Refugee

by Alan Gratz

  “I have to say, this is the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in,” Dad said. He was trying to joke again. His father was always joking. But Mahmoud didn’t think that any of this was funny at all.

  At last, soldiers with nightsticks came to their cell and told them in Arabic to line up to be processed.

  “We don’t want to be processed,” Dad said. “We just want to get to Austria. Why not just take us all the way to the border? We never wanted to stay in Hungary anyway!”

  A soldier whacked him in the back with his nightstick, and Mahmoud’s father collapsed to the ground. “We don’t want your filth here, either!” the guard yelled in Arabic. “You’re all parasites!” He kicked Mahmoud’s father in the back, and another soldier hit Mahmoud’s father again and again with his stick.

  “No!” Mahmoud cried. “No! Don’t! Stop!” Mahmoud begged. He couldn’t bear to see his father beaten. But what could he do?

  “We’ll do it! We’ll be processed!” Mahmoud told the guards. That was all it took—to surrender. The guards stopped beating his father and ordered everyone to line up.

  Mahmoud helped his father to his feet. Dad leaned heavily against him, needing his son for support. Together they shuffled in line along the far side of the hallway, away from the cells. Men and women and children watched them with hopeful eyes as they passed, looking for their husbands and brothers and sons.

  And then Mahmoud saw them—his mother and Waleed. They were in a cell with other women and children!

  “Youssef! Mahmoud!” Mahmoud’s mother cried.

  “Fatima!” Mahmoud’s father cried with relief, and he stepped toward her.

  Whack! A soldier clubbed Mahmoud’s father with his nightstick, and Dad went down again in a heap. Mahmoud and his mother cried out at the same time.

  “Stay in line!” the soldier yelled.

  Mahmoud’s mother reached for them through the bars. “Youssef!” she cried.

  “No, Mom—don’t!” Mahmoud cried. A soldier clanged his nightstick against the metal bars, and she retreated inside her cell.

  Mahmoud got his father up again and helped him into what the soldiers called the “processing center.” There, clerks sat behind long tables, taking down information from the refugees. When Mahmoud and his father got to the front of their line, a man in a blue uniform asked them if they wanted to claim asylum in Hungary.

  “Stay here? In Hungary? After you have beaten me? Locked my family up like common criminals?” Mahmoud’s father asked, fists clenched and shaking. Mahmoud still had to help him to stand. “Are you joking? Why can’t you just let us go on to Austria? Why do we need to be ‘processed’? We don’t want to stay here one second longer than we have to!”

  The policeman shrugged. “I’m just doing my job,” he said.

  Mahmoud’s father slammed his hand flat on the table, making Mahmoud jump. “I wouldn’t live in this awful country even if it was made of gold!”

  The policeman filled in an answer on a form. “Then you will be sent back to Serbia,” he said without looking up at them. “And if you return to Hungary, you will be arrested.”

  Mahmoud’s father didn’t speak again, not even to make a joke. Mahmoud answered the rest of the clerk’s questions about their names and birthdates and places of birth, then helped his father back to their cell with the other inmates. Mahmoud’s mother cried out for them again as they passed, but Mahmoud’s father didn’t acknowledge her, and Mahmoud didn’t respond. He knew that would only bring down the wrath of the guards again.

  Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. Be unimportant. Blend in.

  Disappear.

  That was how you avoided the bullies.

  The St. Louis was throwing a party. Even bigger than the one it had thrown the night before they’d reached Cuba. This one had the euphoria of more than nine hundred people who had been at death’s door and were suddenly, miraculously, saved.

  Belgium, Holland, France, and England had agreed to divide the refugees among them. None of the passengers were going back to Germany.

  Josef’s mother wasn’t alone on the dance floor anymore. She was joined by dozens of couples, all dancing with giddy abandon. Josef had even taken a turn around the floor with her. Passengers sang songs and played the piano with the orchestra, and one man who knew magic tricks entertained Ruthie and the other little kids in the corner of the social hall. In another corner, Josef laughed as passengers took turns telling jokes. Most of the jokes were about taking holiday cruises to Cuba, but the best was when one of the passengers got up and read from the brochure that advertised the MS. St. Louis.

  “ ‘The St. Louis is a ship on which everyone travels securely, and lives in comfort,’ ” he read. You could barely hear him over the hooting. “ ‘There is everything one can wish for,’ ” the man read, gasping for breath, “ ‘that makes life on board a pleasure! We hope you’ll want to travel on the St. Louis again and again!’ ” Josef laughed so hard he cried. If he never saw the MS St. Louis again in his life, he would die happy.

  The next morning, the ship docked at a pier in Antwerp, Belgium. Negotiations between Captain Schroeder and the four countries still took time, and it was a full day later when, under the grim portrait of Adolf Hitler, Josef and his family joined the other passengers in the social hall again to find out where they would be going.

  Representatives from the four countries sat at a long table at the front of the hall, arguing over which passengers each would take. Every country wanted only the passengers with the best chances of getting accepted by America, so they could ship the refugees back out as quickly as possible.

  Josef hoped they would get England, because it was the farthest away from Nazi Germany, safe across the English Channel. But when everything was settled, he and his family were assigned to France. They would be among the third group to disembark—after the Jewish refugees going to Belgium and the Netherlands were delivered, but before the last group sailed for Great Britain.

  The first group left that afternoon.

  Josef watched with most of the other passengers as the refugees going to Belgium disembarked. Josef didn’t want to go to Belgium, but he was jealous nonetheless. Like everybody else, he was ready to get off this ship.

  “Think of it—we traveled ten thousand miles on board the St. Louis,” one of the men leaving for Belgium told the other passengers as he stepped onto the gangplank, “only to end up three hundred miles from where we started!”

  The line got a laugh, but a sad one. Josef was all too aware of the long shadow cast by Nazi Germany, and so was everyone else. Still, as long as the Nazis stayed in Germany, they would all be safe. Wouldn’t they?

  The next day, 181 passengers disembarked in the city of Rotterdam, even though Holland wouldn’t let the St. Louis dock at their pier, just like in Havana. The refugees were taken into town by another ship and escorted by police boats.

  As they sailed on to France, Josef wandered the decks. The ship had a strange, empty feeling to it. Half the passengers were gone. The morning they arrived in Boulogne, France, the 288 passengers who were traveling on to England gathered on C-deck to say farewell to Josef and the others who were disembarking.

  “We’re due into England tomorrow,” Josef heard one of them say. “June twenty-first. That’s exactly forty days and forty nights in a boat. Now, where have I heard that story before?”

  Josef smiled, remembering the story of Noah from the Torah. But he felt less like Noah and more like Moses, wandering in the desert for forty years before reaching the Promised Land. Was that France? The Promised Land, at last? Josef could only pray it was. He picked up his suitcase in one hand, took Ruthie’s hand with his other, and led her and their mother down the ramp into Boulogne.

  “You see?” Mama said. “I told you somebody would think of something. Now, stay close, and don’t lose your coats.”

  At the bottom of the ramp, Josef watched as one of the other passengers got down on his hands and knees and kissed the
ground. If he hadn’t had his hands full, Josef might have done the same thing.

  The secretary general of the French Refugee Assistance Committee officially welcomed them to France, and the porters on the docks moved quickly to carry the passengers’ luggage for them, refusing any and all tips offered.

  Maybe this was the Promised Land after all.

  Josef and his mother and sister spent the night in a hotel in Boulogne, and then they were taken by train to Le Mans, where they were put up in a cheap lodging house. Days passed, and life went on. Josef’s mother got work doing other people’s laundry. Ruthie went to kindergarten at last, and Josef went to school for the first time in months—but because he couldn’t speak French they put him in the first grade. Thirteen years old—a man!—and they put him in a classroom with seven-year-olds! It was humiliating. Josef promised himself he would learn to speak French over the summer, or die trying.

  He never got the chance. Two months later, Germany invaded Poland, touching off a new world war.

  Eight months after that, Germany invaded France, and Josef and his mother and sister were on the run again.

  Isabel’s mother cried out. “It’s coming— it’s coming!”

  Isabel didn’t know if she meant the baby, or the Coast Guard ship.

  Or both.

  “Paddle!” Amara cried.

  Isabel paddled harder. She could see the shore, could see the beach umbrellas folded up for the night but still stuck in the sand. Strings of lights. Palm trees. More music—a salsa now. It was all so close!

  But so was the Coast Guard ship. It bore down on them, its red light flashing, its powerful motor thrumming, water sluicing from its bow.

  Isabel’s heart hammered. It was going to catch them. They weren’t going to make it!

  Lito froze. “It’s happening again,” he said.

  “What? What do you mean?” Isabel asked, panting.

  “When I was a young man, I was a policeman,” Lito said, his eyes wild. “There was a ship—a ship full of Jews, from Europe. And we sent them back. I sent them back! Sent them back to die when we could so easily have taken them in! It was all politics, but they were people. Real people. I met them. I knew them by name.”

  “I don’t understand,” Isabel said. What did her grandfather’s story have to do with anything?

  “Paddle!” Isabel’s father cried. The Coast Guard boat was almost on top of them.

  “Don’t you see?” Lito said. “The Jewish people on the ship were seeking asylum, just like us. They needed a place to hide from Hitler. From the Nazis. Mañana, we told them. We’ll let you in mañana. But we never did.” Lito was crying now, distraught. “We sent them back to Europe and Hitler and the Holocaust. Back to their deaths. How many of them died because we turned them away? Because I was just doing my job?”

  Isabel didn’t know what ship her grandfather was talking about, but she knew about the Holocaust from school. The millions of European Jews who had been murdered by the Nazis. And now her grandfather was saying that a ship full of Jewish refugees had come to Cuba when he was a young man? That he had helped to send them away?

  Mañana. Suddenly, Isabel understood why her grandfather had been whispering that word over and over again for days. Why it haunted him.

  When would the Jews be let into Cuba? Mañana.

  When would their boat reach America? Mañana.

  Mañana had never come for the Jewish people on that ship, Isabel realized. Would mañana never come for Isabel and her family either?

  A calm came over Lito, as though he’d come to some sort of understanding, some decision. “I see it now, Chabela. All of it. The past, the present, the future. All my life, I kept waiting for things to get better. For the bright promise of mañana. But a funny thing happened while I was waiting for the world to change, Chabela: It didn’t. Because I didn’t change it. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. Take care of your mother and baby brother for me.”

  “Lito, what are you—?”

  “Don’t stop rowing for shore!” Isabel’s grandfather yelled to everyone else. He kissed Isabel on the cheek, surprising her, and then stood and jumped into the ocean.

  “Lito!” Isabel cried. “Lito!”

  “Papá!” Isabel’s mother cried. “What’s he doing?”

  Isabel’s grandfather popped back up a few meters away, his head appearing and disappearing in the waves.

  “Lito!” Isabel cried.

  “Help!” he cried, waving his arms at the Coast Guard ship while at the same time swimming away from it. “Help me!” he yelled.

  “He jumped in to distract them!” Papi realized.

  “They’ll come for us first!” Señor Castillo said.

  “No, he’s in danger of drowning. They have to rescue him!” Amara cried. “This is our chance. Row—row!”

  Tears rolled down Isabel’s cheek where her grandfather had just kissed her good-bye. “Lito!” she cried again, reaching out for him over the waves.

  “Don’t worry about me, Chabela! If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s treading water,” Lito yelled back. “Now, row! Mañana is yours, my beautiful songbird. Go to Miami and be free!”

  Isabel sobbed. She couldn’t paddle. Couldn’t row. Couldn’t do anything but watch as the Coast Guard ship veered away from their little boat and steered toward her grandfather. Went to save him and send him to Guantanamo. Back to Cuba.

  They came for Mahmoud and his father again the next morning, this time to take them to a crowded refugee camp in a cold, muddy field surrounded by a wire fence. Multicolored camping tents stood among heaps of trash and discarded clothes, and Hungarian soldiers in blue uniforms and white surgical masks guarded the entrances and exits. There was only one real building, a windowless cinder-block warehouse filled with row after row of metal cots.

  Mahmoud and his father found Mom and Waleed among the newly arrived refugees, and they shared a tearful reunion. They were each given a blanket and a bottle of water, and found cots for themselves. But when the food was delivered, they missed out. The Hungarian soldiers stood at one end of the room, tossing sandwiches into the crowd like zookeepers throwing food to the animals in a cage, and Mahmoud and his family didn’t know enough to rush the tables to catch their lunch.

  Mahmoud expected his father to laugh it off, but he wasn’t joking anymore. Instead, Dad sat on his cot, his face and arms purple and bruised, staring off into space. Getting beaten and thrown into prison by the Hungarians had finally broken his spirit.

  It scared Mahmoud. Of the four members of his family who were left, he was the only one who wasn’t broken. His mother had snapped the moment she had handed her daughter away, and now she wandered the maze of mattresses and blankets in the detention center, asking people she had already asked if they had seen or heard of a baby named Hana.

  Mahmoud’s brother, Waleed, was broken too, but unlike his mother he had been broken piece by piece, over time, like someone snapping off little bites of a chocolate bar until there was nothing left. He lay listless on a foam mattress, disinterested in the card games or soccer games the other children were playing. Whatever childish joy he had once possessed had been sucked out until there was nothing left.

  And now his father was dead inside too.

  Mahmoud fumed. Why were they even here? Why did the Hungarians care if they were just passing through? Why had they taken them all the way to the Austrian border only to throw them in a detention center? It felt personal somehow. Like the whole country was conspiring to keep them from finding a real home. There were policemen with guns at every door. They were more like prisoners than refugees, and when they got out of here it would just be to go back to Serbia. Back to another country that didn’t want them.

  After everything they had been through, they weren’t going to make it to Germany after all.

  But Mahmoud wasn’t ready to give up. He wanted life to be like it was before the war had come. They couldn’t go back to Syria. Not now. Mahmoud kn
ew that. But there was no reason they couldn’t make a new life for themselves somewhere else. Start over. Be happy again. And Mahmoud wanted to do whatever it took to make that happen. Or at least try.

  But making something happen meant drawing attention. Being visible. And being invisible was so much easier. It was useful too, like in Aleppo, or Serbia, or here in Hungary. But sometimes it was just as useful to be visible, like in Turkey and Greece. The reverse was true too, though: Being invisible had hurt them as much as being visible had.

  Mahmoud frowned. And that was the real truth of it, wasn’t it? Whether you were visible or invisible, it was all about how other people reacted to you. Good and bad things happened either way. If you were invisible, the bad people couldn’t hurt you, that was true. But the good people couldn’t help you, either. If you stayed invisible here, did everything you were supposed to and never made waves, you would disappear from the eyes and minds of all the good people out there who could help you get your life back.

  It was better to be visible. To stand up. To stand out.

  Mahmoud watched as a door on a nearby wall opened, and a group of men and women in light blue caps and vests with the letters UN written on them came inside, escorted by some important-looking Hungarian soldiers. Mahmoud knew that the UN was the United Nations—the same group that had been helping people at the Kilis refugee camp. The UN people carried clipboards and cell phones, and made notes and took pictures of the living conditions. This place was run by the Hungarians, not the UN, so Mahmoud guessed they were there to observe. To document the living conditions of the refugees.

  Mahmoud decided right then and there he was going to make sure the observers saw him.

  Mahmoud got up from his cot and walked to the door. All he had to do was push his way through, and he would be outside. But a Hungarian soldier stood guard next to it. She wore a blue uniform, a red cap, and a thick black leather belt that held a nightstick and had all kinds of compartments. Over her shoulder she carried a small automatic rifle on a strap, the barrel pointed at the gymnasium floor.