PARIS: Two nights after the Paris attacks in November, a young couple kissed in the rain on the Place de la Republique as crowds gathered to grieve and share their shock at the killings.

She was French and he Syrian, and the photo of them holding a handwritten placard saying “Love will always win” went viral.

“I knew it was bad when my friends began calling me from Syria asking if I was OK,” said artist Hamid Sulaiman, of the attacks in which 130 people died.

“As a French-Syrian couple every day we pay the price of terrorism, fanaticism, racism, borders, arms etc. Love will always win.”

Three months later his graphic novel “Freedom Hospital,” which tells the story of an underground hospital in a besieged Syrian town, is being acclaimed in France and Germany. By turns harrowing, heart-breaking and funny, it follows a group of wounded rebels and the staff of the field hospital who treat them as the revolution’s idealism is drowned in a river of blood.