A desperate journey from Syria to Germany
Not long ago, a Syrian acquaintance of mine, Muhammad Albalkhy, sent me an urgent email: “I am in Hungary and I need your help. Do you know anyone who could get me out of here?”
After escaping from Syria, and enduring a harrowing journey through Turkey, Greece, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, Muhammad, 26, was arrested by Hungarian police.
Muhammad is part of the raging headlines these days, one of thousands trying to get to Germany from often punishing circumstances in the Middle East and Africa, via boat or truck or on foot. One more tired soul on a desperate journey to a new life.
In our old lives, I had met Muhammad when we worked at Damascus University two years ago. He taught television editing. We used to exchange smiles in the morning.
After I settled in Germany, before the migrant crisis in Europe hit a fever pitch, we became Facebook friends. Five months ago, he asked how he might come to Germany, too.
I asked why he was so desper- ate to escape Syria. I didn’t know that Syrian authorities had arrested him three times since 2013.
He was first arrested because a colleague accused him of disloyalty to the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad. Later, police arrested him after he quit his job at the private, pro-regime Addounia television station and he was caught attempting to leave Syria via Jordan.
The third time was the worst. He was beaten in jail, he told me, after he made a mistake at work at a public TV station — a program went missing from the server. In January, a barrel bomb killed 12 members of his family near Daraa, where the revolution against Assad had begun. Enough was enough.
“I lost my uncles and aunts,” he said. “My father vanished. I tried to find out whether he was arrested or killed but couldn’t. After that, I knew I had to get out of the country.”
Muhammed tried to apply for a visa to travel to Sweden to receive artificial arms — he lost both of his own in a car accident in 2001.
“They kicked me out in a nice, respectful way,” he said.
So he began his escape to Germany, crossing the Syrian border into Turkey. The truck ride across Turkey was the worst part of his trip, he recalled.
“The most terrifying and ex- hausting part of the journey is being trapped in a claustrophobic truck pressed up against 80 other refugees. I worried about my friend and his young wife who were running out of oxygen in there,” he told me. “By the time you embark on the boat, you don’t have much energy. I don’t think people drown because they are unable to swim; it’s because they are tired.”
Muhammad set out from Turkey on an inflatable boat, bound for Greece with 40 other migrants.
“On the boat, all faces were terrified, stories of other Syrians who had drowned in this water reflecting in their eyes,” he said. “But I was too relieved that we got out of that truck alive to care.”
Three hours later, he reached the island of Mytilini in Greece, then onward to Macedonia and Serbia and finally Hungary, where he wrote that plea. With- out thinking, I answered, “Were you caught by the Hungarian police? The most important thing is not to be forced to leave your fingerprints in Hungary.”
Under European Union laws, migrants must apply for asylum in the country where they first enter the EU, and fingerprints document that entry.
He responded that he had been released and that, no, they didn’t take his fingerprints. Instantly, I realized my mistake: Muhammed doesn’t have fingers.
Eight days later, Muhammed sent me his new German phone number. He had made it.
Life in Germany won’t be easy, but it’s nothing compared with the nightmare in his war-torn home, where there is no future, particularly for the disabled.
After five years of study at Damascus University’s department of technical computing, the government banned granting degrees to disabled students — so he was expelled. But although the university refused to grant him a degree, he was nevertheless hired to teach there.
“During the whole journey, I didn’t think about stopping and turning back to Syria once,” he said. “I simply knew that there is no way back. It was impossible to look back.”