SYRIAN GIRL WRITES OF HER FLIGHT FROM DEATH TO FREEDOM
▶ Yusra Mardini sheds light on the refugee crisis in her autobiography, David Crossland writes from Berlin
A Syrian girl who helped to save fellow refugees on an inflatable dinghy in the Aegean Sea and went on to compete in the 2016 Olympic Games, has told her traumatic story in an autobiography to be published next month.
Yusra Mardini, now 20, became the youngest ever UN High Commissioner for Refugees Goodwill Ambassador, meeting Barack Obama and Pope Francis and inspiring other refugees with a simple message: never give up.
Her book, entitled Butterfly, reveals how she and her elder sister Sara paid smugglers US$1,500 (Dh5,509) each to cross from Turkey to Greece after they fled war-torn Damascus.
They were packed into an overloaded 4-metre dinghy that looked like a toy for tourists when they set off to reach Europe in August 2015.
Fifteen minutes into the journey towards the Greek island of Lesbos, only 10 kilometres away, the boat’s engine died in choppy seas and, with the occupants being tossed around helplessly by high waves, it seemed doomed to sink.
The passengers began praying but one man, Muhannad, who could not swim, slid into the sea and clung to a rope that ran alongside the boat to try to lighten the load.
Yusra and Sara, who had also swam for the Syrian national team, jumped into the water to try to stop the boat from capsizing, clinging on to keep the flimsy dinghy headed in the right direction.
The book tells how the sisters swallowed seawater while being buffeted by waves, their eyes and muscles stinging while passengers, including families with small children, frantically used their mobile phones to try to summon help.
They eventually made contact with the Greek coastguard who simply told them to turn back, but they could not reach the Turkish coastguard.
The Mardini sisters clung on for three hours, continually swallowing sea water, their muscles aching from the cold and their skin chafing from their life jackets.
Yusra’s legs seized up and her palms sustained rope burns. Another boat of refugees, larger in size, sped past, ignoring their cries for help as the sun set and darkness fell.
Suddenly, the engine sputtered back to life after repeated efforts pulling on the engine’s cord. The sisters, who had been in the water the longest while the male passengers took turns to help them, climbed back into the boat.
Shivering with cold, Sara volunteered for one last stint in the water to reduce the
Being a refugee is not a choice. Our choice is to die at home or risk death trying to escape
YUSRA MARDINI Syrian refugee
dinghy’s weight and they landed on a Lesbos beach.
“Being a refugee is not a choice,” said Yusra, revealing that she hates the word because it dehumanises people and evokes thoughts of borders, barbed wire, bureaucracy and humiliation. “Our choice is to die at home or risk death trying to escape.”
Her story is now being made into a feature film by Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliot,
The Hours and The Reader. In Damascus, Yusra lived through four years of escalating conflict in which friends were killed by air strikes and shelling.
She decided to leave after a rocket-propelled grenade smashed through the ceiling of the building where she was training. She survived because it failed to explode, and lay green and shimmering at the bottom of the swimming pool.
Having reached Greece, the refugees encountered kindness and hostility as they joined tens of thousands of fellow Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis on an odyssey on foot, ferry, car, bus and train through Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary and Austria.
Their near-death experience at sea welded the group together and spurred them on towards their final destination, Germany.
Gripping and moving, the book conveys the horror of refugees escaping conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, through names and faces.
Yusra recounts how they were particularly badly treated in Hungary, where smugglers cheated them each out of hundreds of euros and police humiliated them, locking them in a stable, hurling bad food over the gate and then taking them to a refugee camp in a pitch-black van.
In the late summer of 2015, when the refugee crisis peaked, Yusra was among tens of thousands stranded at Budapest train station just as German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to let them travel to the country, in a humanitarian gesture that temporarily suspended an EU rule that asylum claims should be handled in the country where migrants first arrive.
Partly as a result of Mrs Merkel’s open-border policy, 890,000 asylum-seekers arrived in Germany in 2015. Yusra and Sara were among them, reassured by the “Refugees Welcome” signs that greeted them as their train arrived at Munich station.
They were taken to Berlin, where the story of their courage attracted increasing attention. Yusra, who was 17 at the time, resumed her swimming with her ultimate goal in mind: to compete in the Olympics.
Helped by a German coach, she trained and came to the attention of the International Olympic Committee, which was forming a refugee team to compete in the Rio games in 2016.
Yusra writes that she initially baulked at the thought of swimming for a refugee team because she did not want to be defined as stateless, feeling it smacked of charity.
But she changed her mind, convinced it was her chance to become a role model to others fleeing war, by showing that it is possible to prevail. Yusra, who was named in
People magazine’s 2016 list of those changing the world, still lives in Berlin and is training for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
It is unclear whether she will swim for another refugee team or for Germany or Syria.