We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled

by Wendy Pearlman

The night before I left was the longest night of my life. I was alone with the kids, and the planes were in the sky all night. The sound of planes is scarier than the sound of barrel bombs, because you hear them and wonder when the bombs will drop. The waiting is harder than the actual attack.

  I didn’t know if we’d leave the next day, or if this would be the night that we died. I had seen children torn in pieces before, but I wasn’t strong enough to see my own kids in that state. I needed to get them to safety.

  The kids woke up and I got them dressed. I got two pieces of paper and wrote our names and phone numbers and put them in their pockets. That way, if someone got killed, people would know their identities.

  I waited for the driver outside. I kissed the walls on the street, because I knew that I was never coming back to them.

  Ghassan, artist (Khan al-Shih camp)

  In 1948, my grandfather left Palestine. The family settled in the Golan Heights and started over from zero. In 1967, Israel entered the Golan; we had to leave and again started over from zero. We eventually moved to the Khan al-Shih camp, because it’s a poor area and we could afford to buy land and build a house.

  I dropped out of school when I was in eleventh grade. I’d always loved calligraphy and drawing. I first worked as a tailor and then in advertising and graphic design. Over ten years, I built a business. It succeeded, and I reached the point where I could go back to school. I finished high school and began studying at the Fine Arts Academy. That was 2011; I was thirty-eight and had four children.

  Khan al-Shih became besieged, and the FSA started using the area as a base for its operations. The regime bombed civilians to get them to force the FSA to leave. There was a huge battle and I got displaced from my wife and kids. For a while I lived in a house with twenty-eight other people.

  Time passed. I kept hoping that the regime would fall this month, or the month after, or the month after that. My brothers went to Germany, but I didn’t want to leave. I felt like I couldn’t go to Europe and start over. The things that I’d achieved in Syria might not have been great, but for me they were huge. I’d built a business. I had my name, my reputation, my dream of an education. Leaving Syria meant losing everything and starting from zero, yet again.

  I finished my first year at Fine Arts. My wife and children managed to join me in an area where I’d started renting an apartment. My kids looked so much older than when I’d last seen them. At a certain age, a year makes a big difference. My son was twelve, and he’d gotten very tall.

  Months went by. Design requires you to do a lot of work from home, but I couldn’t, because we had no electricity. I took leave from university, sold my car, and bought a different one that I could use as a taxi. My business had stopped, and work as a taxi driver was steadier.

  I enrolled my kids in a new school and would drive them there in the taxi. Every kilometer there was a regime checkpoint. Once, the soldier stopped and asked for my son’s ID. I said, “He’s only twelve.” The soldier said, “Really?” I showed him a note from school proving his age.

  This happened another three times. They were paying a lot of attention to age, as they wanted to know if boys were old enough to do their mandatory army service. I thought, “What if he gets stopped at a checkpoint sometime when I’m not with him? They’ll never believe that he’s twelve.” I was scared that they’d take him. That was my nightmare.

  I decided that we needed to leave. I’d wanted to stay in Syria because of what I’d achieved. But that would be selfish. I couldn’t take risks with my kids’ futures. When I sold all the equipment in my office, I felt like I was selling a part of myself. The only thing I kept from Syria was my paintbrushes and pens.

  Um Khaled, mother (Aleppo)

  Our house was bombed and collapsed on top of us. We spent a year going from place to place inside Syria. We spent all the money we had. First we went to the countryside. We were thirty-five people in one house. The women would sleep in one room and the men in another. When there was shelling, we’d be about three hundred people in the underground shelter.

  My youngest daughter, Hayat, was in first grade. She’d wake up at night screaming and her father would hold her. Finally he told me, “You can’t bear any more of this. It will destroy you. I want to get you to another country.”

  I said, “Come with us.”

  He said, “No, I want to get you to safety.” He wanted to stay because our eldest daughter was staying. She is married and has four kids.

  So we left and came to Lebanon and my husband and daughter stayed in Syria. I’d talk to him and tell him to get out. He’d say, “You still have a daughter in Syria and I want to be able to check on her. Your siblings and my siblings and their children are also here. I won’t leave. The important thing is that I am reassured about you.” He’d ask me if I was well and I would say yes. But I was not well. I just wanted to put his heart at ease.

  We found a storage space where we could live. I had some gold and I sold part of it to pay the rent. The space had no water, no electricity, nothing. But it was a place for us to sleep—me and my children, my grandchildren, and one of my sons-in-law, who was sick with liver disease. I’m a housewife and have no experience working. But I found work in a factory and worked for six months. I didn’t tell my husband.

  Then I got news that a plane dropped a bomb and killed seven people. My husband was among them. I don’t know if he was inside the house or outside the house. The house was blown away. I tried to get information, to understand what happened. People told me that he was just like everyone else: you’re in the street and a missile comes, or who knows what. They sent me a photo of his burial so I’d believe that he was dead.

  That was three years ago. When he died, I had to observe a period of mourning, as our religion expects. So I stopped working and stayed home. We had no food or drink. I got my other daughters here from Syria, God knows how. One was eight months pregnant. Her husband was not allowed through. She suffered. She’d faint when she stood up. I’d cry thinking that she was going to die.

  I found another job, washing stairs in buildings and sweeping garages. By then we were eighteen people sleeping in the storage space: my four married daughters, my three sons-in-law, their nine children, Hayat, and me. In winter I’d put a thin comforter on the floor for the kids and fold it over them. After they woke up, I’d put it on myself.

  Hayat would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “Mama, they killed Daddy!”

  I’d say, “It’s okay, God rest his soul.”

  The other kids would say, “Grandma, look at the mouse!”

  I’d say, “It’s okay, it won’t do anything.”

  Safa, mother (Homs)

  In Homs, there was no security anymore. The siege never stopped, shooting never stopped. There was no bread, no water, no electricity . . . it became unlivable.

  Thank God, we came here to Lebanon. But life is terrible here, too. This neighborhood of shacks, the lack of hygiene, the germs making the kids sick. Whenever it rains, the metal roof leaks. The heater puffs and fills the house with debris. Tap water is so polluted you can’t even use it to wash vegetables. My son developed an allergy from the filth. My husband’s ears got infected and loads of pus dripped out. And the bugs! In the summer, we have all kinds of insects.

  In this neighborhood, all the houses belong to one landlord. The landlords manipulate rents as they please. At first, our rent was about $230. The bathroom was disgusting. There was no kitchen. I spent all of my savings fixing up the house. Then because of the improvements I’d made, the landlord increased the rent to $300! They tell us, “If you don’t like it, go live on the streets.”

  Everyone takes advantage of Syrians. If you go to the hospital, they register your visit even when they don’t provide treatment, just so they can charge the fees to the UN. They cash in and complain about Syrians at the same time. There are organizations that distribute some donations to people, but hoard the rest. Once Kuwait sent clothes; I swear t
o God that the organizations took the clothes and distributed worn-out secondhand clothes instead. Then Syrians fight each other over the donations, and Lebanese make a fuss that the donations should go to them.

  Lebanese won’t accept to be paid less than $20 a day, so bosses fire them and hire a Syrian for $10. That leads to tension between poor Lebanese and poor Syrians. We managed to get my husband work selling coffee on the street. He leaves the house at four in the morning and roams around looking for customers. If he stops anywhere, the Lebanese tell him to leave. He can’t stay put in any location for long.

  My brother is the concierge of a building. They don’t give him a salary, just a room to stay in. He had a motorcycle, but it was stolen. The owner recognized the thieves as guys from the neighborhood. My brother went to file charges, and the police told him, “Take it as advice from us: don’t bother. Nothing will come of it, and they might even accuse you of something instead.”

  The UN used to provide about $30 per person. Then they announced that they ran out of funding. One woman had little children and wanted to register for assistance. They kept telling her to wait. It was such a humiliation; they would leave her to wait for hours in the sun. They’d say “Tomorrow,” or “The day after tomorrow.” Finally she poured fuel on herself and set herself on fire—right there, outside the UN building.

  There’s nothing to protect us. No state, no government, no law, no human rights. Animals have more rights than we do.

  Bushra, mother (al-Tel)

  Today, kids don’t think about going to school in order to be able get a job someday. It’s the opposite: They think about getting a job in the hope they will be able to go to school someday. Kids’ biggest dream is that they find some sort of work. Or they dream about living in a real house. Sometimes I go to a women’s center. One day I took my young daughter with me. She was so excited. After living in a tent, she was amazed by the real walls and real floors. She said, “Take a photo of me next to the wall!”

  Abdel-Aziz, teacher (rural Daraa)

  For Jordan, Zaatari is a dead area. They found a place in the desert where not even a tree or an animal can live, and they put the Syrian people there. The other day we saw a butterfly in the camp. Everyone got so excited, we were all shouting at each other to come and look at it. It must have really lost its way if it wound up here.

  Eyad, graduate (Daraya)

  Living in Egypt was hard. We were alive, but not really living. My bosses would curse and insult me. Finally I quit my job.

  Seven months after we arrived in Egypt, a friend told me that a man we knew was smuggling people to Europe by boat. I thought it was like a joke, but it turned out to be quite serious. It cost about $4,000 per person. In Egypt, that’s a full year’s salary or more.

  My friends and I asked around for money, but only two managed to piece together enough. When they arrived in Europe, I felt envious. I wished that I’d gone, too.

  Three months later, another friend asked if I wanted to go. This time, I had the money. We were ten young men and talked to the smuggler. He said, “If you guys get shot and killed, I can’t help you. But if you don’t arrive in Italy after twenty days, I’ll give you your money back.”

  We packed our stuff and waited. One day the smuggler called and said, “Come now, a bus is ready to take you.” I said goodbye to my brothers and sisters. My sister cried, “For God’s sake, don’t go.” I said, “I’m leaving, and that’s final.” She continued to beg me to stay. Finally, I threw down my bag. I told my friends that I wasn’t joining them.

  They went. There was a storm and one of them hit his head and was in a coma for five days. It was a very hard journey, but they arrived. I thought to myself, “Maybe I should have gone, too.”

  The third time I thought about going to Europe, a friend suggested we go through Libya, which was faster and cheaper. I told my family that I wanted to travel. By then, we’d been in Egypt for fourteen months. My whole family told me to go. No one was crying anymore.

  Maher, teacher (rural Hama)

  I was able to defer military service as long as I was enrolled as a student. But then I couldn’t afford to pay for my master’s program anymore and had to drop out. I no longer had an excuse to keep avoiding the army. I was given a grace period of one month, and so I began to plan my journey from Syria. My friends and I got online and searched for smuggling opportunities from Morocco, Algeria, Sudan . . . We found lists of phone numbers for smugglers, communicated with a few people, and decided to go through Sudan. That was the only country in the world where Syrians were free to visit with only a passport.

  The man who drove me to the Damascus airport told me that everyone there was an intelligence officer, even the cleaning people. He warned me that if someone tried to chat with me, I shouldn’t talk.

  I waited until they called my flight. The agent looked through my passport and found a piece of paper. On one side it said, “Be careful.” On the other side it said, “I love you.” It was a note from my wife—I didn’t know it was there.

  He looked at it suspiciously. I said nervously, “My wife. You know how women think.”

  He answered, “I assure you, if it wasn’t for the sentence ‘I love you,’ you’d be in a lot of trouble.” Then he let me proceed.

  I arrived in Sudan and I swear it was the first day in five years that I felt safe. I was no longer concerned about checkpoints or police raiding my house.

  The smuggler refused to move until we paid him. It was $3,500 to get to the shore and another $500 to cross the Mediterranean. We took Jeeps across the Sudanese desert and then to the Egyptian desert, and then the Libyan desert. Sometimes the car would get stuck in the sand and we’d get out and push. Nobody shot at us, but the Egyptian army shot at cars that left after us, and two people died.

  Our boat had about 180 people aboard. The lower deck was all people from Africa and the top deck all Syrians. They told us that we should head toward a star in the sky. The Libyan smuggler left and a young Tunisian took charge of the boat. Then the Tunisian left, too. He told us, “You guys need to take care of yourselves.”

  Sadik, veterinary assistant (rural Suwayda)

  There were over forty of us in an inflatable boat built for ten. We had to board very quickly, because the Turkish coast guard was on patrol. We helped the women and kids board first. You had to remain sitting in the same position in which you entered, because there was no space to move around.

  On the boat we found ourselves to be Syrians, loving each other and caring for each other, even though we’re all from different parts of the country. I’m from Suwayda and I was sitting next to a mother and her three kids from Zabadani. The father got stuck on the other end of the boat and there was no way he could move closer to us. I held the kids during the journey and was responsible for their safety. We were all Syrians; all one family.

  Nabil, musician (Damascus)

  Al-Jazeera leaked 93,000 names of people wanted by the secret police. I was on it. I needed to leave Syria as fast as possible, but couldn’t leave until I got my wife out. She was an extremely accomplished student, someone who had excelled in school her whole life. I wanted to make sure her future was secure.

  We searched for scholarships and found one for her to do a doctorate in geology in Portugal. I spent the next fourteen months in Lebanon and Turkey, performing as a musician as I applied for visas to follow her. Nothing worked, so I finally decided to go by sea.

  For two years, before I left, I read about what to expect: what to bring, where to go, how to speak with smugglers, how to sleep in a hotel, how to put your phone in a nylon bag for the ride on the dinghy . . . people traveled and then talked about their experiences in detail on the Internet so others could benefit.

  For all countries in Europe, you can know the quality of housing, the legal situation, how long you can expect to live in a camp, the duration of your residency permit, etcetera. If someone wants citizenship quickly, he goes to Sweden. For young people who like to ha
ve fun, the Netherlands is the choice. Germany is for people who want to study and work. Countries in southern Europe are welcoming and their culture is closer to Syrian culture. But they have economic problems and are still coping with older waves of immigration.

  After two or three years of people making these journeys, there’s no piece of information you can’t find.

  Nur, beautician (Aleppo)

  After two years in Lebanon, my husband’s work came to a halt. We went back to Aleppo, but found things were even worse then we’d left them. We needed to find somewhere else to go.

  We left for Turkey and then made it to the shore. I’d carefully packed one bag with basic necessities: our papers, passports, water, aspirin, rubbing alcohol, toothpaste, a change of clothes, and cookies for the kids. The smuggler told us that there was no room, and we’d have to leave everything behind.

  The dinghy arrived. Getting on was like throwing yourself into a deep, dark hole. My husband looked at me and said, “Should we go back?” I responded, “To where?”

  In Greece we started walking. My husband carried our son the entire three-week journey. I held our daughter by the hand. We went from Greece to Macedonia, and then to Serbia, Hungary, and Austria before reaching Germany. Everyone along the way tried to make profits at our expense. Days were flaming hot and nights as cold as ice. My feet bled and all I wanted to do was sleep. Every step we took, we found ourselves longing for the one we’d just taken. When we slept on the street, we’d say, “How beautiful the dinghy was.” Then we’d get to a field where thousands of people were waiting for days to cross the border from one country to another. We’d say, “How beautiful it was to sleep in the street.” But once we started, we couldn’t go back. It’s as if we were walking on a thread that kept getting cut behind us as we moved forward. Like in the cartoons, when characters cross a bridge that crumbles beneath them as they run.