Ammar in the Polish wardrobe: A story about hiding refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border

She called briefly. I heard: “Come.” She couldn’t say anything more over the phone. I reached her an hour later.

“If you had seen what he looked like…” Beata takes a drag on her cigarette. We stand on the doorstep, smoke wafting inside. It’s minus 12 degrees outside, typical for February. Beata is shaking with emotion. She lives here alone. The house stands in a pseudo-exlusion zone, according to the law. We met two days ago. I didn’t expect her to call.

Beata can’t sit down. She walks over to the balcony window and taps on the glass.

“I was sitting in the armchair where you are and looking at the TV. I don’t watch that dumb TV, but I was thinking about what else I should do today. I heard soft thumps. I thought Karinka wanted to scare Grandma. I opened the balcony and then behind the railing I saw… I wish I had taken a picture. He had rubbish bags on his shoes. And he was all wrapped up in plastic.  Not thermal blanket, but just ordinary foil, the kind used to wrap windows. I said, come and sit down. And he shows that he doesn’t want to sit down.”

“I didn’t want to sit down because I was all wet. I looked terrible.” Ammar suddenly joins the conversation, as if he understands everything. He already has dry clothes. He has managed to get warm, but he is still scared. He takes his phone, brings up the map app.

“There were four of us. We were sitting here hidden in the bushes, then suddenly soldiers appeared. They shouted: ‘Stop, stop!’ I ran ahead until I found myself at the river. I thought, since the water was frozen in the forest, the river will be too.”

Ammar looks at the map and takes a drag on his cigarette.

“If only I had known the water was so deep and rushing. I had to swim, I kept repeating in my mind: ‘God, why?’ When I got ashore, I no longer knew where I was going. The phones got wet. I felt that it was the end. That I was dying. I just kept walking ahead. Over the bridge, through the village, it was all the same to me, it didn’t matter if I got caught. At the first house the door was opened by a girl, she started shouting: ‘Mum, Mum!’ I ran away. Then I got here, I saw the lady watching TV. I knocked.”

Ammar talks about his older sister, who accompanies him in all the important moments of his life. She knows everything about him.  It is also now that he is trying to reach her. She is the first person in the family to hear from him “I almost died. Tell everyone I survived, I’m healthy. I ended up in a home where they help people. I’m in a safe house.”

“Safe house” is what activists on the Polish-Belarusian border call the places where refugees find relief. Where no one will call the Border Guard. Some used to do that because they thought it was the right thing to do. Now they know that a single phone call might become a sentence. It would mean that the refugees are going back to Belarus, being pushed back through the border wire.”

Beata also called.

 “It was September, there was a lot of fear. They imposed a state of emergency. The Border Guard instructed people: call.”

Beata suspends her voice and repeats several times: “Yes, I called, I admit it.”

I know what she is thinking now. She has already told me about an Iraqi family who ended up in her house for a few hours in the summer. That was enough to get them international protection. Then she called the guards.  They should have taken the refugees to a centre, but instead they took the family “out to the wire”.

Beata cried as the little children called later from Belarus, asking, “Why did you do this to us?”

“I didn’t know they were going to deport them. They thought, and so did we, that if we got them international protection, nothing would happen,” she told me through tears.

Beata’s son managed to contact that Iraqi family. He also found their belongings, which the Border Guard had dumped in the forest.

Beata still has the little Iraqi girl’s backpack, her hairbrush and a small mirror. She repeats: “I look out the window and wait for someone to knock on my door.”

Avin and Ula, a refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan and a Polish activist, met during one of the Granica Group interventions. Poland 2021, photo by Karol Grygoruk.

Dehumanised people are easier to haul back to the forest

I arrive at the village of Z., assisted by the Border Guard. Apparently, the officers have received information that a car with Warsaw plates is loitering in the area. There are still a lot of patrols here, a lot of army presence.

Almost nobody calls the Border Guard in this village any more. Not even those who at first were afraid to give a refugee a glass of water just because the border guards had declared that it was illegal to help. And those who did help were afraid to admit it. They kept silent or said: “Refugees? They were at a neighbour’s house, not at ours”.

An activist, who I travelled with in late October and early November, tempers: “I sense that it wasn’t the neighbour who had these refugees, though. It’s like during the war, the helpers are afraid to admit that they have been helping.”

After several months of border crisis and anti-refugee propaganda, the people of Podlasie know who to call when they meet foreigners. In the village of Z. they call Kasia and Tomek.

“When you welcome someone at your home, so that they can to get warm, have some food and rest, you are acting legally, it’s humanitarian aid”, Tomek explains. “But when you think how to put it into practice, the stumbling blocks start. Because people have different neighbours, and neighbours have different views. And how, for example, to tell refugees where the safe house is? When you go with them through the forest, for law enforcement you might be a guide or a smuggler. The refugees have to reach the house on their own. We won’t put them in a car and transport them. It’s impossible, it’s illegal,” says Tomek.

But then these people are usually between a rock and a hard place. So some things happen spontaneously and that’s that. A person takes risks. Even when faced with the danger of being arrested. Simply because others are threatened with deportation.

First time they took refugees home was in November.  What were they supposed to do? Two guys completely emaciated, a shivering woman and these children. The boy was crying all the time.

“I didn’t even think we might be in danger. I was worried about them. I felt tense the whole time. My neck was straining and I was walking around aching all over. I don’t know why,” Kasia recalls.

“Because we live in war-like conditions”, Tomek says. “Hiding people is stressful. Maybe there are no battles,  no threat of the death penalty, but when this harbouring of people goes on for a while, as it has recently, the stress level becomes unacceptable.”

Our conversation is interrupted by an elk outside the window. Bison are no longer so impressive, the herd often comes into the meadow near the house.. But the elk is an unusual visitor. Tomek asks Kasia if she can talk about the unromantic side of hiding people.

“Yes, because it shows the scale of the debasement,” says Kasia. “When you find them in the forest, it’s obvious they are dirty, they have been there for weeks, after all. But when they enter a house…” Kasia searches for words. “For an ordinary person who doesn’t deal with people in crisis situations, this is terribly hard. Both for them and for us. Because they also feel what we feel.”

Tomek joins in: “One Syrian man told me that his children had not been bathed for six weeks. Anyone who reads this can imagine themselves how they would feel after six weeks in the forest without a bath. The activists and I helped repack one woman’s belongings in the forest. Between her clothes I saw a cable. I pulled, and at the end… ‘Oh fuck, a hairdryer!’, we cried out together. Not very serious words, contrary to the matter. They are lugging this hairdryer around so as not to lose their dignity. After all, they didn’t think they would be stranded with a hairdryer in the forest.”

“But once they come out washed and clean, they are beautiful. The woman who was with us had beautiful long hair. When she left us, it was blowing wonderfully in the wind,” smiles Kasia.

“This shatters the image of a refugee that ordinary Poles have,” says Tomek. “Because a Pole might accept a dirty, barefoot, bedraggled person. But then if he has normal shoes, a phone and a suitcase, he is no longer a refugee, but an economic migrant. It doesn’t matter how many bombardments he has survived, how many loved ones he has lost, how many wounds he has suffered from. The guards would rather have these people dehumanised. It is easier to deport them to the forest. They prefer humans not to look like humans.”

Is there a limit to helping?

Kasia and Tomek have welcomed refugees into their home five times. The first family – a Kurdish one – spent five days.

“There was a constant hustle and bustle. The children were rushing around, the stories were flying, and they were doing nothing to end their stay with us,” Tomek recalls.

“You don’t know that,” remarks Kasia.

“I know it, and you know it too.”

“Well, maybe. But it’s a different situation than with the Sleepyhead.”

“We had two Syrian men and an activist living with us at the time,” Kasia recounts. ” We go out in the morning and, here you are, someone’s sleeping on the stairs by our front door. We wake him up.  The man still has the bristle, while the two others at home are already clean and shaven. He said he knocked during the night, but no one heard him.  Anyway, he stayed with us for almost a week. Most of the time, he just slept and, generally did nothing to organise his transport. He explained that he had no money. Or that his brother from Berlin would come. Finally, Sleepyhead’s father started calling us from Iraq, asking to find him a smuggler. He said: ‘Only to Warsaw, I can manage further’. And you feel this pressure. You do everything you can to help a person, but gosh, the awful thing is that you have to learn to put up boundaries. To learn to say no. It’s very difficult. They don’t understand that we can’t get them transport. They ask and they have no qualms, well, because they are fighting to survive. They are not guided by convention or good manners. They won’t say, ‘Oh I think I’ve been with you too long’. And I understand this very well. I would probably function that way too.”

Kasia and Tomek’s guests usually leave quietly. They agree that this is the moment and leave. Only once, when this first Kurdish family was leaving, did Kasia cry. Out of emotion but also relief. After so many days of tension, they finaly left. And not into the forest.

She took him by the hand, they walked like a couple

Anna knows that many would like to help, to welcome someone in need into their home, but not everyone can.

 A flat, for example, is out of the question – too many neighbours and people who might “see something”. There are some houses that seemingly might work perfectly, but the neighbours are untested. Or outright hostile. That does not leave many options.

Residents in the zone opened their doors when immediate help provided on the spot, in the forest, started to prove ineffective. That the people they were finding were often hypothermic and needed to rest in decent conditions; when there were more and more pushbacks and deaths; when they realised that calling an ambulance could cause harm –  as you cannot be sure whether the ambulance comes or not, but the border guards notified by the doctors certainly will. So the best thing to do is to take the person home. It is a human reflex impulse.

Anna received a text message: “There is an Iraqi man in the town centre. He’s sitting in the park. What should we do with him?”. She wrote back: “He needs to be hidden, I’m on my way to get him.”

A man was roaming around for days, with no food and no water. Completely alone. From time to time he would join some groups. One of them was caught in the forest. He saw them being picked up by people in civilian clothes, while a police car was parked on a side path. First he fled through the woods, but eventually he decided to go into town and see what would happen. That was when Anna’s friend saw him, in the park. She took his hand and walked with a confident step. They looked like a couple. The street was almost empty. A hooligan sitting in front of a block of flats was given 20 zloty not to tell anyone what he had seen. Anna was waiting behind the corner. The guy had his cap slipped down and his face covered with a scarf so that it wouldn’t be obvious he was darker than everyone else. He was frightened. They got into the car.

Anna remembers that as soon as they entered the house, Ali asked about the shower. He wanted to wash off the smell: damp, smoky, unwashed, very strong, Anna already knew it well.

After getting washed he immediately looked much better. He was very young. He said his journey had been a must because in Iraq he wanted to commit suicide in Iraq. Everything seemed pointless. That’s what Anna understood. And then someone told Ali about going for a better life through Belarus. He didn’t check if it would be difficult. A wave carried him until he ended up in the forest.

Azyar (11 years old) from Iraqi Kurdistan detained by the Border Guard. His entire family of sixteen was pushed to the Belarusian side several times. Poland 2021, photo by Karol Grygoruk

The camel in the kitchen

After Ali, Anna had eighteen other guests.

“At first they are very intimidated. They find it a bit hard to understand who I am or why I’m helping them. And then they go to sleep. In the morning, rested, they get back their colour,” says Anna. “You know, in a person you can see how they regain colour. In the face, in the clothes, in the flash of the eye, in their voice. One day later they start joking around, talking about themselves. After all, they all have their lives, their stories, just like anyone else. And not just tragic ones. They show pictures of their homes, their families, their daily lives. They want to manifest  what they are like and that they have achieved something.”

We were seated at the table where Anna spent many hours with her guests. They talked in English and via translation. Once, she had to draw pictures, such as a car and with gestures tried to explain  that she was going somewhere, as her guest spoke only Sorani, which Google Translate doesn’t know. At least not at that time.

Once at Anna’s table, somebody said: “I understand perfectly well what you are doing here. If I could stay, I would do that and help, just like you. Because that’s what I did in Syria.” He had a restaurant there, he gave back to people who had lost their homes.

At that table the guests would eat scrambled eggs together. A Cameroonian would make them for a Moroccan. And in the meantime, they would exchange stories about the right way to kill a camel so that it is halal.

And there, in the corner of the room, is exactly where they would pray. Anna fixed the direction according to the movement of the sun. To check if it was right, Ali pulled out his phone with a special app with a compass for Mecca and asked for two green tree leaves. She did not understand why he needed them. He put them on the floor and said it was instead of a prayer rug. He knelt on them. “When he left, I went into this room, there were these leaves on a wooden stool,” Anna says.

Ali sent news back from the refugee centre in Germany. He had already had his second interview that might prove decisive for his future. But the people there did not believe his words. They said that with such tales he could go to Hollywood. Because why would you believe his story? He managed to cross the border because it was foggy. He joined a group that was picked up by people in civilian clothes. He was the only one who avoided the pushback. Why? And then, after four days in the forest, he walked into the city, and no one stopped him. Strange, isn’t it?  Finally he sits down on a park bench and someone takes him home. And then he ends up in Warsaw, where someone protects him in their house. And then in Poznań too.

Such a story seems to escape the logic. And many of them are like that.

You’re not crazy, you’re saving our lives

Anna asks visitors: where did you get the motivation to do this? Did you never doubt that it made sense?

And yes, they all confirm they doubted every single day. One guest replied: “Without dreams you are dead. They give you direction. And no one can forbid us from dreaming.” He added: “Our country has only one thing for us, namely, war. And I too have only one thing, which is my life. And I do care about it.”

“I had the feeling that I was going mad,” says Anna. “That I’m giving my house away to strangers, squeezing my life to some vacant rooms, and still going to the forest in the meantime. That we’re practising a secret, underground state here, playing hide and seek or hare and hounds. None of these seemed normal. Therefore, sometimes I had the impression that our involvement verges on insanity. I told one of my guests about this sense of madness. His response was: ‘Don’t even think like that. You are saving our lives.’ I confided that I often come back home and cry. And he said: ‘Don’t cry. In our country we have to be strong, because if you lack strength, they kill you. But you have no reason to cry.’ I learned a lot at this very table. We save their lives, then they move on in the world. Yet, a bond remains, probably because we met in such a special situation, and also due to the fact that I know something about them that nobody else knows, not even their families.”

Amlad (25), Amad (15), Wadla (43), Elena (5), Kawsar (31), part of a family of nine from Iraqi Kurdistan. Today they have found a safe haven in Western Europe. Poland 2021, photo by Karol Grygoruk

First checkpoint, first lie

It was a Sunday in early September, beautiful sunshine. Dominika with her husband and son went to the forest. Not for a walk, because Dominika hates walking in the forest. They went because they wanted to help. In fact, the son wanted to. He packed a rucksack and shouted: let’s go.

They walked and walked. Nothing. Just when they were about to go home, something suddenly flashed by.

She remembers it well, her heart was in her throat. She said to her husband: “Let’s get the fuck out of here! I’m not going in there. I’m gonna have a heart attack and you’ll be looking for a phone signal to call an ambulance. I’m not going any further, I’m scared.” She was terrified, even though she could see just two young guys and a baby.

“Are you scared of the baby?”, asked her husband.

“Yeah, I’m going to go up to the baby, and thirty guys are going to come flying out. They’ll beat us up out here. We won’t even be able to call anyone because there’s no signal here.”

Her son turned on her: “Mum, at home you were so brave. To say that if you met someone, you’d help. And now you’re such a chicken.”

They approached. Three shivering little children asked for the internet. They didn’t want anything else. Just the internet. One spoke a little English, but poorly. Dominika thought: “Well well, then you’re at home. Because I also speak it very poorly, so we’ll get along.” She asked if there were any other children. There was another one. Together that made four: a talkative 10-year-old; a scared 15-year-old; a 17-year-old who seemed like he was the head of the family; and a 7-year-old child with autism.

They gave the kids food and some other stuff, but they kept going on and on about the internet. They wanted to contact someone to take them away. Getting people to a safe place with mobile coverage is not that easy. If someone sees them, guiding a whole gang, the game is over. How would they get out of that, explaining that they weren’t in fact smugglers? But Dominika knew she couldn’t leave them there. She said to her husband:  “Show them the way.”

The boys managed to contact someone who promised to come and fetch them, but only in two days. Two days, goddammit! How are they going to manage with these children in the forest? We had to go and get more stuff. But then again, a car loaded to the ceiling with rucksacks, how do you get past the checkpoint with that?

“Where are you going?”, asked the policeman.

“To the mountains”, Dominika answered in a confident tone.

“And where are your skis?”

“Officer, it’s not worth dragging your skis with you these days. There are ski rental shops all around,” Dominika argued.

The policeman smiled and even wished her a nice holiday. Only her husband asked wryly: “So you’re going skiing in the mountains in September? And where will you get the snow from?

First checkpoint, first lie, thought Dominika. Later, after this first group, there would be others. Now, in mid-October the weather already got really cold. Leaving the children in the woods was out of question. It was simply impossible to walk away from them. She was scared as hell, because the army was everywhere, and she had to drive with the children from the forest through the very centre of the zone. Hardly had she set off, when an army vehicle came right behind. What bad luck, she thought, predicting that they would stop her. “I couldn’t feel the gas or the brake or anything. I was shaking all over.” But, fortunately, the army car disappeared around the bend. She stopped the engine, took a deep breath: “Get a grip. Your children are waiting at home. It’s only going to be a mess if you give up now.”

A dirty guy in the bathroom, a friend over coffee

Once they got back to Dominika’s house, it was strange. How to talk to them? How to behave? The first day was hard, and the first night too. Dominika was afraid: “What if we get our heads ripped off?” In the morning she said she had to go to work. She left the guests with her children at home. Her daughter remarked, “You’ve dragged in company and now you’re leaving, big thanks.” At work,  she constantly kept thinking about them and could not concentrate. All in all, she decided to take a leave of absence.

They quickly learned to function together. The guests cleaned and cooked trying to show their gratitude. Their presence was not a burden. Worse were the people you had to hide them from.

Knock, knock. “Hi, I’m just stopping by for coffee”, said a friend on the doorstep. Oh shit, thought Dominica. The friend enters and starts chattering about the “dirty people”. That, fuck, they should be shot, a bullet in the head. And she is an educated girl. Dominika thinks patiently: let her have her coffee, as quick as possible, and get off. But the woman has one coffee, then another one, and keeps babbling, while Dominika’s guest is sitting in the wardrobe the whole time.

“I just thought to myself, God, how lucky it is that he doesn’t understand Polish. He would be upset. Because he’s just a person, the same as us. And the thought flashed through my mind: how about I tell the boy to come out? And I’ll show her: ‘Look, this is the dirty man you’re talking about. See how elegant he looks.’ Because they are indeed dirty, but only in the forest. Later, when they bathe, they start looking są good. Really, they are no different from us.”

Birthday wishes

At Beata’s house it smells of soup. The table in the living room is set with cakes and snacks. The previous night they didn’t get much sleep. Too many emotions.

We try to find out what happened to Ammar’s friends who stayed in the forest. But there is no contact with them.

We are joined by Robert, Beata’s son. He gives a matter-of-fact assessment of the situation.

“Ammar was not organised. I don’t know what he was hoping for, but certainly he had no big plans. Even if he hadn’t lost his phones in the river, I don’t think he would have known what to do next.”

Ammar tries to warm himself up by the fireplace. He calls, he writes, he tries to contact the people who are supposed to help him. He also shows the numbers of those who got through. Or of people who helped them get through. “They could be smugglers,” Robert says.

I ask him how long Ammar can stay with them.

“As long as he needs to,” says Robert. “You know, in fact, no one was waiting for him here. But it’s already happened, he’s with us. We can’t run away from it, can we?  After all, if he hadn’t ended up here, if we hadn’t helped him, he’d probably be dead by now. There are many situations like this. We all face something new. At the beginning, in September and October, we felt the pressure of the authorities. There was a lot of fear, a sense of powerlessness, but eventually or maybe as a result, I decided to commit myself to helping in the forest.”

“Afterwards, I noticed that I had symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I was afraid to go out into the woods. Now I don’t take it as hard, although I do get involved. For me, it’s a fight against the sick system. Because I know what will happen to these people if we don’t help them. I know what happened to the first family that came to us. Even though we offered protection for them, they were pushed back to the wire. I tried to find them but it didn’t work. Ammar is incredibly lucky. Most situations from the border are miraculous cases. Here, there are lots of stories that are hard to believe.”

Ammar stayed in Beata’s house for nine days. Robert sent me pictures. Their guest was no longer sitting hunched over by the fireplace, but smiling on the sofa. Shaved, he had regained his colour.

For another week we had no contact. Finally, he wrote: “Guess where I am?” He has reached Germany, he is in a refugee centre.

His sister’s wish came true. Exactly one year earlier, on his 29th birthday, she wrote: “I hope our dreams come true. Your heart deserves it.”

I asked what  was his birthday wish that year.

“I wanted to reach a country where human rights are respected and where I would have influence on my future. It probably sounds trivial, especially for a person who has been guaranteed this since birth. You won’t understand if you don’t know what it’s like in the country I come from, in a country where there is war. For me, security, freedom and dignity are the most precious things. Without them, life is not worth living. That’s also why people die trying to cross the border. And a miracle happened, many miracles. Just when I thought I was going to die, I knocked on Beata’s door. For sure, what I expected more in the village was the police. They weren’t looking for me, it was me that was looking for them. But I ended up at Beata and Robert’s house and everything changed. I got a lot more from them than I would have expected.”

The names of the characters have been changed.

Translation by Voxeurop.

The long road to a home in Europe

It is one of many boats making the crossing to Europe. On 1 August 2016, 118 migrants are rescued from the waters of the Mediterranean. They are attempting to cross from Libya to Italy, in a dinghy that is slowly filling up with water. The men – all are men – are mainly from West African countries such as Guinea, Senegal and the Gambia.

They use a migration route that is busier than ever in 2016. Due to the deal of 18 March 2016, the border between Turkey and Greece is hermetically closed. As a result, migrants are opting for the much longer crossing from Libya to Italy. Since the fall of Gaddafi and the war in Libya, human traffickers there can go about their business fairly unhindered. But it is a dangerous route, on which 4,576 people die that year – making 2016 the deadliest year in the history of migration to Europe.

At the same time, 181,436 people are rescued that year, mostly by private aid workers, and land in Italy. They dominate the news and disrupt politics, all across Europe. Most of these boat migrants are among the “fortune seekers” despised by right-wing politicians: they left their country not because of war, but because of poverty and a lack of prospects. Often, when they left, they did not intend to travel all the way to Europe. Yet that is where they would disembark in 2016.

Spanish-Iranian journalist and photographer César Dezfuli, who regularly works for de Volkskrant, wants to show the people behind these numbers. He photographs all the migrants from this one boat, just after they have been rescued – their tired, drained, pained faces, scarred by the horrors in Libya, and by the journey between death and life last night.

Later he realises these pictures do not show who these people really are. Where are they now? How are they faring in Europe? And what does Europe look like through their eyes?

Dezfuli embarks on a quest. Through Facebook, he finds one of the people who was on board the dinghy. That one turns out to be in touch with some of the others, and so the photographer proceeds from one to another. He has since traced and photographed 72 of the 118 migrants. For the final eight, Volkskrant journalist Maartje Bakker joined him.

The migrants appear to have spread across large parts of Europe. They have crisscrossed the map of Europe, driven by casual contacts, numbers they have stored in their phones. Forty of them are still in Italy. More than thirty ended up in France. Others travelled on to Spain or Belgium. Some of them were in the Netherlands for a while, though none stayed here.

These men hold up a mirror to Europe. For although they are not wanted here, there appears to be plenty of work for them. In the north, they are earning very reasonable wages with jobs in industry or construction – that is, as long as their asylum procedure is ongoing, because after that they have to leave. In the south, there are also opportunities to find work without residence papers: a migrant in Italy, Spain or France can work in fruit and vegetable growing or construction, if necessary by renting someone else’s ID.

However, this is often not the end of their troubles. Life in Europe turns out to be much more complicated than many imagined. After all, those without papers have no right to exist in Europe. Yet these migrants are not giving up. They keep themselves going, send money to their families, help ensure that siblings can go to school and family members can pay for healthcare. These men, so often maligned in public discourse, show how resilient a human being can be.

And occasionally they manage to find a way up, out of that parallel reality of illegal migration, to a European life in the light of day. Perhaps through a lucky encounter with a woman, or with a Spanish or Italian boss who offers a work contract, or thanks to a lawyer who went the extra mile to arrange a residence permit.

Such an outcome is only fair, these migrants feel, after all they have endured – the only just end to their odyssey.

Neboth: “You should try to erase your memories. Don’t think about the past”

When Neboth boards the rescue ship on 1 August 2016, there is no relief or joy on his face. He is looking worried. Yes, he has reached Europe. But without his wife Joy, with whom he left Nigeria.

In his homeland, Neboth (now 36) worked as a decorator of weddings and other events. Wistfully, he thinks back to the house he grew up in, a spacious four-bedroom home. “We always put flowers outside,” he says. “I watered them and took out the bad ones in the morning.”

He has a fickle nature, sometimes calm and rational, other times angry and short-tempered. One day, he decides to leave Nigeria, hoping for a better life elsewhere. His daughter stays behind with his parents. “All the money I earned there, I spent on food,” he says. “And you don’t always have electricity in Nigeria, no good roads or schools, there are not enough hospitals. If Nigeria only had 10 percent of what Italy has, I would have stayed there.”

Neboth and his wife travel together until they, after a trip across the desert, arrive in the city of Sabha in Libya. “There they took my wife, while putting a gun to my head,” he says flatly. “If I had said anything, they would have shot me dead. It is better to stay calm, tranquilo. In Nigeria, we say: a live dog is better than a dead lion.”

Wherever he goes in Libya, he looks for his wife, but he does not find her. After six months, he decides to make the crossing to Europe alone. During the weeks before the attempt, he is living in a camp with other migrants in the dunes near Sabratha. There, he tries to recreate something of the homely life of the old days, by making himself a kind of private room. He stacks concrete blocks on top of each other and fashions a canopy out of rubbish. His room is so low that he can only lie in it, but here he can keep his things and have some privacy.

From the crossing, Neboth remembers having to take off his jacket to mop the water out of the boat. “We mopped and gave the clothes to those at the edge of the boat to wring them out,” he says.

Once in Italy, he is taken to Senigallia, a town on the Adriatic coast. After six months, he manages to get his wife’s phone number. He calls her and learns she is in Tripoli. “She was doing okay,” he says. What was she doing in Libya? “That’s not something to reveal in public.” Neboth sends his wife money for the crossing.

Neboth’s application for asylum in Italy is rejected. He travels to Switzerland, but is sent back within a few weeks. And so he is still in Italy, illegally. First he works in Sardinia, painting luxury yachts in shiny white. The ships are sold for millions; Neboth gets €700 a month for his labour. After two years, when the police start asking around about illegal workers at the shipyard, his boss tells him to leave.

Neboth ends up in Matera, a town in southern Italy, famous for its cave dwellings and early Christian churches. But that is not the Matera that Neboth gets to know. He lives in a house with other Nigerians on an industrial estate. In his room, which he rents for €200 a month, he has again tried to make himself at home. The wall is decorated with plates, and a picture of plants and butterflies. An air freshener occasionally sends out a puff of pleasant rose scent.

But right outside the front door, the raw reality begins. There are piles of stinking rubbish. Stray cats make themselves comfortable on an old car seat and a sofa.

During the day he works, still illegally, at a Chinese company that makes chairs and sofas. Neboth upholsters four or five pieces of furniture per day – Made in Italy. “These Chinese don’t care if we get sick, if we die,” he says. “If you come, you get €25 a day. And if you don’t come, nobody cares.”

Sometimes he is close to despair. “I work all day, but at night I can’t sleep,” he says. His eyes shoot back and forth restlessly. He constantly receives calls from people from Nigeria, begging him for money. He cannot understand why Italy does not give him a residence permit. “Some people have documents, but they don’t see any work they can do. They keep begging. I see work everywhere, even without documents!”

His wife made it across and these days lives in Rome. Sometimes they visit each other. She looks after an old lady with whom she lives. About the past he thinks as little as possible – the horror of what happened in Libya, the crossing, his failed attempts to build a life. “You should try to erase your memories,” he says. “Don’t think about the past. Now is now. It’s better to look to the future.”

What does that future look like? One day, he hopes to live with his wife and daughter again. “In Nigeria, we had a good life,” he says. “That is what I would like to rebuild here too. My dream is to live like any normal person.”

Oumar: “Even with a degree, my eldest brother still earned very little. That’s why I wanted to go to Europe”

It is thanks to two ruses that Oumar is on the boat that was rescued off the coast of Libya on 1 August 2016. His name was not on the list drawn up by the people-smugglers for this crossing. But he raised his hand after Diallo Boubakar’s name was called out and no one else responded. “Why the hesitation?”, he is asked. “I was dozing,” he says.

Once on the beach, he has to be inventive again. Diallo Boubakar may be on the list, but at the very bottom – and there is often no room on board for the last ones.

So once the Zodiac is in the water, and when everyone is queuing on the beach to board, Oumar hides behind the boat, in the water. Only his head rises above the waves. It is night, so no one sees him.

During the boarding there is a commotion. That is when Oumar emerges beside the boat, holds out his hands and is helped on board. Plan succeeded.

Alpha Oumar (now 28) – called Oumar for short by his friends – is from Guinea. Until the age of 20, he went to school. His father, a schoolmaster, wants him to study, to become a journalist, because he loves writing. “But I saw that my eldest brother was still earning very little with his degree,” he says. “That’s why I wanted to go to Europe.”

After some wanderings through Algeria, Morocco and Libya, he finally reaches Europe in August 2016. The Italian authorities take him to Carovigno, not far from Brindisi. Oumar, a thoughtful and deeply religious young man, assiduously attends Italian classes six days a week. Sometimes he goes to Brindisi for it, sometimes the lessons are at the reception centre. He makes rapid progress and practises his new language with the staff at the shelter.

His asylum application is rejected. Oumar knows he is faced with an important choice: which lawyer to hire? Three work at the reception centre. He chooses a man who has just started his law practice. “He will try extra hard,” he thinks, “because he has yet to establish his name.”

And indeed, he is lucky, as are about one in three asylum seekers in Italy: his application for a residence permit is granted. After one year and five months, Italy grants him asylum on humanitarian grounds, and he is allowed to work legally. Why him and not others? That is a matter for conjecture. Maybe it is the lawyer, maybe his Italian fluency, maybe the story he tells to the asylum commission. Maybe the fact that he brings along and shows all the things he has written in Italian.

In any case, it seems to be more than just a matter of chance: if you listen to the stories of a number of migrants, after a while you begin to discern a pattern. Those who did more than a few years of school in their home countries, and who had higher social status, often also seem to be able to find their way better in the European bureaucracy. Besides chance, abilities can determine fate.

Be that as it may: Oumar is crying tears of joy. He is transferred, residence permit and all, to Palagiano, the “clementine capital” of southern Italy. There he starts picking clementines and tangerines, and olives. He earns about €1,000 a month, sometimes more.

With five other migrants, he shares a house that they rent for €370 a month. For that, they have to put up with mouldy ceilings and draughty window frames. Sometimes he still writes, just for himself. He keeps his notebook in his bedside table, over which the occasional cockroach scuttles. There are stories and poems, in Italian and French.

When I was born I was black. When I grew up I was black. When the sun shines I am black. When I die I will be black. I am always black, and you are a white man. When you are born you are pink. When you stay in the sun you are red. When you are cold you are blue. When you are scared you are green. When you are sick you are yellow. When you die you will be grey. So tell me who’s a person of colour.

Oumar is not satisfied with his job in agriculture: “This is not what my father dreamed of.” He would like to have another job, an occupation where he can write – and if that’s not possible for him, then maybe for his wife?

He married her in 2019, during his only trip so far back to Guinea. He knows her from before, he would see her walking by whenever she went to school. “I love her very much,” he says, with a smile. “Every day we talk to each other.”

Oumar is trying to arrange for his wife, who is several years younger than him, to come to Italy. He is looking for a house for them together. And he hopes she will then be able to continue her studies. Literature – wouldn’t that be nice?

Modou: “It’s better to stay in one place. Then you get to understand things”

Modou sits in the boat close to the captain. He is in charge of the compass, although he had never seen such a thing before boarding. The Senegalese man has emerged as the leader of a band of migrants. It suits his character: he talks easily, to everyone, and also speaks a little Arabic, learned at Koranic school.

They sail north until they know they are far enough off the coast of Libya. “A plane flew right over us,” says Modou. “That’s when I knew we were in Italy.”

Modou (now 25) worked in Dakar as a clothes seller. Especially women’s clothes, “because women always want to look neat”. Just before he left, he visited his mother one last time, in the village where he grew up. “I didn’t tell her I was going,” he says. “But I did bring her lots of things, things like milk and rice, because I knew we wouldn’t see each other for a long time.” As soon as he crossed the border into Mali, he called her to tell her he has left. It is also the first thing he does in Italy: buy credit and call his mother. She is happy to finally hear from her son. “Thank God, she said, you are alive     .”

The Senegalese knows from the start where he wants to go: to Spain, where some relatives and acquaintances live. “I always heard people talking about Spain,” he says. “I tried to listen carefully. I heard that you can live well there.”

After being plucked from the sea, he is first taken to a shelter in Italy. He ends up in the villages of Camerino and Serravalle, in the Marche region. “You couldn’t do anything there,” he says. “Just sit and wait.” He is, however, a keen attendee of Italian classes. “I want to be able to ask things,” he says. “If you don’t understand anything, you’re always scared.”

Serravalle is right in an earthquake zone. “We didn’t know that at all,” Modou notes. “In Africa, you don’t have earthquakes.” After a year, when the earth starts shaking for the umpteenth time, he decides to move on – to Spain. At the border near Ventimiglia, he pays a trafficker and travels by train to France without much trouble. Then he continues by bus to Barcelona. “I carried a book in French and pretended to be reading,” he grins. “That way, everyone would think I was a student.”

In Spain, he soon finds himself in Tàrrega, in Catalonia. Here, too, he plunges into the local language. “I already have eight diplomas,” he says. In a bar, he meets a young Spanish woman who has travelled extensively in Africa. She offers to register him with the municipality at her address. It is an important step towards recognition in Spain: migrants who have been registered for three years, and can show a work contract, are granted a residence permit. Such schemes for economic migrants also exist in other southern countries: those who work and integrate will, over time, have a chance of getting residence papers.

For Modou, the three years in Spain are now over. In the meantime, he has moved to La Fuliola, a village in the same region, among apple orchards. There, he shares an old house with as many as 20 other migrants. Its beautiful modernist floor disappears under the mattresses they sleep on at night. In summer, African migrants flock to this region to pick apples. For Modou too, it is easy to find work during those months.

But when the others leave again, he stays. “It’s better to stay in one place,” he says. “Then you understand things better, and you can get to know people.” Throughout the year, he does odd jobs for nearby farmers. They call him to feed their calves, to give them shots, to help with repairs. Sometimes he gets paid for it, sometimes not. “No pasa res,” he says. It’s no problem, in Catalan – another language he wants to master because “otherwise it would be racist”. In Modou’s words: “You have to persevere, and then you might get lucky.”

He’s right. He now has his residence permit.

Mollow: “The choice is: die here or return to Guinea”

The moment he boards the German rescue ship, Mollow’s face is serious. He is thinking about his sister. Not five minutes pass, he says, that he does not think of his sister. She has told him not to go to Europe. The crossing is too dangerous. “But I was ready to die at that moment,” says Mollow, “after everything I had been through in Libya.”

Mollow is 27, but his frizzy hair is already turning a little grey. “In my whole life, I’ve only had three or four happy years,” he says. In fact, he does not want to think back on everything he has been through. His story consists of disconnected scraps.

From the very beginning, his life was difficult: Mollow was born “out of wedlock”, the son of a Guinean father and a Sierra Leonean mother. His parents met when his father worked as a doctor in Sierra Leone during the war. Two children would be born there: a daughter, then a son.

Mollow grew up in Conakry, Guinea. He never went to school, instead selling things on the street. When he was 12, his mother died, and from then on his sister looked after him. His father’s family did not like him much, and he was even threatened by a friend of his father’s, a military man – at least, that is the story he tells. In 2011, he decides to leave Guinea: the beginning of a long quest, through Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Cameroon. Then to Algeria, after that Libya. And finally to Europe.

In Italy, he stays only two weeks before travelling on to northern Europe. “I don’t speak the language there,” he explains. “That’s why I wanted to go to a French-speaking country.” Although he never went to school, and grew up speaking Susu, he is proficient in French. He learned it along the way.

He takes the train to Rome, to Ventimiglia, to Nice. There are no checks at that point. Then straight on by train to Paris. “I don’t like France,” he says, without being able to properly explain why. He takes a Flixbus to Brussels. Arriving at one in the morning, he spends the night at Brussels North station. In the morning, he reports to the police to apply for asylum.

In Belgium, he lives in a reception centre until, after a year and a half, he is told he has no right to asylum. Mollow decides to travel on to Germany. In time, he finds work there in a car parts factory, in the Ruhr region. Proudly, he shows the wages that were deposited into his bank account, amounts around €2000. He lives in a container house all to himself. The years in Germany – those are the happy years.

Meanwhile, his sister in Guinea is in a bad way, suffering from mental illness. But with the money he earns in Germany, Mollow is able to buy medicine for her, and pay for admission to a psychiatric hospital.

Then, after four years in Germany, he loses everything. Reporting to the German authorities to extend his residence permit, Mollow is taken into custody at a detention centre. The boss of the company where he works sends a letter to the police; he would like to keep him as a labourer. To no avail. Mollow is deported to Belgium because, according to European rules, he can only apply for asylum in one country.

For a place to sleep, he now depends on friends: Guineans from the shelter in Belgium, or others he met elsewhere on his journey. This is how he ends up in Seraing, a suburb of Liège. The dominant colour there is grey – the sky, the boarded-up houses. On the horizon are the rusty remains of a steelworks. Long ago the Lion of Waterloo was cast here.

For four months now, he has been wandering from one address to another. “I’m so tired,” he keeps saying – a European would probably say depressed, but how often is that diagnosis made in Africa?

The money has run out. Mollow reveals where he sleeps: at an acquaintance’s house on the floor, in an unused corner of the shag carpet by the fireplace. He also depends on friends for food. Because he could no longer pay the bills, his sister had to leave the psychiatric hospital. She is now in a village in the care of a traditional healer, who ties her up when she has a seizure. Mollow sometimes hears her screaming over the phone.

More and more often he thinks about going back to Guinea. He is still afraid of the soldier who once threatened him, and who is now said to be high up in the army. Apart from his sister, he has nobody there. Following his mother, his father also died. “But at least I know my sister loves me,” he says.

Actually, he says, he is now at the same point as when he took the boat to Europe. “Then the choice was: suffer in Libya or die at sea. Now it is: suffer here or return to Guinea.” His eyes are filling up with tears.

Kaba: “Life is a ladder. You just have to be patient”

The boat is full, and Kaba is still on the beach. No, he thinks, this is not possible, I have to get in. But when the Guinean tries, the Libyans pounce on him. He hits back, pushes them away, and runs into the water. He dives under the boat, to the other side. There the   others help him on board. He is shaking from the stress, the cold. Don’t tremble, they tell him – that way they will know it was you.

Of the crossing, Kaba remembers most of all the pain: he has to sit on one of the big screws sticking up from the bottom of the Zodiac. “In the eyes of Arabs, we blacks are donkeys, worth nothing at all,” he says.

In Italy, Kaba is taken to a shelter in Macerata Feltria, not far from the microstate of San Marino. There, he pulls out the €100 he had sewn into his pants. Since his time in Algeria, where he worked in construction, he has hidden the money there. Somehow he was not robbed of it in Libya.

Without seeking asylum in Italy, Kaba travels on to France after a few weeks, courtesy of the €100. “I don’t speak Italian, but I speak French well,” he explains. He crosses the Italian-French border on foot, along the railway tracks, ducking away when a train passes.

When he arrives in Paris, he asks around among other Africans: where can he go? A   passer-by tells him to go to the 18th arrondissement, to the Porte de Clignancourt. There is a big market, where people might give him something to eat.

It is in that neighbourhood that Kaba lives on the streets, for months. During the day he stays in a park, but at night it is closed and he is condemned to the sidewalk. In the morning, he often takes the metro, line 4 from Porte de Clignancourt to Bagneux and back, sinking into a seat to try to get some sleep.

He can’t find work, you need contacts for that. So he begs for food. Sometimes he looks in a bin for discarded clothes, and sells what he finds there at the big flea market for a euro or a euro and a half.

One day, he meets a man from Ivory Coast who has squatted a house and offers him a room. “Then I slept for four days straight,” Kaba says. “I woke up, had breakfast, and fell asleep again.” The Ivorian advises him to apply for asylum. From then on, the French government gives him a living allowance, €380 a month, as long as the asylum procedure is ongoing. But after eight months, his application is rejected. Kaba receives an order stating that he must leave the country.

Again, he has to rely on chance contacts. He meets a compatriot who lives in Montauban, near Toulouse. The man is willing to give Kaba accommodation. So he ends up in the small town on the Tarn, where French people live in one neighbourhood, and Arabs and West Africans in another. “On the first day I went to the café, and there was an Arab who asked: do you want to work?”, Kaba recounts. “I said yes, of course. Then I got to work, picking apples and kiwis.”

From then on, the paid jobs string together. Always undeclared, without a contract. He currently works in construction, as a bricklayer. For every day he works, he gets €50 – a lot more that the €150 he got in Guinea for a whole month

Sometimes France is seen as a country where job contracts are gold-plated and workers’ rights are cast in concrete. In Montauban, that turns out to be only a small part of the story. France, like Italy and Spain, has a large informal economy, in which much of the work is done by migrant workers who have no papers and thus no rights. They pick the fruit, build the houses, and even keep the fast-food chains going. For a while, Kaba sold tacos, a fatty French snack,  under the name of a friend who has a residence card – in return for a part of his earnings.

Kaba has not yet given up hope of getting a residence permit. There are three options. Get a work contract, together with a work permit. Conceive a French child. Or marry a French woman. He tries them all. He often goes dancing, on Saturday nights, so as to hit on women. “And I always look neat, in clean clothes,” he says.

Now, when Kaba walks down the street in Montauban, he is constantly greeting acquaintances. One offers a cigarette, which he picks with his teeth. “Ça va bien? Tranquille?” Gone are the days when he slept on the streets. “Life is a ladder,” he says, optimistically. “You just have to be patient.”

Translation by Voxeurop.