After the Last Border

by Jessica Goudeau

  “Why do we help?” the narrator asks—is it only for humanitarian reasons, or because Americans are “suckers”? He immediately dismisses those ideas: We help because “we realize that our half of the world cannot remain well if the other half is sick. We realize that we must rehabilitate these displaced persons for our own interests and preservation, as well as theirs. If we don’t help these people now, then the chaos will continue indefinitely, and the seeds of a third World War will take root.”

  In the 1940s, that was the most compelling argument. It grew out of the country’s shared sense of its identity and its solemn duty to prevent another war. The US would do what was right, even if it was hard.

  * * *

  —

  In 1945, President Truman sent an emissary, Earl G. Harrison, to visit these camps and report back on conditions there, particularly for Jewish refugees. Harrison’s letter belied the chipper tone of the newsreels to the American public: Jewish refugees felt that “they, who were in so many ways the first and worst victims of Nazism,” were “neglected by their liberators.” The horror of remaining in some of the “most notorious of the concentration camps, amidst crowded, frequently unsanitary and generally grim conditions, in complete idleness, with no opportunity . . . to communicate with the outside world” was unconscionable. Harrison wrote that Jewish refugees often had a choice only between concentration camp uniforms and German SS guard uniforms—both options equally disturbing. At the end of 1945, their most pressing concern was finding their relatives again, a complicated task that had been barely addressed by the time Harrison arrived. He warned the president that there was insufficient food and the living conditions were “clearly unfit for winter use.” The threat of death was as overwhelming following the war as it was during the Holocaust; one rabbi “personally attended, since liberation 23,000 burials (90 per cent Jews) at Bergen Belsen alone.” According to Harrison’s report, the former concentration camp still housed 14,000 displaced people, more than half of whom were Jewish.

  No wonder, when he addressed Congress less than a year later, President Truman called those camps “unthinkable.”

  * * *

  —

  Resettlement became a critical tool in the government’s foreign policy arsenal, with international negotiations about how many refugees the US would resettle going hand in hand with diplomatic talks about foreign aid. The same year the DP Act was passed, the 1948 Marshall Plan committed $15 billion over four years to help rebuild Europe after the war. And in moving toward an internationally-agreed-upon, legal definition of refugees as victims of targeted persecution on a massive scale, the world also identified the perpetrators of a new type of crime—“crimes against humanity.”

  After World War II, for the first time in history, Allied countries agreed during the Nuremberg trials to prosecute other sovereign states for violating a newly adopted system of international laws. There was widespread international consensus that a sovereign country could not just do whatever it wanted to its own citizens.

  Though the US might have seen itself as leading the charge, these conversations were happening on a national scale in other countries as well. The Nuremberg trials were a start; fifty nations met in San Francisco in October 1945 and established the United Nations. In 1948, the UN voted on two landmark declarations: On December 9, the UN unanimously ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The next day, the UN passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which stated “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” is the “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.” It laid out the fundamental idea that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” to which they are entitled “without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” The identification of crimes against humanity and genocide as internationally criminal offenses, and the declaration of rights not based on citizenship but on basic humanity, were the foundation of the modern refugee resettlement program in the US and other countries around the world.

  Three years later, the United Nations ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. A core tenet of the document, signed originally by twenty-six countries and later by the United States, is “non-refoulement,” which states that countries cannot send asylum seekers or refugees back to any country in which they face threats to their life or freedom. Non-refoulement became a routine part of laws protecting the rights of displaced people in various countries, including the US, for the next seventy years.

  The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as anyone with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” The signatory countries, of which many more would be added over the years, established their duties to protect refugees at all cost.

  A filmmaker captured one of the first ships bringing refugees to the United States from the port city of Bremerhaven, Germany, after the passage of the Displaced Persons Act. US soldiers assisted women and children carrying cardboard suitcases, with coats and hats, onto the gangplank. A handful of refugees look down at the camera, leaning over a banner that reads “SHIP TO FREEDOM!” The October 20, 1948, headline from the New York Times stated, “813 REFUGEES SAIL FOR THE U.S. TODAY. First of Displaced Persons Admitted Under New Law Will Leave Bremerhaven.”

  The images of those passengers surely evoked memories of photos from the MS St. Louis—the ship to freedom attempting to redeem the voyage of the damned. With the departure of the first passengers out of Bremerhaven, the American refugee admissions process began. Following World War II, through the dips and shifts of refugee resettlement policy over the next several decades, one of the principles of American identity would remain the same: The United States viewed itself as a country that provided defense for the defenseless, welcome for the war-battered, and home for the displaced people of the world. This identity was shaped by an American public that, along with much of the world, felt a deep resolve to prevent a crisis like the Holocaust from ever happening again.

  Chapter 3

  HASNA

  DARAA, SYRIA, MARCH 2011

  Hasna al-Salam absently picked a dying flower off her jasmine plant. The cool morning wind stirred her still-damp hair; she would not put on her hijab for a few more minutes. This was the time of day Hasna liked best, puttering alone in her home sipping her coffee before beginning the work of the day. In the early years, when the older children were babies, she could not have dreamed of a pause after breakfast and before cleaning the dishes, time to listen to music on her record player or prune the plants. But as the children went off to school one by one, these quiet mornings became completely hers. Daraa, her beloved city, came awake around her—the deep rumble of trucks and the high whine of a motorcycle, her neighbor scolding a small child, birds calling to one another.

  She turned on an album by Fairuz. The singer’s voice always accompanied Hasna in the mornings, as it did so many women—the rhythmic drive of the piano and the snappy drums, the soulful violin that infused her lyrical trills with nostalgia. Fairuz captured the heartache and joy of being a mother.

  The high walls lining the courtyard of their home, which allowed her to be both outside and private, were covered in vines. The jasmine plant was in a deep pot in one corner on the smooth concrete bench skirting the entire courtyard; the heavy scent filled the yard. Metal poles set in the mosaicked tile floor held an awning above. Grapes grew along the awning and kept the courtyard shaded for much of the day. The courtyard was filled with plants both practical and beautiful—she could make tea from the jasmine and the roses. She had pots with lemon trees, olive trees, and sage to cook with, aloe for her children’s and grandchildren’s scrapes. The begonias and amaryllis she kept because she loved
them. Whatever she planted grew; the region of Horan, in which Daraa was the biggest city, was well-known for its agricultural wonders. And Hasna was especially good with plants. She adjusted the chairs around the table where later in the day someone would set up a backgammon game; sometimes her husband, Jebreel, and their neighbor would stay up until three in the morning before someone won. Sometimes, on holidays, their sons Yusef and Khassem and their friends would come over, filling their home with laughter and stories.

  The courtyard took up half of their home. In Daraa, there were few days out of the year when they needed to remain indoors. They slept and prepared food inside the house; they hosted formal clan gatherings on the rugs and pillows in their large living space. But their life as a family happened in this courtyard. In the years when her children all lived at home, before the girls had married and Khassem gone off to the army, they ate their meals on the long table in the middle of the courtyard. The children would pile in from school and from working in their father’s shop. Hasna imagined them again, all long arms and legs, bickering and laughing together, as she sat down to finish her coffee on the part of the bench she liked best, her back against the wall by the kitchen door, the record player within easy reach.

  Her children were only the latest generation to grow up in this house, where dozens of al-Salam children had been raised over the decades. The houses in the streets surrounding the small Al-Salam Square, which was what everyone called the small plaza around which their clan life revolved, changed with every generation. Each family added balconies and second-floor apartments, took out some walls and added others in a complicated hodgepodge that defied any sort of architectural order. The result was a labyrinthine neighborhood where the houses were joined in an elaborate system of connected garden walls and alleyway shortcuts that the children innately understood and that was all but incomprehensible to outsiders.

  Hasna loved that her friends and neighbors lived within a stone’s throw of one another. One of her best friends from childhood, Um Ahmad—her title as Ahmad’s mother—married a cousin of Jebreel’s who worked at a guard’s station near the border with Jordan. Hasna saw Um Ahmad almost every day. She missed her parents, who had died years before; her brothers and sisters and their families lived in Damascus and Aleppo and United Arab Emirates and visited a few times a year. But her days were full with neighbors, especially Jebreel’s many sisters and cousins, slipping back and forth to one another’s homes when the men were at work, cooking or shopping or lingering over coffee.

  Hasna had been a teenager when she married into Jebreel’s clan. She could still remember the al-Salam men tromping to her house for the jaha; she was supposed to remain upstairs as the traditional engagement ceremony took place among the men, but she had snuck a look at her husband-to-be when the men walked up the long, olive-tree-lined drive. He was in the middle of the group, laughing nervously with his cousins. His older relatives, led by the richest of his uncles, had been invited to show off the strength and respectability of their clan.

  The al-Salam men were known throughout the region of Horan, all around the city of Daraa, for their fierce clan loyalty. She watched them as they walked, men sure of themselves and of their place in the world, feeling proud that his family had chosen her as a good match.

  When the requisite ceremonies and the parties were done, Hasna had found herself in charge of a small dominion—as the only brother’s wife, she had a place of respectability in their family that she had not had as a younger daughter in her own home. Jebreel and Hasna had been shy with each other in those first few months, careful, polite. She was little more than a girl and he seemed so much older in his midtwenties. Hasna, who had secretly dreamed of becoming an architect or an engineer—she was good at drawing and was fascinated by the houses and streets that gnarled around them like arteries—never questioned the fact that marriage came before education, not in those early years. Better to question that harvest came before winter; some things were part of life. Women bore children, men worked outside the home, the world continued.

  The most important thing to both of them and to the clan living around them was to prove that their marriage was fruitful. Their initial shyness wore off; the children came. First a son, Yusef, a sign of Allah’s favor and a blessing on their marriage. With his birth, Hasna became Um Yusef. He was quiet and serious from birth. He took his time to accomplish any goal, thoughtfully contemplating the floor before him before crawling or walking. His brother, Khassem, born a year later, was Yusef’s opposite in every way—all fire and drive, running almost before he walked. Both boys were smart, but Yusef was almost always content to be home and Khassem was perpetually bored; if he wasn’t entertained, he would find ways to make his life interesting. Hasna spent much of her late teen years trying to keep toddler Khassem out of trouble.

  Those were tumultuous years, when Syria was still defining itself as a nation. Syria had been a French colony until it gained its independence in 1946; before the French, the nation was under the Ottoman Empire. A series of dizzying power changes followed independence as the region roiled and churned. Like the other Arab nations, Syria had become a pawn in the chess game of global dominance that played out in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The other countries in the region were involved in boundary skirmishes, civil wars, and an ever-shifting series of alliances as the Arab states jostled for position in relation to the newly established country of Israel and as their own alliances shifted. Hafez al-Assad came to power in a series of coups that ended all that. His “Corrective Revolution” ended in 1971, firmly cementing Assad and his party as the rulers of Syria.

  It was a relief, in a way, to remain under the same leader—there was a certain stability in that, at least. But Hafez al-Assad ruled with an iron fist. Jebreel and Hasna, along with most of their neighbors, learned early on that political engagement in Syria under Hafez al-Assad was a high-risk game they’d rather not play.

  Jebreel and Hasna were not Alawites—the ethnic minority in Syria that had risen to power with Assad—which meant they had two options: to join the ranks of the non-Alawites who bought or schemed their way into positions of power and success within the country, or to stay out of politics entirely. To openly resist Assad was not an option; everyone knew people in Syria who had disappeared, sometimes for years. A distant relative of Hasna’s had made an off-color joke about Assad and had never come home from work. Twenty years later, after his infant grew up, got married, and had a child of her own, he showed up one day at their family home. There were rumors of where he had been for the last two decades, but no one spoke of it. His wife and family welcomed him back as if he had only been gone a few days. To repeat the story was to risk the possibility of being disappeared. Still, everyone had developed codes and shorthand for saying what needed to be said, and the story spread, a warning of what could happen to anyone at any time in Syria under Hafez al-Assad.

  Jebreel and Hasna decided to stay politically unengaged, to never even speak of politics. It was a choice they agreed on completely. In Syria, even the walls had ears.

  Their family might not attain the same successes that they could have if they had played into the often-corrupt system, but at least they would not be subjected to the mercurial changes of fortune that followed so many who did. They led as independent a life as they could.

  Hasna tried hard not to pay much attention to the conflicts that turned her country into a pressure cooker during the years her babies were being born. In 1980, when Israel took advantage of President Hafez al-Assad’s efforts to eradicate the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in order to formally annex the Golan Heights and solidify their defiant position against Syria and other Arabic countries, she was pregnant with Yusef and setting up her new home. A year later, when Khassem was only a few months old and Yusef was echoing his mother’s voice with his first words, Hafez al-Assad’s troops began targeting the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, slaughtering th
ousands of civilians. The Assad regime learned that brutal repression could eradicate any external threat, a lesson they would not forget.

  Hasna, a teenage mother with two small boys, kept her head down, spoke of other things when the neighbors came for coffee or tea. Still, she heard about the deaths of the Syrian civilians at the hand of their government. It was the political event that would define the nation—thousands of young people died, even more fled the country. But the event that defined Hasna’s life came two years later in 1983, when baby Amjad—her third son—was born with asthma. Her older sons had also had asthma as babies, but there was a medication she had given them to ease their symptoms. When Amjad was just a few weeks old, she asked the doctor for that medication along with formula; breastfeeding had never been easy for her. He told her sorrowfully that both were no longer available because of sanctions against the country, collateral of the complex relationship between Syria and Lebanon and the continuing conflict with Israel. Hasna neither knew nor cared about this tangle of international relations. Such things were in the hands of Allah. But her body was not producing enough breast milk to keep Amjad alive. He was three months old when she held him, starving and struggling for breath, and watched him die.

  Amjad’s death deeply affected her. Months passed. Her relatives and neighbors gave her unsolicited advice about how to move past her grief: babies came and went—better not to be too attached before you knew they would live past the first year. Hasna could barely hear them; her body ached for her son. She woke up to the sound of his plaintive cry in the night. Her living sons’ toddler bodies seemed tainted with her grief. Instead of being the energetic and active playmate she had been, she was now withdrawn. The boys were clingier and whinier than before. Eventually, the grief dimmed, but she no longer assumed that she could live out a normal life and avoid what was happening in her country—eventually, the politics in Syria would come for them all.