The Road Before Me Weeps

by Nick Thorpe

  On the afternoon I arrived, twenty-nine refugees from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq and Eritrea, all of whom were living in Syria when the war broke out, were packing for their journey to the UK the next day. They had all applied for asylum in Britain, while still in Syria. The process had taken several years but had ultimately been successful. Now they were very excited.

  Ruqia was from Somalia, travelling with her son and two teenage daughters Ahlam and Yasmin. They sat on the beds in their bright yellow and orange African clothes, like butterflies in the grey Romanian winter. They grinned from ear to ear, leaning back on suitcases packed for their early morning departure to Manchester, via Munich, on Lufthansa flights. They already knew the addresses of the flats they had been allocated in Bradford, in north-east England. The last years in Syria had been hell, Ruqia told me, and the family constantly in danger.

  The next morning at 3.30 I met them again at Timișoara airport, weary from lack of sleep. Officials from the IOM helped them unpack their bags from the bus, then lined up the bags at the check-in gate, as the airline staff were not yet there for the 05.50 flight. The IOM people went outside for a coffee and a smoke. At this point a Lufthansa check-in official approached me, presumably because I was wearing a jacket which gave me an air of authority. The bags were in the wrong line, in front of Business Class, she explained, indignantly. They should be moved at once, in order not to discomfort her Business Class passengers. The thought of moving fifty-eight bags even a short distance seemed daunting. I started to wake up some of the men to help me, then was overcome by a wave of indignation.

  ‘Don’t you realise these people have come from war zones?’ I asked her. ‘They have endured war, shelling, bombing, rape and imprisonment, and you are now concerned that they are standing 3 metres to the right of where they should be?’ Couldn’t she just swap the signs for Business and Economy class? Fortunately, the IOM officials returned at this point and resolved the situation in a matter of seconds, in a hurricane of Romanian. Then the families disappeared through the gates. Their plane would fly high over the Hungarian fence, to Manchester with a stopover in Munich. Then they would start a new life in Hull and Leeds, in the north of England.

  The camp was strangely empty after their departure. Commander Vasilescu was proud of both sides of his camp’s work, with refugees and with irregular migrants. ‘When I see families with children I feel compassion for them because I have a family too. Maybe if I was in the same position as them I would do the same.’ He was well aware that most were just resting under his care, while they looked for smugglers in Timișoara, to take them on to Western Europe. ‘Even if they don’t respect our rules, we try to understand. Perhaps they were not fortunate enough to go to school, maybe they have a different religion or culture. We try to respect them and to provide them with the information they need to respect us.’

  On the wall of one of the UNHCR rooms in the camp was a child’s painting of a little girl in a blue dress, offering a bunch of flowers to a soldier in camouflage uniform, kneeling in the grass in front of her. A yellow butterfly, perched on his finger, was inspecting the flowers. Bullets dropped from the soldier’s left hand. Outside in the playground, a little Iraqi girl in a brown anorak swung to and fro on a red and blue swing in the morning sunlight, her eyes tight shut.

  In the weeks after I met them there, all the victims of the crash left Romania with the help of smugglers.3 Samir reached Italy. Murat, Khose and Aiman were hidden in a truck when they were discovered by police in the Czech Republic. After two months in an asylum detention camp there, they were released and finally made it to Hanover to their relatives.

  Aidi was smuggled by car across the Hungarian border in February 2018, hidden under a blanket in the back. Quite probably the border guards were bribed, as each car is checked rather thoroughly. After a twenty-hour journey from Timișoara, the smuggler dropped her off outside the flat where her parents, brother and sister live, in Munich.

  ‘I hugged them, and we all cried so much.’ She hadn’t seen them for more than eighteen months. The authorities placed her in a refugee reception centre in Regensburg, where I went to visit her the following month. We sat on the shore of the Danube, close to the ancient stone bridge, with the medieval towers of the city reflecting in the river and the church bells ringing out the quarter hours across the water. She was so happy, and she spelt out her plans. ‘First I will go to school, to learn German. Then I will go to university. Because I have one dream. I want to work in an office. I would so much love to work in an office. That’s my dream!’

  First of all, though, she had to get asylum in Germany. In April 2018 she was told that her application for asylum had been turned down. For a while it seemed she would be deported back to Romania. After everything she had suffered on the journey, the crash in Hungary, the deportation to Romania, the new journey to Germany, and her joy at being reunited with her family, her world appeared about to unravel once again. Then, on appeal, her application was granted after all. She sent her Hungarian friend, Noémi, photos of the big family picnic her father organised in her honour in a park in Munich to celebrate.

  Two hours’ drive to the north in the East German city of Gotha, I met Akhir, another of the survivors of the crash in Hungary. Like most of the others, he was also deported by the Hungarian authorities to Romania and spent several weeks in the refugee camp in Timișoara. From there, still on crutches, he was smuggled in a lorry through Hungary to Germany.

  The smuggler told us the journey would only take four to six hours. In fact, it took thirty-seven hours. We had no food, just water. It was also very cold – January 2018. Then the lorry stopped and we were told to get out and hide in a forest at the roadside. We waited many hours, then a van picked us up and took us to another place. Finally we were transferred to a car. After a while the driver said: ‘You are now in Germany.’

  We spoke in his room in the rather dilapidated camp on the outskirts of Gotha. He lifted his shirt to show me his scars from the accident – down his shoulder, on his arm and across his abdomen. He was very glad to have reached Germany safely but desperately lonely. His wife and children rang while we were talking. ‘Take me to you now,’ his three-year-old son asked, as though he could reach out and pluck him through the phone.

  I went with Akhir to meet Sigrid Ansorg, a youth integration officer of the Evangelical Church Community in Gotha. She explained patiently to him that even before he got asylum, he could start a German language course. The more efforts he made to start integration – he had been in Germany two months when we met, and still hardly spoke a word of the language – the more chance he stood of getting asylum. Then, in the best case scenario, his wife and children could follow him to Germany on family unification grounds, about a year after his own request was accepted – if it was accepted. She introduced him to another Kurdish man, who promised to take him to meet his father. ‘It is important you integrate in your own community, as well as integrating in Germany,’ she explained. The camp was full of lonely people, far from home, isolated, spending hours on the internet with their distant families, but hardly in contact even with other camp inmates. The challenge facing Germany, how to cope with so many lonely people, is daunting. Through his window, beyond the bicycles of the camp staff, stretched an open field with a row of solid German oak trees.

  In 2015, 890,000 asylum claims were made in Germany, 280,000 in 2016 and 190,000 in 2017.4 The steep fall helped Germany to cope, but the family reunification issue was a thorny one, especially at a time of coalition negotiations. Through the autumn of 2017, Germany’s Green party held out for maximum family reunifications, while the Bavarian CSU refused to accept that. Aidi’s situation appeared to hinge on a Green party success – but those coalition talks broke down, and the new German government eventually resembled the former CDU–CSU–SPD grand coalition, albeit a weaker one than before.

  My research in Hungary led me to the two nine-year-old boys, Hachem and Pasha, whose mother was killed in
the crash. They were looked after in the SOS Children’s Village in Fót, near Budapest, with a twelve-year-old girl, Horia, who was travelling on her own. The UNHCR helped the Hungarian authorities and the Red Cross trace relatives of the three children in Western Europe. After several months in Fót, they were finally reunited with their relatives in Austria and Germany. By May 2018, fifteen of the seventeen survivors of the crash had reached Germany. One, Omar, had been deported back to Romania under the Dublin procedures. Only Safaa and his mother Hali were left behind in Hungary.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  As a nation, we have become fearful. And fear is dangerous, both to others and to ourselves. It causes us to lash out, stop thinking, lose our perspicacity, and bury our analytic capabilities. […] And why have we become fearful? Because fear is easier to deal with than discomfort. Discomfort is too demanding.

  Adam Seligman, University of Boston1

  Berlin, June 2017

  Nawras Ali lives in the Moabit district of Berlin. I last saw him at the east station in Budapest in late August 2015, taking part in a protest against the Hungarian government’s decision to stop refugees travelling on. He is settled now in the German capital with a good job, a nice flat and plenty of friends, both German and Syrian. He has been granted asylum. He has already passed his B1-level language exam and is working towards the C1. The language exam system starts with A1, for beginners, and finishes at C2 which is interpreter standard. All refugees are required to reach at least level B1. Germany is taking the integration of its new arrivals very seriously. Most importantly, Nawras has found work, as an editor at a German-Syrian video centre helping documentary film makers in the Middle East. His office is a few minutes’ walk from the metro stop at Turmstrasse.

  The street is bustling in the early summer, lined with food shops whose outdoor shelves boast all the shapes and colours and varieties of the fruit and vegetable kingdom. He’s waiting for me on the pavement in front of his office, lightly bearded, brown-eyed, twenty-six years old. In Damascus he was a poet and a translator, with a degree in hotel management. He left Syria to avoid the draft.

  I decided to leave my country because it’s not my war. Should I risk my life for somebody to stay president? Or for somebody else to become president? It’s a war over chairs. Why should I die for such a thing?

  I left everything behind. Imagine that you’ve left your family, all the places, all the memories, all the people that you’ve ever loved, all your friends. You only now have your name – but the new people you meet cannot even say your name properly! So you’ve also left your name behind as well.

  On the Greek island of Kos, having lost all his possessions overboard from the crowded, leaking dinghy during the sea-crossing from Turkey, he bought a small wooden disc with the peace symbol on it, which he still wears around his neck – the peace he came to Europe to find.

  The hospitality and welcome he has received in Germany began in Macedonia. ‘When we were walking across the border from Macedonia towards Serbia we met a German soldier. He asked us: are you going to Germany? We said yes, and he said to us: then you should learn to say “Guten Morgen!” And he was really nice, and that was my first impression.’

  When he reached Germany in September 2015 he spent the first twelve months at a refugee camp in Morbach in the south. Without knowing a word before he came, he learned almost fluent German, and gave Arabic lessons. In Berlin, we sit at a long wooden table upstairs in his office, speaking in hushed tones, so as not to disturb his colleagues in the editing suites which open off the corridor.

  Does he feel free now, in Europe, after escaping the war at home? I ask. A melancholy smile passes over his face. He quotes Pink Floyd: ‘Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze?’ ‘It’s not a freedom of course . . . but what other options do we have? It’s not right, but the world is not right.’

  Later he shows me the flat he shares with another refugee. He’s earning enough now to pay his own rent, national insurance and tax, so he’s already contributing to the German economy after less than two years in the country. The flat is modern and tidy, with a small balcony. Through the window, the wind is blasting across the flat plains of north-east Germany. Hot air for a cool breeze . . .

  Many people were welcoming from the start and they are still welcoming. But other people are not racist, they are simply afraid, they are being cautious and simply trying to have a more decent understanding of what’s happening here. Who are those people? Are we going to have a good life if they are part of our society, or not? I completely understand this.

  He has watched with concern the series of incidents involving asylum seekers – starting with the 2015 New Year’s Eve attacks on women in Cologne.

  What happened in Cologne affected everybody. First of all the women who had to suffer those terrible events. And it affected a lot of people who had nothing to do with those things, who came here because of war or other bad situations in their countries.

  How was it possible that 1,000 men – like a small army – got together and decided to molest and harass and even rape a group of ladies in such a terrible way?

  If even 1 per cent of the 1 million refugees who came to Europe were terrorists, that would add up to 10,000. We should have had 10,000 terrorist attacks through the last two years. And how many were there? Five or six? So what should we understand from this? Maybe some of those guys were sent by terrorist organisations. But I also think that some of them were mentally ill. Leaving your country, going through terrible things there or on your journey, then staying alone in a completely different culture, harms you.

  Even in my own experience, I went for two or three months when I hardly spoke to anyone. It’s easy to lose your mind.

  Nawras mentions the case of the German citizen of Turkish origin who ran amok in a Munich shopping mall in September 2016.

  He had an identity crisis. He always wanted to be regarded as a German, but felt he was always seen as Turkish, as an immigrant. Finally, he exploded inside and staged this terrorist action. Look at the USA and you can see a lot of similar incidents, in schools or wherever, when people have been bullied or psychologically tormented, and they do such terrible things.

  The incidents made him even more determined to integrate and prove he can be trusted. ‘When you have been given an opportunity to start a new life, you have an even bigger obligation, to respect the place and the people who helped you and prevent others from hurting people or hurting this beautiful society.’

  There is no such thing as collective guilt, he says. All refugees should not be blamed, though he knows they always would be. If he ever overheard anyone plotting anything bad against Germany, or even expressing extreme views, he would turn straight to the police, without hesitation.

  Would he ever become completely German? Would Germans ever really accept him, a stranger in their midst?

  You know it’s funny, somehow I think about this question every single day. When I was in Morbach I met a guy from Syria who had lived here in Germany for forty years. He told me: if you want to spend your life here, you need to kill a lot of things inside yourself. You need to die and come back to life with another personality, another attitude. If you think any more about your own country, you will just torment yourself, torn between this completely Western society, and your completely Eastern society, and you will be nobody anymore, neither Syrian nor German, just a guy who comes from somewhere else and stays here. I don’t know the answer, but what other options do we have?

  That evening he takes me to a bar called Neu Nachbarschaft, new neighbourliness. It’s a typical German place, with a long table called a Stammtisch, a table for regulars. But instead of heavy beer drinking, bottles slammed on the table and youth the worse for wear from the effects of alcohol and drugs, most people are sipping tea and chatting cheerfully. He takes me round and introduces me to his friends, German and Syrian, women and men. He dr
inks hot ginger, I drink beer. Yann, a postgraduate student from Zurich, explains the philosophy of the place. Anyone who wants to learn German and meet Germans, refugee or not, can come here. Young Germans who want to meet foreigners come here to teach, or just chat, and party. In the hubbub, I have to almost shout to make myself heard. Would Nawras ever consider going back to Syria?

  I remember the night when I was leaving Damascus. It must have been nearly 2 a.m. I was going to the place where the buses stop, to catch a bus to Beirut airport in Lebanon. As the car was driving outside the house of my sister, I looked everywhere. I saw the old citadel of Damascus, the cars, the streets, even the garbage cans. I was trying to memorise everything, even the smells. Damascus is special. It is not just another city. It is the oldest capital on earth. Whenever you go in the old city you have that feeling that you are seeing and smelling things that are 10,000 years old. All those civilisations, all those people that ever lived there, reliving their lives. As I left Damascus, I said to myself: I will go back, one more time.

  Bargteheide, Schleswig-Holstein

  Haneen meets me at the railway station in the small town where she now lives with her father, Bashar. I know from her Facebook photos that she wears a hijab, a headscarf covering her hair. She has an oval, pretty face, with very exact eyebrows, and a serious, self-confident manner which alternates with an easy laugh. We walk through Bargteheide in bright sunlight, with rain clouds building quickly in a chill wind. These are the plains of northern Europe and I can already hear seagulls and smell the salt of the North Sea on the breeze. No one stares at her, a girl in a hijab, or at us, a European man and a Middle Eastern woman. There’s a small-town friendliness. We exchange greetings with people as we pass.