Step-uncle Sam

On the second floor of a brick building in Steglitz-Zehlendorf, where Berlin is plastered and quiet, between urban villas and tall trees, far from the reality of an asylum-seeker life, in room number 202 stands the filing cabinet in which Danilo van der Heide is trying to stow away the madness. The cabinet is cream coloured, compact, head-high, hung in between are green cardboard covers on paper, the lives of 800 refugee children. They are without parents in Berlin, some 10, some 16 years old. They were alone when they got into the dinghy; They are alone when the black dreams come into the bunk beds of their accommodation at night. The file of Ilyas from Morocco hangs in this cabinet, he is 17, for a year in Germany, 30 investigations for theft, robbery, bodily injury, Msd. Now he has an inflamed stomach and urgently needs an examination. Van der Heide is to sign the approval.

Clinton’s file from Ghana also hangs there, he is 15, he doesn’t know who his parents are, he flew from several homes, before he made it a good student and class spokesman by means of the German state. Van der Heide is to allow him a week’s holiday in Majorca.

The file of the boy from Guinea is there, 16, injured on the dealer line at the Gorlitz Park with a knife. The file of Muhammad from Syria, 14, waiting for his family.

They reach out to Danilo van der Heide, these children, they reach for him from this cabinet, they need his care, his knowledge, his signature on asylum applications, library records, fitness tapes, credentials, accompanying notes, they all need something. But van der Heide has nothing more to give. He pulls up his shoulders. He says, “I have to protect myself.”

The official, van der Heide, is a legal guardian of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, responsible for the guardianship of almost all unaccompanied children and adolescents coming to Berlin. His department is the LaGeSo for children, if you will, a center where they should have someone who knows them and can make decisions for them. Once a month van der Heide is to see his ward in person, which is so prescribed. But for months, the rules are no longer applied. “For some, we don’t even know where they live,” he says, “many of them we’ve never seen.”

Van der Heide is 47, a training shoes type, Adidas with blue stripes, he wears a well-shaved bald head, a shaved beard, a short-sleeved shirt and a bold gold-shimmering watch. He could also run a betting shop without having to move around a lot, and his work has to do a lot with gambling these weeks. How many children can an official attend without something going wrong? Without a child in jail, disappearing or dead in a cellar? 50, says van der Heide, “if at all.” 50, says the law too. The reality, however, brings 200 to his table, into his file cabinet. And soon a few hundred more.

Van der Heide and his colleagues have divided the file cabinet. On the right are the older cases, 50 files per employee, they are thick, they document a lot of attention, a lot of time: the children who belong to these files are lucky.

To the left hangs the rest. All the children who came too late. Who reached Berlin when the “welcome summer” turned into autumn and then in winter, and Merkel’s sentence “We’ll manage that” changed into a frightened question.

The files on the left are thin. “This is really dangerous,” says Danilo van der Heide, “we don’t even know the children anymore. We don’t know who is making the contact. They’re lost, they’re going to be criminals, I can imagine everything up to them culminating into sleepers” he says.

On this Tuesday afternoon at the end of January, except for van der Heide, there are also Ms Klieber, Ms Dietze and Ms Schönbeck, who just returned from the magistrate’s court because one of her clients doesn’t have a perspective to stay and he “thieves like a magpie”; The others are sick.

Van der Heide had to take over the management of the department a few months ago. The overtime is building up. His last days off in early summer, he didn’t go anywhere, he slept. He smiles a lot as he speaks, his cheeks then push themselves up, his eyes become small, it’s the protective mask of a desperate person. “The worse it gets here, the quieter I am,” he says, it’s frightening, that’s a strange form of resignation.

When he sits on his turquoise desk opposite Ms Schonbeck, looking down at the Beethoven street, there are usually several cases piled up on his table. On this day there are two Syrian cousins, 14 and 15 years old, who have a court session at which van der Heide is to accompany them. One is to get out of the foster family because he has an aunt who wants to take responsibility for him; The other one cannot be controlled, “he doesn’t go to school, he likes hanging out with Arab guys on the street”.

Then there is a police-known Moroccan who needs a MRI, because he has landed “with recurrent vomiting”, in the emergency centre, so the report says. “He’s spitting blood now,” says van der Heide. He must clarify the assumption of costs. “Is this now necessary for survival or not?”

More than 60,000 unaccompanied minors live in Germany, many are traumatized. Who is to make them into healthy, decent people? Who is to protect them? “We are only reacting from emergency to emergency,” says van der Heide, and a little later this news spreads like a nightmare: According to Europol, 10,000 juvenile refugees are missing all over Europe, 4749 are, according to the Federal Criminal Police Office, in Germany.

Most of them, the people of the Steglitz Youth Office assume, have been moved to other states, to some cousins. Perhaps they also made their way to Sweden, “they don’t unregister from their address.” But what if it’s not like this? “You have your hands full,” says van der Heide, “that keeps me awake at night.”

There was once the case Kevin, the boy had been found in 2006 wrapped in plastic bags in the refrigerator of his drug-dependent foster father. At that time the legal guardian was made responsible. The prosecution accused him of negligent homicide. Since then there is a limitation of the number of cases, maximum 50 children, this is the red line. But it cannot be sustained in these times.

4252 minors with no parents registered in Berlin last year, of which a small third is classified as over 18 and full-year after completion of the clearing procedure. There are still 3000 children and adolescents who need a guardian. Van der Heide has 4.5 places. In order not to exceed the limitation in the number of cases, he would theoretically soon need more than 50 people. “We should be a huge authority,” he says. But when he looks around in the rooms of the Youth Office, there are only Ms Schönbeck, Ms Klieber and Ms Dietze sitting between the file towers, potted flowers, desk sets and coffee cups as the last survivors in the fight against the doom. The red line is far behind them.

“Coffee?” Asks Mrs. Dietze.

Van der Heide rubs his bald head. He exhales loudly and sounds like a kettle from which pressure escapes. Then he tells about his favourite; Clinton, and the story is so good that you would like to visit this Clinton; The trip heads out to Brandenburg.

Clinton is a boy in jogging pants and sneakers, he is standing in front of a pigsty, a bright and a dark speckled pig. Clinton points to the horse standing behind and says: “I always have to dodge the horses. Twice a week is mandatory. I don’t like it, but I have to,” he puts his hands in his pockets.

Clinton is 15 years old, an active boy, friendly, almost 1.90 meters tall, in his heart-shaped face there is something childish. He has shaved off his hair on the sides and gradient up, a footballer, a bit of Boateng.

He’s just finishing school, Clinton is pretty good at school, there are a few low marks in his certificate. This is sensational for a boy who was in a school refusal project until two years ago and who was not allowed to go anywhere without a guardian at his side. One who attacked his carers and kicked the doors. Today Clinton is a class spokesman. Best friends: Thilo and Marie.

The youth welfare project, which saved him, lies behind wide, green fields, in a converted historical sheep-farm with a residential house. Up to eight teenagers live here, girls and boys. The next city is Dahme, 5000 inhabitants, to get to Berlin takes an hour and a half, there is a school bus, but otherwise “there is nothing here,” says Clinton.

He went missing early. As a baby, he was expelled from Ghana to Germany. The woman who took him pretended to be his mother. The test later revealed that this was a lie. No one knows who Clinton’s parents are.

At the age of three or four, he was out in the streets, neglected, starved. The woman, who was not his mother, left him alone in the apartment and had gone to Ghana. Clinton managed to free himself somehow. The people from the youth office took him to a home. There began Clinton’s picture book career of an unaccompanied minor foreigner.

When Danilo van der Heide, his guardian, saw him for the first time, there was a disturbed child, seven years old, perhaps, a small, helpless man. Van der Heide came by motorbike to the youth facility in Kreuzberg, he remembers, a 1000 Suzuki V-Strom, Clinton was allowed to ride along.

It was the beginning of a relationship which still characterises the boy to this day. His guardian and he, then there was still time for that, went on a regular meal together, rode on the motorcycle, van der Heide even took Clinton to his home, there are still presents for Christmas and a birthday. “He’s family,” Clinton says about van der Heide. The term “family” becomes elastic if you don’t know where you come from.

But nothing went smoothly. He had to change facilities all the time. No one could stand him, he wasn’t welcome anywhere. He went ballistic. A clinic for child and adolescent psychiatry diagnosed “posttraumatic stress disorder (development trauma), disturbance of social behaviour and a combined developmental disorder “. He was just eleven years old.

When Clinton flew from the last establishment, van der Heide began to plead with the youth office, so finally he got what he needed. At first Clinton refused to go to the country. Van der Heide took him by the hand and went with him to the closed psychiatry. “Do you want to end up here?” He asked. Clinton chose Brandenburg.

There he was given individual care, was accompanied psychologically. When he went to school, a guard was sitting in the last row, watching him. So Clinton, the Ghanaian foundling child, became probably the most expensive youth of his Youth Office.

In the converted sheep-farm, which is now his home, one could photograph a story for the magazine “Landlust” without moving a stone. In addition to the pigs, the horses and the rescued circus dog, there is a large workshop in which a construction car sauna is being built, there is a group room where the children eat together what the cook has freshly prepared, a piano is in the room, and behind the house, in the “summer land”, the carers live in red and green painted construction site caravans, which they use to take the children to the cinema in Luckenwalde and for swimming.

It’s an idyll, as if left from the time before last September, when desirable things still happened in Germany. Where the case for youngsters was still fought for because society wanted it so. Where no one should be lost, no matter where they came from. But what when 3000 Clintons arrive in one go? When summer fairy tales turn into winter?

It’s lunch time in the Youth Office Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Danilo van der Heide returns from the court. “It was sad,” he says, the two Syrian boys, whose papers he had on the table the day before, are leaving their foster family. The phone is ringing. Van der Heide looks at the orange flashing button and then back to his computer screen. “I only answer the phone operatively,” he says. “When I see that it’s an external number, I don’t pick up anymore.” He knows who’s calling, he says.

There are people who want to help. It’s a few months ago that his superiors didn’t take an emergency call. In the “Tagesspiegel” they talked about the conditions in the Youth Office Steglitz-Zehlendorf and called on citizens to take on voluntary guardianships and to give foster children a home. Within a very short time 1000 people called.

They continue to call to van der Heide every day, his inbox is full of enquiries, all of which sound the same: “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to express my wish to provide a guardianship for a minor unaccompanied refugee … ” But why doesn’t this man put the earpiece to himself and shout “Welcome”? Why does he bury the e-mails from its inbox in a hidden folder? “I’m not responsible,” he says, “no one is responsible. It’s simply impossible.”

Anyone who wants to take over a guardianship or hospitality for a child, takes a great responsibility, needs to be trained, needs a guidance certificate, needs someone to ask them 1000 questions. Van der Heide cannot be this someone at the moment. And no one else from the department, no one of the political emergency-callers thought of that. That what could be salvation, robbed more time. Van der Heide is in the situation of a starving person, who gets a help pack full of preserves, but has no can opener.

After all, there are independent individual custodians who relieve the office, organisations, who are specialised in guardianship, but they are all full. There is a list of judges and lawyers who are willing to become guardians, but a responsible coordinator is missing. Eight job placement were confirmed to van der Heide, months ago. Now, in February, the first new employee starts. It will take months before they learn the ropes. Van der Heide has no idea when the others are coming.

The Youth Office Steglitz-Zehlendorf has so far been able to provide five nursing families, one of them the Gündoğdus, they have received Muhammad.

The boy is standing with a mountain bike in front of the clearing place in the Wupper street and points to a child in a large red down jacket. “Baby,” says Mohammed, “all by himself.” The boy he points to is maybe six, maybe eight. He was separated from his brother in Germany, because he was over 18 years old and was staying in an accommodation for the year, Mohammed says. He had to cry, he says, when he first saw the little one.

Mohammed comes from Aleppo, he came alone over the Mediterranean, 14 years old. He was beaten and imprisoned on the way by the police, travelled across the Balkan route, on foot, on the bus. On the 20^th of August he reached Wupper street in Berlin.

The initial reception for children is in a U-shaped construction, through the windows you can see bunk beds, in front of the gate loungers in jogging pants wasting time, watched by a security man. Actually, the new arrivals are first investigated, questioned, estimated, but in the meantime the Wupper street is so crowded that they distribute the children to  hostels and pensions all over the city.

The senate administration has now opened 39 posts, and the social workers can only look after the young people on an outpatient basis. A few months ago Mohammed was still one of them, he lived on Wupper street in Room 227. Sometimes he comes to see if he’ll finds friends again.

He is now a foster child of the Gündoğdus, for eight weeks. Has a bike and a family. The Gündoğdus live on the upper floor of the former director’s office of a school in Zehlendorf. Mr. Gündoğdu is a caretaker, his Mrs Inci is an elderly nurse, they have raised four children. One son is a theologian and married to a priest, the other has just become a father, a daughter still a student. She and the youngest son, the 15-year-old, live at home.

When the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi was laying on the beach in Bodrum and the photo went around the world, the family made a decision. They would take a refugee child. They had also read about the emergency in Steglitz-Zehlendorf. “We were sure, but we were also afraid,” they say.

Origin, skin colour: they did not care. What was important to them: “That he accepts me and my daughter as women,” says Inci Gündoğdu. “Can he accept that we like to drink a glass of champagne in the evening?”, Says Mr. Gündoğdu. “We also celebrate Christmas,” says Mrs Gündoğdu. “And I love Bratwurst,” says her husband.

“When we saw Mohammed for the first time, he was standing in the corridor of his third home in Neukölln, he was trembling. He was afraid that he would never see his biological parents again, when he went to a German family. “He gave us a hand,” says Ms. Gündoğdu, “his lips were closed.”

When they took him home for the first time after the third visit, it took an hour to get him in the apartment. Momo, as they soon called him, saw the labrador of the family and refused to enter. But shortly afterwards he rolled with the dog on the kitchen floor. “Charly has been his best friend ever since,” says nurse Gündoğdu, “Charly treats him.” When we set up the Christmas tree, Mohammed began to put decoration on it. “We had the kitschiest Christmas tree of all,” says Ms Gündoğdu.

He wanted to buy them presents, “we were very relieved,” she says. Momo needs a lot of attention, a lot of closeness. When Mr. Gündoğdu takes his own son in his arms, Momo waits until he is gone, then throws himself in the arms of the foster father. When he realises that someone wants to leave the house, he runs to the wardrobe and pulls his jacket on. After a few weeks, he named his foster parents “baba” and “anne”, papa and mama.

“It is unbelievable how quickly he gets closer to us,” says Ms Gündoğdu, it makes her very happy, but also a bit frightened. “We have to teach him that we also need privacy,” she says.

The worst thing about Mohammed is that he cannot bring his family there as well, at least not immediately. When he learned that it could take a year and a half, he fell into a hole. “There is a big burden on him,” says Gijoğdu. He is afraid his family could not survive the one and a half years.

In the evenings Momo is often sad, sitting on his bed and crying. In the beginning, he sat down at the computer and watched bad videos on YouTube, corpses, decapitations, things that until recently were his reality and which are still the reality of his family at home. The Gündoğdus told him that they didn’t want him to see the videos anymore. “You should be a child, Momo,” they said, “you should look at happy things.” Since then, Mohammed is watching episodes of a Syrian comedy.

Good moments are when they go out together with the dog. Or drive to Neukölln, in streets where all the signs are in Arabic. Then Momo wants to take them to restaurants, order them food, then he is the one who can show the Gündoğdus something, give them something.

On the walls in his room he hung pictures that he painted in his welcome class, with acrylic paints he painted the names of his family on small canvases, “Mama, Papa, Mohammed”, in Arabic characters and “LOVE”. At school, he also created a poster, which says: “I am 14 years old, I come from Syria, I speak Arabic. I love dogs.”

He has drawn up a plan and presented it to his host family. He shows the floor plan of the apartment in which he now lives, on the drawing he has rebuilt the upper floor. When the elder daughter of Gündoğdus leaves the house, that is his idea, his parents can come from Syria and live upstairs with him. This is how he could keep both families, the German and the Syrian. His foster mother, Inci Gündoğdu looks at it a little helpless and laughs. Mohammed does not laugh. The boy from Aleppo, alone, wants to believe in it.

71 Lives

When the two policemen from the Potzneusiedl Highway Inspection in Burgenland approached the lorry at around 11 am on 27 August 2015, from the right back door a chicken on a promotional photo is looking at them saying “I taste so good because I am fed so well.” Through the crevices of the load compartment a reddish liquid drips onto the asphalt. The stink from the lorry is coming towards them. When participants are asked to describe this smell later, they shake their heads and wave aside. Indescribable, they say, they have never smelled anything like this before.

The refrigerated lorry type Volvo FL 180, with the Hungarian license plate Z-12198, transported fowl long-term through Slovakia before the company Hyza discarded it and sold it to Hungary. It has been standing in the park bay for over one day on the A4 direction Vienna, just before the Parndorf exit. On the Balkan route, as the highway is called, because it leads from Vienna to Hungary and Serbia, it occurs more frequently that old vehicles are parked. But there are more important things to do. It’s over 30 degrees, a record summer, holiday season. The Neusiedler See is not far, and the popular late night shopping starts in the outlet centre next door, the Furla ladies’ bag for 70 instead of 353 euros.

But this lorry can no longer be ignored. An employee of the highway authority, mowing the lawn, has called the police because of the smell.

The officers open the load compartment. And then step back. They see decaying bodies, sunk into each other, leaning against each other as if they were standing in a crowded subway and would have fallen asleep. Their feet are stuck to the ankles in a mixture of excrement, urine, and corpses. The policemen call into the load compartment. Nobody replies. They notify the emergency physician and the service centre. They make a photo that is supposed to describe the situation to the colleagues, which appears the next day in the “KronenZeitung”. They close the door. It’s too much. At 11.25 am, they send a message via the police system “SMS Pro”: “A lorry with about 20 dead found on A4 Parndorf”.

There are 71 dead. 21 Afghans, 29 Iraqis, 15 Syrians, 5 Iranians and a man who cannot be identified. 59 men, 8 women, 4 children. The youngest, Lida from Kunduz, Afghanistan, is eleven months old. Persecuted, despaired, Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, teachers, lawyers, traders, policemen, teenagers, three families, FC Barcelona fans, Facebook poser, a kaleidoscope of mankind. 71 dead, who have not done us the favour to drown far away in the sea. 71 lives, which wanted to be transported in a much too narrow load compartment of a lorry through Hungary and Austria, because at the end of their Odyssey Germany shone, the promised country. 71 corpses that deprived us of the illusion of having nothing to do with the wars and problems of others. A few days later refugees begin to cross the Hungarian-Austrian border at Nickelsdorf, 25 kilometers from the parking bay near Parndorf, across the highway from Hungary to Austria. “We can do it,” Angela Merkel says, opening the doors.

So many have lost in this story. Nahed Asker, 31, has lost her husband. Farah Al Shaikh, 31, her family. Two stories from many, which are connected in the refrigerated lorry on the A4. After the tragedy, Asker travelled after her dead husband with the children from Syria, and is now waiting for her asylum in a refugee home in Austria. Alshaikh has been living in Germany for a long time. She had encouraged her family in Syria to flee to Germany. Now they are all dead.

The women did not know each other before the disaster, although both come from Deir az-Zur to the east of Syria. Through the city flows the Euphrates, there grow jasmine flowers, splutters petroleum, pomegranates and cotton grow. There has been war for five years. Asker and Al Shaikh have still not met each other. They write Whatsapp messages to each other, make phone calls. Since 27 August 2015 they share their fate, but not their grief. It cannot be shared.

“They treated my family like chickens,” says Alshaikh. “My soul is broken,” says Asker.

Asker lives with her son Zaid, 11, and her daughter Tala, 5, in a small room in a refugee home in Wiener Neustadt. She has placed three mattresses side-by-side to form a large bed. They sleep together, wake up together. Asker likes to watch Beyoncé music videos, post a lot on Facebook, wear leggings, lipstick and mascara. She cooks with the other Syrians. She knows what medication her children need when they are ill, because she has been working in a pharmacy in Syria. She cannot work in Austria. She doesn’t speak German, has applied for asylum, for the family that remained for her. “When we last saw each other, my husband told me, ”No matter what happens to me, always look after the children. I will fulfil this wish,” says Asker.

Alshaikh lives with her husband Fateh Alhamad, 41, and her son Omar, 1, in a spacious apartment in Northern Germany. They speak almost accent-free German, have German nationality. She is a gynecologist and just on parental leave. He works as an internist in the hospital. During Ramadan they eat and drink only after dark. Alshaikh wears headscarf, not because she has to, but because she wants it. Omar has brown hair and eyes, just learns to walk and lands mostly on the butt. Then his mother sometimes smiles. She often walks with him to a small playground at the end of the street, buys food, otherwise she stays at home. The neighbours know nothing about their history.

She went twice to the Immigration Authority in Saarbrücken in November 2014. They lived in Saarland, worked in the hospital, owned a car and a house in the suburb of Saarbrücken. It had a garden and more rooms than they needed. She asked the woman from the immigration office for the application for family reunion, which she had submitted half a year ago. She wanted to bring her mother Fadila, 53, her father Abdel, 57, her brother Almuthanna, 23, and her sister Hend, 17, to Germany, because no more everyday life was possible in Deir az-Zur. IS against government forces, the situation was unclear.

Her brother Almuthanna studied law and was arrested by the IS because he had smoked. Her sister Hend was no longer allowed to go to school, just before graduating from high school. The business of her father, Abdel, who traded with car parts, was looted, destroying the houses of the family. Farah Alshaikh telephoned her mother Fadila daily. She sensed that the mother was afraid, even if she did not say that.

At that time, Alshaikh was eight months pregnant. She wanted to bring the family at her own expense. But the woman from the foreigners’ office said: “In parental leave you get only 60 percent of your salary. That’s not enough to provide for your child and your family.” “We’ll get it. In our house there’s enough space. We don’t want money, really not,” said Alshaikh. The officer asked her boss. The request was rejected. A week later she went back to the office. She begged her at least to bring her sister to her. She had asthma. Rejected.

“My father didn’t want to flee. He feared for the family, had fear of the human traffickers. He only wanted to leave Syria if they could enter legally anywhere,” says Alshaikh. She offered him the rooms in her house. If it was to become unbearable, they should come, no matter how. “I’ve been pushing. Maybe I’ve put too much pressure on them.”

“We canät stand this any more,” her father says when he calls in early July 2015. He sets off with 20,000 dollars and the family. They drive in their Toyota from Raqqa to the Syrian-Turkish border. They abandon the car there, pay a smuggler to lead them through a forest. 4 They get to Urfa in Turkey. There lives another sister of Alshaikh. They stay a few days. Abdel Alshaikh, the father, spreads the word to his acquaintances. He is looking for a smuggler. A man named Abules is recommended to him. A Syrian, who organises smuggling from Urfa. He collects commissions from human traffickers and refugees. Abules explains Abdel Alshaikh the route and the prices.

On 17 August 2015 the family is waiting for a hotel in Izmir. From the Turkish west coast, they want to go to Belgrade via Samos, Athens and Macedonia. There they are to meet a man named Afghani, who organises the journey through Hungary and Austria to Germany. The Alshaikhs are not alone, their group consists of twelve people. They include Alshaikh’s Uncle Youssef, 39, a brother of her father – and Hasan Al-Damen, 36, the husband of Nahed Asker.

He left Asker and the children in Damascus. They wanted to move him into the military. He was to fight for Assad, whom he despised. As a teacher he can no longer earn money. He wants to bring his family to Germany later.

“Give us your luggage. That doesn’t fit the dinghy,” the human traffickers say in Izmir. Alshaikh’s sister Hend is horrified. She only keeps her mobile phone, the pants and the T-shirt that she wears. In a photo, which she sends to her sister in Germany via WhatsApp, the wind blows into her black curly hair. She stands by the water and tries to look happy. She fails. The 17-year-old is a girl from the city who wants to listen to romantic Arabic pop music on the smartphone and to study medicine. She is afraid of the sea. She is wearing her mother’s silver wedding ring on her right hand. It shall protect them.

The human traffickers collect 1200 euros per person for the crossing to Samos. Two starts fail. The first time, they were caught by the Turkish coastal police, who left them at the beach and sunk the boat. The second time, the police patrols caught them when they wanted to cast off.

It is only the third time that they leave at midnight. In the early morning of 19 August, the boat is captured one kilometer before Samos by the Greek coastal police. Mother Fadila is glad. She vomited the whole night. When they enter the EU, the sun rises. In the port of Samos, they receive provisional travel documents with which they can buy tickets for the ferry to Athens.

In Samos they sleep one night on the ground, have little to eat. The next day they take the ferry to Athens. From there they call Farah Alshaikh in Germany. Her father Abdel sounds tired, but he says, “We’re okay. We’ll go on.” Her sister Hend cries. “I’m done, I can’t go on anymore.” Her mother Fadila would like to go back to Syria.

In Athens, they rest, go to an Arabic restaurant. Some of the group would like to stay longer. But Hasan Al-Damen, the husband of Nahed Asker, urges them to continue. He believes the borders will be closed soon. After a day in Athens they take the bus to the Macedonian border. There they split up, trying to get across the fence at various points. The border guards beat the refugees with sticks and spray tear gas into their faces. They catch Al Shaykh’s brother Almuthanna. He can escape, suffers only bruises. Mothers are separated from children, many cry and cry.

The group reunited after an hour on the Macedonian side. It’s raining, it’s cold, they’re freezing, their clothes are soaked. By bus, they travel four hours through Macedonia towards Serbia. They look out the window. They have imagined Europe differently.

In Belgrade they meet the human trafficker Afghani. An Afghan who has been living in Europe for some time. He is thin, has black hair, wears a t-shirt, jogging pants and a shoulder bag. “Trust me! I will make sure that you are taken directly to Germany without your being registered in Hungary or Austria, and your fingerprints taken,” he says to Al-Damen and Abdel Alshaikh, who are leading the negotiations. He is asking for 1600 euros per person for transport. A common price for the route this summer. The men agree. They had deposited part of their money with Abules in Urfa. He is to transfer the fee to the human traffickers only after they have arrived well in Germany. They hope to be able to protect themselves, not to be deceived.

It’s Monday, 24 August 2015, when the Alshaikhs call Farah Alshaikh in the afternoon from a hotel near Belgrade. They are in a good mood. Her brother Almuthanna has received an e-mail from Syria that he passed the lawyer’s examination. “Be careful what you say to me in the future, I am a lawyer now,” he tells his sister. “We got a little bit of rest and bought new 5 clothes,” says her mother Fadila. “I have a good feeling with the trafficker, he doesn’t seem to do it for the first time,” says her father Abdel. Her sister promises Alshaikh that soon after their arrival they will go to the zoo, to the Wilhelma in Stuttgart, because Hend wants this for a long time. It’s the last conversation with her family.

In the evening, the group arrives at 6:00 pm in the park next to the coach station in the centre of Belgrade. There it’s teeming with refugees and human traffickers. In these weeks, Belgrade is the hub of the refugee route across the Balkans. Afghani talks all the time on his mobile phone, in a language they don’t understand. His cell phone is old. Traffickers use old mobile phones and prepaid cards, so they cannot be located. Refugees use smartphones because they need the Internet as much as water. The phone is their only contact with those who they had to leave behind.

“Wait in the park until it gets dark. There’s a lot of police, we have to be careful,” says Afghani. Most of them try to sleep. At midnight Afghani wakes them up. They follow him through the night, along the rails of the tram, over a bridge that crosses the river Save to a parking lot. From the river banks the basses of the discos drone. The Belgrade youth is partying.

Afghani calls on them to divide themselves into three groups. Four people would be taken in each car. In the first one, a thug drives mother Fadila, brother Almuthanna and Al-Damen away. In the second one sits Youssef Alshaikh, the last to leave the parking lot are father Abdel and sister Hend in the third car on the parking lot. “You go with your mother, take care of her,” says Abdel Alshaikh to his son Almuthanna, who wanted to join his uncle Youssef. The decision costs Almuthanna his life.

The journey takes three hours to the north, via the E75 motorway through flat land to the Serbian border. Outside, the darkness flies by, everything is black. The sense of time and orientation is gone.

The human traffickers drop their passengers off in a forest near Domaszék on the Hungarian side of the border. After the first, the third car arrives a bit later. “Wait here, we’ll be back soon,” the human traffickers say. The Alshaikhs are in the forest.

Only Youssef Alshaikh is missing, the uncle. The second car in which he was sitting suddenly stopped, after two hours’ drive. The human trafficker had received a call and shouted into his phone in Serbian. He threw the refugees out of the car on the highway. “Waiting, waiting,” he shouted, driving away. Youssef Alshaikh had not bought a SIM card in Serbia, couldn’t call anyone.

They come to a village at dawn, drive back to Belgrade by taxi. He buys a SIM card and calls his brother. Abdel Al Shaikh tells that they have been brought together with other refugees and are waiting in a forest. “We are hungry and thirsty, bring something to eat and drink” he says. “Don’t go any further,” says Youssef Alshaikh, “something is wrong.” He doesn’t follow. That saves him his life. The group disintegrates.

On 25 August 2015, her father writes to Farah Alshaikh, “Sitting in the forest and waiting to go on.” She wants to reply, but suddenly he’s gone. She sees on WhatsApp that the last time he was online was at 12 o’clock. She can’t reach the rest of the family any more. At 10 pm, Nahed Asker gets the last news from her husband Hasan Al-Dame in Damascus. “I’m in the woods. The human traffickers say we have to wait for police checks. I am hungry and eat apples from the trees. Please kiss the children from me. Soon everything will be over.

A week ago, a man bought 6 a refrigerated lorry from a used car dealer in Kecskemét. He registers the lorry in his own name, doesn’t even bother to conceal his identity. The business with the refugees is running well, hundreds of human trafficker vehicles roll uncontrolled towards Austria every day. The man belongs to a group of traffickers which organised and carried out over 20 towings. It consists of four Bulgarians and the Afghan. The five men are all involved in the act on 27 August 2015. The load is valuable, 71 times 1600 euros. Therefore the bosses take care of it themselves.

On Wednesday, 26 August 2015, the traffickers will drive the refrigerated lorry at 4 am from Kecskemét to the forest on the border. Kecskemét, an old Hungarian university town, is situated an hour north of Domaszék. The sky is clear, it will be a nice, hot day in southern Hungary again, where tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and apricots grow. In the forest the 71 refugees have been hiding for more than a day and are waiting for the continuation of their journey.

The Alshaikh family from Deir az-Zur, Syria. The Rahm family from Kunduz, Afghanistan. Father Khuda, his wife, three children, including the little Lida, and a cousin. Rahm worked as a policeman in Afghanistan. The Taliban threatened him and his family. Muhammad Ali and his wife Lefana from Tall Abyad, Syria, who married three months ago and want to found a family in Germany. The Iraqi Mahmoud Abidi, who was just promoted to a four-star officer and fled with his wife Sine Gailani from Baghdad. She wants to see her brother in Germany, because as an engineer, he leads a good life there. She persuaded not only her husband, but also her siblings Ali and Seineb Gailani to come along. The Kurd Saeed Othman from Sulaimaniyya in Northern Iraq. He hopes that a doctor in Germany can help him, because he only has one kidney and that causes him pain. Mohammed Baba from Karkur, Iraq, who can’t find a job and believes in a career as a football professional.

Nothing indicates that the refugees had to be forced to board.

At five o’clock the lorry drives at Domaszék on the M5 motorway to the north, and is captured by the cameras of the Hungarian toll system. A car escorts the lorry, runs ten minutes ahead. The escort vehicle is supposed to warn the traffickers in the lorry, if there are police checks on the line, and to collect the drivers when something goes wrong.

The lorry passed Kecskemét at 6:03, two hours later Budapest and reached the border to Austria at 9:15 am Nickelsdorf. About 20 minutes later the traffickers set it off in the park bay near Parndorf. Why? The smugglers are silent. There was no police block on this day. The group must somehow have realised that their cargo is lost.

The load compartment of the 7.5-tonnes vehicle cannot be opened from the inside. The cooling unit doesn’t work. The air would only have been rearranged, but no oxygen would habe been supplied. To the refugees remained only the oxygen, which was in the loading area at the start of the journey. In order to determine where they died, whether the Hungarian or Austrian judiciary is responsible, an expert’s report is commissioned after finding the lorry. It calculates the volume of the load space and divides it by the number of persons. About five refugees were standing on a square meter of the load compartment. They must have suffocated before eight o’clock in Hungary. There are no traces of death agony in the load compartment or the corpses. It can be assumed that they have fainted from oxygen deficiency and died unconscious. The position of the corpses shows that children were held high. The bodies of a 7 couple look as if they hugged each other.

The smugglers are arrested shortly after finding the lorry in Kecskemét. They’re about to prepare their escape, but the license plates and the records of the highway cameras lead the investigators to them quickly. They are held in remand in Kecskemét and don’t comment. In September, the prosecution is scheduled to begin early next year with the process.

The lorry is taken from the parking bay into a hall to Nickelsdorf, which can be cooled. Forensic doctors carry the bodies out of the load compartment, photograph them, assign items to them, for example, passports that are stuck in breast pockets, money sewn into sleeves or belts. In Hasan Al-Damen, the husband of Nahed Asker, one finds his teacher diploma. He had had it translated into German in order to find work later.

As the policemen had opened the load compartment in the morning, air came in, and the decomposition of the bodies was accelerated. In their salvage, the victims look like dark-skinned people. On backpacks and jackets glue corpse scraps. Most phones are in a state as if they were thrown into an acid bath. They can no longer be used for forensics. Nothing can be known this way about the last moments in the lorry.

The forensic doctors have provided the white corpses with numbers. The dead are lying there nameless. Unlike a plane crash, there is no passenger list that can be processed. The investigators switch a hotline for relatives. They need the DNA of relatives to identify the dead. For one man there are no enquiries. It will continue until 10 December 2015, until the identification of the others is completed.

In the afternoon of 27 August 2015, Nahed Asker sees a report on the lorry on television. She lives with the children at her mother’s house in Damascus. Asker says she immediately sensed that her husband is dead. When she calls the translator of the Burgenland state police authority, who is carrying out the identification, a few weeks later, she is not shouting. The body of her husband cannot be transferred to Syria. He is buried on the Muslim cemetery Inzersdorf in Vienna. Asker wants to say goodbye to her husband. She goes to Vienna with the children. The refugee route is now open.

Farah Alshaikh holds Omar in her arms, stands at the window of her house in Saarbruecken and looks into the garden as the call comes. They had found the passports. She drops Omar.

Since the beginning of the year they live in northern Germany. She could no longer hear the questions of friends in Saarbrücken, was fed up with condolences. She recently put a picture of her family on the cabinet over the TV in the living room. The Alshaikhs are also buried on the Inzersdorf cemetery. At the funeral on 07 October 2015, Farah Alshaikh insists on seeing her mother’s face. She lets them open the coffin. She hasn’t been again in the cemetery ever since. She can’t do it.

On the weekend after the Parndorf disaster, thousands of refugees arrived at German railway stations. They were applauded to, given water and clothing. The children got teddies and sweets. Many leave the gyms and shelters during these weeks. They start a new life.