Aeham Al-Ahmad plays the piano in the middle of the street near destroyed buildings in the southern Damascus suburb.

Three years of siege, famine and bombing of his Damascus refugee camp didn’t kill celebrated musician Aeham Al-Ahmad, but something died inside him the day militants burned his beloved piano in front of his eyes.

It was then that Al-Ahmad, whose music had brought consolation, even a bit of joy, to Yarmuk camp’s beleaguered residents, decided to join thousands of others and seek refuge in Europe.

“The piano wasn’t just an instrument. It was like the death of a friend.”

For 27-year-old Al-Ahmad, whose songs of hope amid the rubble of Syria’s largest Palestinian camp became a social media sensation last year, “it was a very painful moment.”

Since Syria’s civil war struck Yarmuk in 2013, the once-thriving neighborhood saw its population dwindle from 150,000 Palestinians and Syrians to barely 18,000 people.

Al-Ahmad became a symbol of hope, helping Yarmuk’s people — particularly its children — forget for a moment the brutal war raging around them with every note he played.

“The days when I felt the most helpless were when I had money, but I could not get milk for my year-old baby Kinan, or when my older son Ahmad would ask me for a biscuit,” he said.

“It was the worst feeling.”

But after the Daesh militants attacked the camp in April, Al-Ahmad’s gentle, tentative ray of light was engulfed in flames.

He was in a pickup truck, trying to move his piano to nearby Yalda, where his wife and two boys were living, when he was stopped at a militant checkpoint.

A gunman torched his beloved instrument.

He would make for Germany, from where he would then try to get his family out of Syria.

He began the dangerous journey out of Damascus “as rockets rained down,” heading north through the provinces of Homs, Hama, and Idlib until he reached the Turkish border.

“At every step, I would meet another trafficker of human flesh,” he recalled.

With the help of smugglers, he avoided Turkey’s increasingly watchful security forces by crawling through barriers of barbed wire and spending nights sleeping fitfully in dark forests.

With other Syrian men, women, and children, Al-Ahmad trekked through mountainous terrain to reach the Turkish coast.