Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  “We just want to get through to Germany! They’ll take us!” someone else cried.

  There were more shouts and screams, and before Mahmoud knew what was happening he and his family were caught up in the press of refugees trying to get across the border. Mahmoud was jostled from every side. He clung to the back of his father’s shirt, hanging on like Dad was a life preserver and they were going over a waterfall.

  As frightening as the stampede was, Mahmoud was excited too—the refugees were finally doing something. They weren’t just disappearing into their tent cities. They were standing up and saying, “Here we are! Look at us! Help us!”

  But the Hungarian soldiers weren’t interested in helping. As the refugees swarmed the border, soldiers in blue uniforms with red berets and red armbands hurried to stop them, firing tear gas canisters into the crowd. One of the canisters exploded near Mahmoud with a bang, and people screamed as a gray-white cloud erupted around them.

  Mahmoud’s eyes burned like someone had sprayed hot pepper juice in them, and mucus poured from his nose. He choked on the gas, and his lungs seized up. He couldn’t breathe. It was like he was drowning on land. He fell to his knees, clutching at his chest and gasping uselessly for air.

  I’m going to die, Mahmoud thought. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.

  Josef watched his sister splashing around happily in the swimming pool on A-deck. Other kids chased each other around the promenade. Watched movies. Played shuffleboard. For as much as he’d wanted to grow up, Josef wished now that he could join them. Be a little kid again, cheerfully oblivious to what was going on around him.

  But he wasn’t a kid anymore. He had responsibilities. Like keeping his sister and his mother safe. Papa had told him what the concentration camps were like. He couldn’t let that happen to Ruthie and his mother.

  “Are you ready?”

  It was Pozner. He stood in the shadow of a smokestack, looking around nervously.

  Josef nodded. He had agreed to help take over the ship. He had to do something, and this was the only thing he could do.

  “What about Schiendick and his firemen?” Josef asked as they walked.

  “We’ve got a distraction for them down on D-deck. But we have to move fast.”

  The rest of the group came together near the social hall. There were ten men, including Josef, and they all carried metal candlesticks and pieces of pipe. Some of the men were Papa’s age, like Pozner, and some of them were in their twenties. Josef was by far the youngest.

  Ten men, Josef thought. A minyan.

  Ten Jews come together not to worship, but to mutiny.

  Pozner put a small length of lead pipe in Josef’s hand, and suddenly the weight of what Josef was about to do was very real.

  “Lead on,” Pozner said.

  Josef took a deep breath. There was no turning back now. He led his fellow mutineers into the maze of crew corridors.

  Just outside the bridge, in the chart room where all the maps were stored, they came across Ostermeyer, the first officer. He looked up from the map cabinet with surprise, but before he could do anything, Pozner and one of the other men grabbed him and pushed him through the door to the bridge. Josef was startled by how rough they were being with Ostermeyer, but he tried to swallow his fear. Taking over the ship wasn’t going to be easy, and this was only the start.

  There weren’t as many people on the bridge as there had been when Josef visited—just one officer and three sailors. The sailor at the ship’s helm saw them first, and he let go of the steering wheel to dive for an alarm. One of the passengers got to him first, slamming into the helmsman and sending him tumbling to the floor. The mutineers quickly surrounded the other sailors, threatening them with their makeshift clubs.

  And they had done it. Just like that, they had taken the bridge.

  Josef’s heart raced as he looked around, wondering what was next. Stretched out before them was the great green-blue Atlantic Ocean, and beyond that, still days away, Germany and the Nazis. Up on the little platform at the back of the room, the steering wheel teetered back and forth, and Josef wondered crazily if he should jump up there and turn the ship around himself.

  “Send for the captain,” Pozner told the first officer.

  Warily, Ostermeyer went to the ship’s intercom and summoned Captain Schroeder to the bridge.

  As soon as Captain Schroeder stepped onto the bridge, he understood what was happening. He spun to leave, but Josef and one of the other men blocked his exit.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Captain Schroeder asked. “What do you mean by all this?”

  Pozner stepped forward. “We mean to save our lives by taking over the ship,” he said, “and sailing it to any other country but Germany.”

  Captain Schroeder put his hands behind his back and walked to the middle of the bridge. He looked out at the ocean, not Pozner.

  “The other passengers will not support you, and my crew will overpower you,” he said matter-of-factly. “All you are doing is laying yourselves open to a charge of piracy.”

  Pozner and the others looked around at each other nervously. Josef couldn’t believe they were so easily losing their resolve.

  “We’ll hold you here as hostages!” Josef said. “They’ll have to do as we say!”

  Even Josef was surprised he’d spoken up. But his words seemed to put a little more steel back in the mutineers’ resolve.

  Captain Schroeder turned to look at Josef. “The crew will obey only me,” he said calmly, “and I will give no order, no matter what you do, that will take my ship off its set course. And without that order, you can do nothing. What will you do, pilot the ship yourself?”

  Josef blushed and stared at the ground, remembering his crazy urge to take the wheel when he didn’t even know how it worked or where to go.

  Captain Schroeder helped his fallen helmsman back to his feet and led him to the steering wheel. The man was still shaking from the attack, but he took the helm and straightened the ship on course.

  “You have done enough already for me to prefer serious charges against you,” Captain Schroeder said, still frustratingly even-keeled. “If I do, I can assure you that you will most certainly be taken back to Germany. And you know what that means.”

  Josef steamed. He did know what that meant, but did Captain Schroeder know? Really know? How many Germans really understood what was happening in the concentration camps? Josef knew, because his papa had told him. Had shown him when he jumped overboard and tried to kill himself.

  Josef wasn’t about to let his mother and sister end up in one of those camps.

  “You would do that to us?” one of the men asked the captain.

  “You are doing it to yourselves,” Schroeder said. “Listen: I understand and sympathize with your desperation.”

  Pozner huffed. “You have no idea what we’ve been through. Any of us.”

  Captain Schroeder nodded. “No. You’re right. But no matter what’s been done to you, what you’re doing now is a real criminal act. By law I should have you all thrown in the brig. But I’m willing to overlook all this if you leave the bridge right now and give me your word you will take no such further action.”

  Josef scanned the faces of his co-conspirators and saw only panic. Fear.

  Surrender.

  “No,” Josef told them. “No,” he told Captain Schroeder. “My father told me what happened to him in those camps. I can’t let that happen to my mother and my little sister. We can’t go back to Germany!”

  The first officer took that moment to try to pull free from the men holding him. There was a struggle. The other sailors moved to help him, and the other mutineers flinched, ready to fight.

  “Ostermeyer! No!” Captain Schroeder commanded. “Cease and desist. That’s an order.”

  The first officer froze, and Pozner froze too, the lead pipe in his hand still raised in threat.

  Nobody moved.

  The captain raised his hands. “I pro
mise you men,” he said quietly, his voice almost a whisper, “I promise you on my honor as a sea captain that I will do everything possible to land you in England. I will run the ship aground there if I must. But you must stand down and promise me no further trouble.”

  Pozner lowered his pipe. “Agreed,” he said.

  No. No! Josef wanted to argue, but everyone else agreed.

  Josef threw his pipe to the ground and left without the other men. They were going back to Europe, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  They were going back to Cuba, and there was nothing any of them could do about it.

  So this was the last verse, Isabel thought. After everything they’d been through, after everything they’d lost, their climactic ending wasn’t going to be climactic after all. Theirs wasn’t a son cubano, with its triumphant finale; theirs was a fugue, a musical theme that was repeated again and again without resolution. Their coda was to be forever homeless, even when returned to their own home. Forever refugees in their own land.

  The US Coast Guard had found them.

  “Geraldo,” Isabel’s mother said, but Papi didn’t answer. He sat frozen with all the others as a bright white searchlight clicked on. A ship motor—a real motor, attached to a real propeller—roared to life.

  “Geraldo,” Mami said again, “it’s started.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s over. For all of us. They’re going to take us to Guantanamo.”

  The searchlight swung around toward them.

  “No,” Mami said, hands on her bulging stomach, her voice tinged with alarm. “No, I mean, it’s started. The baby’s coming!”

  The head of every single person in the little boat turned in surprise. Isabel sat down with a splash in the water. She didn’t know what to think. How to feel. She’d been put through the wringer—the elation of leaving Cuba, the exhaustion of the storm, the horror of Iván’s death, the relief at seeing the lights of Miami, the despair of running into the Coast Guard ship and knowing they would never get to el norte. And now her mother was having a baby. Isabel’s baby brother. Isabel could only sit lifelessly and stare. She had nothing left to give.

  “I’m not staying in that refugee camp at Guantanamo behind a barbed-wire fence,” Lito said. “That’s just trading one prison for another. I’ll go back to Cuba. Back to my home. Castro said he won’t punish anyone who tried to leave.”

  “Unless he’s changed his mind again,” Amara said.

  It was Luis who saw the Coast Guard searchlight sweep past them on the water and point somewhere else.

  “Maybe none of us will have to go to Guantanamo!” Luis said. “Look! They’re not after us! The Coast Guard is after someone else!”

  Isabel watched as the searchlight found another craft on the water a few hundred meters away. It was a raft full of refugees, just like them!

  “More Cubans?” Amara asked.

  “It doesn’t matter!” Señor Castillo said. “Now’s our chance! Paddle for shore! Quickly!”

  Isabel spared her mother a look, then grabbed a water jug carved into a scoop and started rowing as hard as she could. So did Lito, Amara, and the Castillos.

  “But be quiet,” Lito whispered. “Sound carries a long way on the water.”

  “Ohhh!” Isabel’s mother cried.

  “Shhh, Teresa,” Papi said, holding her hand. “Don’t have the baby yet—wait until we get to Florida!”

  Isabel’s mother gritted her teeth and nodded, tears welling in her eyes.

  The lights of Miami got closer, but they were still so far away. Isabel glanced behind her. In the darkness, she could pick out the lights of the Coast Guard ship, alongside another dark craft. Shadowy figures were moving back and forth between the two.

  They were taking the refugees on board to send them back to Cuba.

  “Ohhh!” Isabel’s mother cried, her voice like a cannon shot in the quiet.

  “Row, row,” Señor Castillo whispered.

  They were so close! Isabel could see which hotel rooms had their lights on and which were off, could hear bongos beating out a rhythm over the water. A rhumba.

  “The current’s taking us north,” Luis whispered. “We’re going to miss it!”

  “It doesn’t matter—as long as we’re standing on land, we’re safe!” Lito said, his voice thin from exertion. “We just can’t be caught on the water! Row!”

  “OHHHH!” Isabel’s mother screamed, her voice booming out across the water.

  BWEEP-BWEEP!

  The Coast Guard cutter made the same sound as before, and its searchlight lit up their little boat. They’d found them!

  “No!” Isabel’s mother sobbed. “No! I want to have my baby in el norte!”

  “ROW!” Señor Castillo yelled, giving up entirely on being quiet.

  Behind them, the Coast Guard cutter’s motor roared to life.

  Isabel churned at the water, bending her flimsy jug-paddle in her desperation. Tears streamed down her face, from sorrow or fear or exhaustion, she didn’t know.

  All she knew was that they were still too far from shore.

  The Coast Guard ship was going to catch them before they reached Miami.

  Sirens. Soldiers shouting through bullhorns. Screams. Explosions. Mahmoud was barely aware of everything that was happening around him. He lay on the ground, curled into a ball. Trying desperately to draw a breath that would not come. His eyes felt like bees had stung them, and his nose was a streaming cauldron of burning chemicals. He made a choking, gurgling sound that was somewhere between a shriek and a whimper.

  After everything, he was going to die here, on the border between Serbia and Hungary.

  Rough hands pulled Mahmoud from the ground and dragged him away, his sneakers twisting and scraping on the dirt road. He still couldn’t see a thing, couldn’t force his eyes to open, but he felt his chest beginning to work again, the barest tendrils of air reaching his lungs. He drank the air in greedily. Then he was thrown to the ground, and someone pulled his hands behind him and tied them together with a thin piece of plastic. It cinched painfully tight, and Mahmoud was lifted again and rolled onto the flat metal bed of a truck. He lay there, still gasping for breath, the plastic zip tie cutting angrily into his wrists as more people were tossed into the truck beside him. Then Mahmoud heard the truck’s doors slam and the engine start, and they were moving.

  Mahmoud’s breathing finally came back to something like normal, and he was able to sit up and open his bleary eyes. There were no windows in the van and it was dark, but Mahmoud was able to see the other nine men with him, all of them red-eyed and crying and coughing from the tear gas, and all of them handcuffed with zip ties. Including Mahmoud’s father.

  “Dad!” Mahmoud cried. He worked his way across the floor of the bouncing van on his knees and fell into his father. They put their heads together.

  “Where are Mom and Waleed?” Mahmoud asked.

  “I don’t know. I lost them in the chaos,” Dad said. His eyes were red-ringed and his face was wet from tears and snot. He looked terrible, and Mahmoud realized he must look just as bad.

  Mahmoud thought the van would stop soon, but it drove on and on.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Mahmoud asked.

  “I don’t know. I can’t reach my phone,” Dad said. “But we’ve been in this van for a long time. Maybe they’re taking us to Austria!”

  “No,” one of the other men said. “They’re taking us to prison.”

  Prison? For what? Mahmoud wondered. We’re just refugees! We haven’t done anything wrong!

  The van stopped, and Mahmoud and the other refugees were unloaded into a building one of the soldiers called an “immigration detention center.” But Mahmoud could tell it was really a prison. It was a long, single-story building with a barbed-wire fence surrounding it, guarded by Hungarian soldiers with automatic rifles.

  A soldier cut the zip tie off Mahmoud’s wrists. Mahmoud expected the relief to be instant, but instead his hands went fro
m numb to on fire, like the tingling needles he felt in his leg after it fell asleep, times a thousand. He cried out in pain, hands shaking, as he and his father were hurried into a cell with cinder-block walls on three sides and metal bars on the front. Eight other men were pushed inside with them, and up and down the hall more prison cells were filling with refugees.

  A soldier slammed the barred door shut, and it locked with an electronic bolt.

  “We’re not criminals!” one of the other men in the cell yelled at him.

  “We didn’t ask for civil war! We didn’t want to leave our homes!” another man yelled.

  “We’re refugees!” Mahmoud yelled, unable to stay silent any longer. “We need help!”

  The soldier ignored them and walked away. Mahmoud felt helpless all over again, and he kicked the bars in anger. There were similar cries of innocence and rage from the other cells, but soon they were overtaken by separated families trying to find each other without being able to see from cell to cell.

  “Fatima? Waleed?” Mahmoud’s father called, and Mahmoud yelled their names with him. But if his mother and brother were here, they didn’t answer.

  “We’ll find them,” Dad assured Mahmoud. But Mahmoud didn’t understand how his father could be so sure. They hadn’t found Hana, so what made him think they would find Mom and Waleed? What if they had lost them forever? Mahmoud was beside himself. This trip, this odyssey, was pulling his family apart, stripping them away like leaves from the trees in the fall. It was all he could do not to panic. His breath came quick and his heart hammered in his chest.

  “I don’t believe it. They took us almost all the way to Austria,” Mahmoud’s father said, checking his iPhone at last. “It’s just another hour by car. We’re outside a little town in the north of Hungary called Györ.”

  Almost all the way to Austria, Mahmoud thought. But instead of helping them along, the Hungarians had thrown them in prison.

  Hours passed, and Mahmoud went from panic to frustration to despair. They sat in the cell without food or water, and only one metal toilet attached to the wall. All Mahmoud could think about was Mom and Waleed. Were they in some Hungarian prison somewhere too, or had they been pushed back across the border into Serbia? How would he and Dad ever find them again? He slumped against the wall.