I met M. in the central train station of a mid-size German town not far from Frankfurt. Even though I knew he was as eager to see me as I was him, the look in his eyes was tired and nervous. It wasn't a temporary anxiety or a general paranoia; it struck me as the sort of fear that had eroded its way onto his young 23-year-old face over the course of weeks or months. For him, the train station had been a 40-minute walk from the refugee camp. After a week in the town, this was his first time to make it to the city center. Nor had he taken the bus, even once. “When we ask people for directions,” he said at one point, “they sometimes say, ‘Oh, it’s a really long walk.’ ‘How long?’ we ask. ‘About 5 kilometers,’ they say. After all the walking we’ve done, 5 km is not a problem!”
For me, the trip was a morning train ride from Munich on the Intercity Express, which reached speeds of almost 300 km/h. A mutual friend had gotten to know M. before his trek to Germany and put us in touch with him.
As I walked out of the station with him, I asked if he knew any place he’d like to eat lunch. “Anything,” he said—which he would repeat throughout the course of the afternoon in response to several of my questions about what he wanted to do. He was gracious, and he had not explored the town before.
Once we had settled down at a cafe, it would still be more than half an hour before M. did anything more than nibble at his food, since, when I asked him to tell me about himself and where he came from, he launched into a detailed account of the last few years of his life. I was riveted. I hadn’t wanted to assume his story would be anything like the various news reports we had heard, but in fact it turned out to be a individual instance of those very reports—a kind of thread pulled from their fabric.
M. is from central Syria, near where the war began. He has an older brother, a younger sister, and a younger brother. As a child, M. dreamed of becoming a football (soccer) player. Before the war, he played for a team in his home city as an attacking midfielder. Once his family was on the move, his coach kept calling him: “We need you!” But his mom wouldn’t allow it. “You should forget football, forget your studies, forget everything.” It was his mother who recognized quickly when the fighting started that they shouldn’t stay in the city. They moved to an outlying village, the first of several moves in the long months that would follow. At first things were fine there, but then the fighting came to where they were. M. related that one of his cousins died, then quickly teared up and couldn’t speak for a couple of minutes.
One night, after months of being away from their home, his family came to a realization. As students, M. and his brother had a waiver that excused them from military service. But that was about to expire, and they would be drafted into the army during this awful conflict. If they weren’t going to join the army, there was only one thing for the family to do—leave the country.
They made their way to Lebanon by bus, through 17 heart-pounding military checkpoints. At any one of them, he feared, the soldiers might have noticed from their papers that he and his brother were about to be drafted, and take them into the military by force. “I can’t describe the feeling,” he said, with his hand on his chest.
Beirut was home for two and a half years. M. noticed that anyone there who knew English could get a good job. His mom had seen an English center, where M. started going in the time he could spare from his factory job. Amazingly, after only nine months of English study, he could converse with me in simple, but entirely adequate language.
For the time being, Lebanon seemed safe enough for M. and his family. But, he explained, Hezbollah is allied with the Syrian government. For all they knew, sometime in the future Hezbollah might make the two brothers go to the Syrian army. M. had a longstanding desire to live in Germany. Remarkably, he was able to get a passport from the Syrian embassy in Lebanon.
Next, he tried to get a visa for Germany, but was unsuccessful. It was then that a Syrian friend called him from Germany and provided details on another means of getting there—from Turkey to Greece via the Aegean Sea. Family and friends pleaded with him not to do it. Too dangerous. He booked his tickets to Turkey anyway. It would be the first time in 23 years that M. had been apart from his family, not living at home. He wished he could take his younger brother with him, but he dared not risk it.
He planned to make the sea voyage with a group of friends who were waiting for him in Turkey. But flight delays set him back a day. The owner of the boat that would take his friends across the sea said they had to make the crossing today, and they called him to let him know they couldn’t wait any longer.
The next day, M. found himself in a sketchy part of Izmir, looking for a hotel. It was the wee hours of the morning by the time he crawled into bed, but his anxiety still kept him awake much of that night. He connected with one of his friends there, a handicapped young man who would also make the journey. The next part was difficult to arrange, especially on his own—finding a boat owner who would let him make the trip. The going price was about $2,000 per person. One man offered to make the arrangements for somewhere in the ballpark of $2,500 each, but M. didn’t have any guarantee that he wouldn’t just abscond with the money. He managed to call one of his friends who had already made the passage, and he vouched for the guy. That would have to be good enough. The middleman did, in fact, put them in touch with the boat owner—and walked off with about a $1,000 commission.
After tramping through the woods, they arrived in the middle of the night at the shore where the boats were waiting. In fact, the “boats” were 2 large rubber dinghies, which M. estimated were designed to hold about 16 people each. They crammed more than 60 onto each boat. Then the boat owner quickly educated one of the teenagers on how to run the motor. The owner would not be coming along, and he would not be getting his boat back. But if everyone on the boat paid as much as M. had, the owner was grossing about $120,000.
It was shortly after midnight, and they were aiming for a small Greek island, about 3 hours away. I asked M. how they navigated, and he responded, “We all had phones.” But less than an hour into the trip, the motor quit. When they couldn’t get it going again, people started crying. After a terrifying 15 minutes, one of the men on board, a mechanic of sorts, identified a problem with the fuel connection and managed to revive it.
They successfully found the target island, then opted to continue on to another, more hospitable one. What they did upon arrival surprised me. The refugees were so afraid that the Greeks might force them to go back the way they came that they tried to sink the boat. Since the dinghy wouldn’t go down easily, they detached the motor and threw it into the sea. M. had recorded a video of the moment on his phone and showed me the celebratory occasion. They had made it to the European Union, and they would not be going back.
The Greek people of the island were very hospitable, according to M., as were the authorities. Over the next days, they crossed multiple borders, and much of their progress was on foot. The passage they most dreaded, though, was through Hungary, which lies directly in the path of so many refugees streaming from Greece to Germany. This summer and early fall, Hungary was proving the most difficult country for refugees to pass through.
They traipsed through the forest from Serbia (I think) to Hungary in the middle of the night. Once in Hungary, they found a bus driver who was willing to take them to the Austrian border (perhaps 300 k.m.?), for a scandalous amount of money. But five minutes after starting on their way, the police pulled them over, by the driver’s arrangement, M. figures. The money, of course, had already been given to an associate, who was nowhere to be seen. The Hungarian police detained the entire group and demanded that they be fingerprinted. They steadfastly refused, despite spending the next three days in jail. Though they were finally forced to give in, M. recounted it with discouragement, since they believed that so long as their border crossings were undocumented, they could apply for asylum in Germany once they arrived there. What they feared was that if their presence in the E.U. was documented elsewhere, they would have to apply for asylum in the country where they were documented and be ineligible to make their asylum application under Germany’s more favorable conditions.
After documenting them, the police released the group from custody, and they found their way into Austria. Here, they spent the last of their money on another driver, who dropped them at a village inside Germany. They started walking toward Munich (perhaps still over 100 km away). But everyone was exhausted from the extremities of the trip — already they had walked many days and nights over the last two weeks. When they took a break on the side of the road, the German police stopped to check if they were OK. They were grateful to be helped on their way to Munich and filed into the refugee system. Then they were placed in camps like the one in this small city where M. and I met. I encouraged him again to eat and asked him how the food was in the camp. “Very bad,” he said.
After lunch, M. took me to the refugee camp, which was about a 40 minute walk from the city center, though a park and a shopping center. I noticed a poster campaign in the mall advocating the rights of asylum seekers. When we got to a gate in the chain-link fence around the camp, I had to show the guards my passport, and M. had to sign me in as a guest, using as identification a yellow slip of paper that he was supposed to keep with him at all times. We passed some children playing in a courtyard, and a building with the sign of one of the large non-profits that has been providing assistance during the refugee crisis. The housing consisted of 20 or more adapted container units, put together to form kind of an apartment building with a central hallway. M. was bunking with four other young men in a crowded but basically adequate room. His English was by far the best, so he had to translate anything beyond the few words of Arabic I could muster. Since I was their “guest,” they treated me to the best they had — a carton of juice — which I accepted gratefully, despite my compunctions about depriving them of their provisions. When I took my leave, M. showed me to the main road, where we shared a few words of encouragement before I left. The entire day had been a fascinating but sobering glimpse into M.’s life and the refugee situation as a whole.
M. and I stayed in contact by phone, and I was able to visit him again about a month later. I had given him some suggestions of how he could make some friends outside the refugee camp, and through our phone conversations I learned that he had taken me up on these ideas. He was now practicing with a local soccer team, and two different people had taken it upon themselves to help him learn German. “Now I have more friends than I can count,” he said glowingly. I’m fairly sure this is not the case for many others in the camp.
When I saw him again, a big smile had replaced his previously pained and anxious looks. He had with him a bike that one of his new friends had just given him. We ate some pizza in the shopping center and then headed over to the house of one of his new friends for coffee. After only a few minutes of conversation, I realized that my prayers had been answered — M. was well taken care of. He was making an attempt to learn German, and he seemed much less anxious, though he still mentioned his worries over whether he would get a residency permit, which he expected to take another 1-3 months.
At the end of the day, a little while before I had to be at my train, we sat down at the river and chatted about Syria. M. showed me on my phone satellite images of where his home had been. The street running through his neighborhood that had once been a major artery both day and night was practically deserted. The rubble was clearly visible. Government forces had besieged the city for a long time. As he explained the situation, I began to realize for the first time the extent to which the divide was ethnic and religious, not just political. One could tell which people were pro-government by the dialect they spoke, M. claimed, demonstrating the difference for me. The conflict fed new hostilities among long-time friends. It was during the siege, I gathered, that he became estranged from one of his good friends, who was pro-government. M. started receiving hateful text messages from him, but responded kindly, asking why, after their years of friendship, he had suddenly turned on him. That response occasioned a heartfelt phone call between the two of them—a little piece of the reconciliation that so many Syrians need.
Though M.’s story isn’t over, this chapter of it has a delightful ending. A week or two after my second visit, M. phoned me to tell me some incredible news. He had been granted a three-year residency permit which allows him to work! The speed with which it had happened was unheard of. I'm so grateful for this outcome and am looking forward to seeing what more is in store for this thoughtful young man.