We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled

by Wendy Pearlman

  I was lucky. But my mind is in turmoil because of the contradiction between the comfort I have here and the suffering of people back home. My conscience bothers me. I’m a doctor; I could have stayed and helped people.

  We respect all people and are against all terrorism. But why does this world have such little sympathy for people dying in Syria? A Russian plane is able to drop phosphorus bombs on some human beings because the world has grown accustomed to their deaths. It’s as if the blood that circulates in our veins is of lesser value. We’ve seen only cowardice from the so-called “Friends of Syria.” The truth is that Syria has no friends. It is just a chessboard for great powers to settle their accounts.

  Our family is scattered. My parents and one of my brothers are in Qatar. Another brother is in Egypt. My other brother was a dentist in Syria. He was desperate to leave because he was about to get drafted into the army. The German embassy rejected his visa application, so he left by sea.

  My son spent the first years of his life in Homs stuck inside because of the curfew and the bombing. He had no contact with anyone but his parents and grandparents. He was two years old when he saw another child for the first time. He went up to him and touched his eyes, because he thought that he was a doll.

  Ghayth, former student (Aleppo)

  Most Syrians have had to start their lives over at least twice. Someone goes to Egypt and creates a new life, and then boom! The political situation changes and he has to leave. He goes to Turkey and gets ruined again and then goes to Greece and gets ruined, and so on.

  Germany opened its borders and huge numbers of people came in. I came with that wave. The amount of bureaucracy was unbelievable. Every day I would go to the LaGeSo and wait from seven o’clock to four o’clock.* They did not assign people numbers, so people would sleep outside overnight to hold their spot in line. It took me forty days even to enter the building. I got a number, and then it took another thirty days for my number to show up on the screen. There was no organization. You have number 80 and I have number 90, but number 100 might get called before us. Every day I had to show up, just to see if my number was called. I kept asking them why it never was. Then they discovered that they’d lost my file.

  One of the reasons the paperwork takes so long is that many migrants who aren’t Syrian claim to be Syrian, because they think we get priority. When I was making the journey, I’d help with translations. I remember watching an Iraqi speak to the Greek police:

  “Where are you from?”

  “Syria.”

  “From which city?”

  “Mosul.”

  The police would say, “Mosul is in Iraq.”

  Now they investigate to make sure that you’re really Syrian. They ask you what street you lived on and where you bought your groceries. The employee will pull out a GPS and ask, “How long does it take to walk from Point A to Point B in Aleppo?”

  Imad, former student (Salamiyah)

  Everyone was saying, “Just leave, leave, leave.” So I left, like everyone else. I didn’t even know where I was going until halfway through the journey. I simply moved along with the crowd.

  The trip took a month and a half. I was thrown in jail in Hungary, but it was like a five-star hotel compared to my time in our jails in Syria. And by that time I only wanted a break from walking and somewhere warm to sleep.

  I don’t have any dreams or plans for the future. I hardly think an hour ahead. Return to college? After all those years that I studied and then the revolution started and I couldn’t finish and get my degree? I don’t have the patience to start again. Besides, even people who have degrees find them worthless once they get here.

  Media has tied the revolution to terrorism. If a Syrian asking for asylum says he was with the revolution, European authorities ask for details: Did you see any killing? Did you interact with any terrorists? Who? You feel like you’re being accused of something. People just want to get their residency cards. They’re afraid of getting sent back. It’s easier to say that you’re simply running away from war. It’s easier not to mention the revolution, or even the regime.

  And in this way, the truth of the revolution gets buried. It’s getting lost, without our intention or without us even knowing that we’re doing it. And that alone is a crime against everything that has happened in Syria.

  Hakem, engineer and pharmacist (Deir ez-Zor)

  ISIS started to establish ministries and asked people with university degrees to work with them. I refused. They arrested me for seven days and then released me with a summons to come before their executive court. Everyone knows what that means. I fled to Turkey that night.

  It was very hard to leave. I’d been married for one year and my wife was pregnant. After I left, ISIS sent a message to my family telling them that they’d find me in Turkey and finish me off. We know that ISIS can reach into Turkey to take revenge. They also said that they would punish my wife in my place.

  I managed to get my wife from Deir ez-Zor to the north of Aleppo, where she hid with her mother. Our daughter was born three months after I left. She is seven months old now, and I still haven’t seen her. They are stuck on the border between Turkey and Syria. The Turks have stopped giving residency to Syrians, so the only way to enter Turkey is through smuggling. The soldiers shoot Syrians who try to cross the border.

  I have a degree in engineering and twelve years of experience as a pharmacist. Now I’m just sitting here in this refugee shelter doing nothing. My life consists of smoking and drinking tea. All we do is wait. In the evening, you’ll see all the people listening to the news on their cell phones. The next day we wake up and wait again. Every day we hear the same news of death. The only difference is the numbers who die.

  If I’d known this was life here I would have stayed in Syria and handed myself over to ISIS. It’s better to die once than die slowly every day. We’re trying to forget our tragedy. But how can you forget your wife or your child or your family? Before I got here, the only time in my life I’d cried was when my father died. Now I cry every day.

  Wael, graduate (Daraya)

  I paid a smuggler to hide in a truck from Turkey to Greece. There were four of us and we all lay flat in a narrow compartment like a coffin. The ceiling was less than an arm’s length above my face. On one side was a curtain separating us from the driver. On the other side there was a wall. It was so tight that you could only move when the person across from you did. And it was so hot that when I got out I was drenched with sweat. If we ever talked, the driver would yell at us to be quiet. Whenever a border guard stopped the truck to check its papers, we couldn’t make any sound at all.

  The smugglers told us that the journey would take twenty hours. In the end it took forty. When they dropped us off, we had no idea where we were. I charged my phone and saw that we were close to the border of Sweden.

  Sweden is everything I used to dream of for Syria, in terms of how people are treated. It’s like people want to make things easier for you, not harder. In Syria, if you wanted to do anything, you have to pay a bribe. Here, you will never have to pay for something that should be your right. If you work hard, you can reach the highest positions of government. All that matters are your qualifications and capabilities. Here you might even see the king filling his car up with gas or buying groceries. It’s a long way from the thinking that they implanted in us in Syria—that Bashar was like a god.

  The town I live in has only about 60,000 residents, but it has a huge library. It’s like a dream. They have any book you want, and if they don’t have it, they’ll get it from another library. The first time I checked out a book, I thought of Daraya, which had a population of 250,000–300,000 without a single library. That’s one of a dictator’s strategies: to keep the population in ignorance. A library means people will read, which means they’ll think, which means they’ll know their rights.

  Once my wife and I were walking down the street. An old lady saw my wife’s headscarf and said, “Why are you wearing that? Go bac
k to your country!” This bothered us, but we said, “Okay, thank you.” We kept seeing her on the same street, so we started taking other streets, instead. We’re not here to make problems. But her behavior is racist. It’s none of her business what someone else is wearing. On that, the law is on our side.

  During my first month in Sweden, I lost my temporary ID card. They told me, “It’s no problem. Just go to the police and file a report.”

  I heard “police” and put one foot forward and another back. I remembered how I had lost my ID card once in Syria and thought, “Is the same thing that happened there going to happen here?”

  I went to the police station. I was really nervous, waiting for them to give me a lot of trouble. But the employee said, “Hello, welcome, what would you like to drink?” I told him about the lost ID. He asked me for my name and where I thought I lost it, and then said, “Okay, thank you.”

  I asked, “Is that it?”

  He said yes. I told him about what happened in Syria when I lost my ID. He said, “I’m very sorry to hear that, but this is all we need from you. If you want to talk about it some more, however, please feel free.”

  I wish Syria had 10 percent of the democratic system that they have here. If we did, there wouldn’t have been a revolution.

  Lana, nuclear engineer (Damascus)

  As a teenager, I was always running away from the typical Syrian girl identity. My mom comes from a Christian family and my dad from a Muslim family. They were both very open. But still, they expected me to be gentle, soft, feminine, obedient. Women in Damascus who saw themselves as high class wouldn’t go to a café without their hair done, full makeup, and heels. Even in my family, every girl had a nose job.

  I rebelled against all of this. I listened to Metallica all day. For seven years, I wore only black. I was always struggling with my dad. I exhausted him: when I went out, when I was late, when I got my lip pierced. At the same time, I got really good grades, especially in physics. Girls didn’t usually study physics. But I wanted to piss my parents off.

  When I heard about a program in Jordan to study nuclear engineering, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I fought with my dad, hardcore. He didn’t want me to go. I would be a girl alone, what would people say? My dad told me that if I went, he’d never be happy with me. He used this expression, which is something like, “I will have a grudge against you forever.”

  I went anyway. My parents thought, “A nuclear engineer? No groom will ever come for her now.” They gave up. Later, my younger sister followed me to study in Jordan, too.

  That was 2008. I used to go back to Damascus every two weeks. On the border, the Jordanian guards respected me. For them, coming from Damascus was like coming from Switzerland. Then after 2011, huge numbers of Syrians started coming in as refugees. The border guards’ attitudes changed. They’d yell, “Get out and stand there with the other Syrians.”

  It was humiliating. Syrians were treated like a burden. By the time I finished university in 2013, I was scared shitless to stay in the Arab world. I needed to run away, anywhere. I applied to graduate programs in more than a hundred universities. Italy, the U.S., Canada . . . every university rejected me. A Syrian working in a nuclear facility? It wasn’t allowed.

  Then I got accepted to a university in Germany. I went to the embassy for my visa interview and stood outside, crying. I wanted to get out so badly. I’d never wanted anything more.

  I got the visa. I finished my master’s in two years and submitted 260 applications for jobs. I did twelve interviews; they all loved me but, given all the security checks, it was just too much effort to hire me. Once I took a train eight hours for an interview. When they told me I got the job, I felt like my heart burst. Then they asked for my passport, saying, “You’re Jordanian, right?” I took the train eight hours back, devastated.

  Finally I got the job I have now. I’m still new, so I do mostly technical stuff, like writing code and making calculations that can prepare reactors should something happen to a pump or generator. Here in Germany they respect that I’m strong and independent. But I’ve also realized how Syrian I am. The way I enjoy human interaction, the way I let people into my life—this is our Syrian, our Arab culture.

  My closest friends here are Syrians I never would have crossed paths with in Syria. One is an amazing guy from this small religious community, the Ibrahimis. Another wrote a book in German. Another is a gay guy, who is the best belly dancer you’ll ever see. We’re crazy personalities: a collection of new faces and new diseases coming out of war. Some are great minds exploring new possibilities. Some are people who worked in the revolution and are destroyed now. Many have become seriously depressed or are using drugs to cope. They’ve lost faith in everything.

  My friends and I are all sad from the inside, but we never talk about it. We have an understanding: If you want to bring up the war, then do something about it. Go to a protest, take action. If not, just keep your mouth shut. It’s like schizophrenia, but it’s also a mature way that we’ve developed to deal with things. We’re all searching for stability. We’re trying to live.

  You know, if I hadn’t gone away for college, I never would have finished school or gotten where I am today. Even my dad, who is more hardheaded than I am, recognized this. He’s not the type to express emotion or say, “I love you.” But once, after the war started, he called me and managed to say: “Thank you for being so stubborn. You saved yourself, and you saved your sister, too.”

  Yasmine, education expert (Yarmouk camp)

  We said goodbye to our country. I was not going to return until it became a homeland for me again.

  What is a homeland? It’s not rocks or trees. It’s the humans who build the land. It is where you feel safe.

  A homeland is a friend with whom you work and drink coffee every morning. And that friend betrayed me for a little money or a better position. As the war intensified, people started reporting each other to the security forces. If anyone held a grudge or wanted revenge on someone, he’d simply file a report about him. And a work colleague filed a report about me. I went for interrogation and they saw that I hadn’t done a thing. But you didn’t know what might happen the next time they called you in.

  I didn’t betray my homeland. It betrayed me. It pushed me to leave. When the revolution on corruption turned into a worldwide war, I couldn’t consider it a homeland anymore. It became a grave where you die slowly. In my country, I fulfilled my duties, but didn’t receive my rights. Here in Sweden, I fulfill my duties and get rights in return. This is what homeland means.

  My three children have become holders of European nationalities. My eldest son got an invitation to a convention in Sweden. He stayed and is now in his third year in university. My middle child was invited by a Spanish friend to go to Spain. He became a Spanish citizen and is studying there. My daughter got a scholarship to get her master’s in Qatar. From Qatar, she could travel on a tourist visa. She chose to go to Holland and is settling down there now.

  In the future, I will have grandchildren who speak Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish. If they don’t learn Arabic, they will be strangers to each other. They won’t have any traces of where we came from. They won’t be Syrian. And I will live in exile and die in exile.

  Iman, engineer (Harasta)

  A month after we got to Turkey we registered with the United Nations to be considered for migration elsewhere. The interviewing and security vetting lasted two years.

  They asked us about everything that ever happened to us, getting every detail of our lives with complete accuracy. They’d interview my husband and me in two separate rooms. It was a lot of psychological pressure. We were really afraid that we might forget and say different things, especially when it came to dates. Most of us don’t remember dates so precisely. My husband said that we fled our house at the beginning of July, but I remembered it as the end of July, which was when shelling had become daily.

  After the interviews came the waiting period. I was on the e
dge of my nerves. You didn’t know if you were going to have a future or not. I have a degree in engineering but might never work in my field again. In Turkey, I was lucky to find work in a refugee organization teaching kids how to use computers. Most people didn’t find work at all.

  For two years, we were living on hope. Every day I’d watch my phone, waiting for the call. My husband is a physician and he ran a small clinic out of our home. He kept waiting for the call, too. And then one day they called. The man told me, “Your trip to the United States is scheduled for September 23.” I was in such disbelief, I didn’t even understand what he was talking about.

  It was really hard in the U.S. at first. Everything was different. The caseworker would speak to me and I would tear up because I couldn’t understand what she was saying. Within two weeks I registered for English classes. I wanted to learn so badly, I studied day and night.

  I still dream of going back to Syria. We had just gotten married and lived only two months in our new home before we had to abandon it. I’d chosen everything in the house with such care: the furniture, the curtains, the colors of the walls. I dream that I’ll go back to it again someday. My husband doesn’t want to go back. He has a right to think that way, after what he suffered in prison. For those who suffered like that, it’s a blessing to forget.

  Ahmed, activist (Daraa)

  We registered as a nonprofit to send supplies from Jordan into Syria. By fall 2014 I was really exhausted. The Syrian regime was threatening to attack me inside Jordan. I already had a visa to the United States, so my wife and I decided to see if we could live there.