“I swear to God, why, what is our guilt that we left our homeland, or our country we escaped from war, are dying in the seas, are being arrested without a crime, they are treating us as prisoners of war.”
The respondent entered by land to Greece, with 15 people, women and children and 8 men. They entered through a tunnel under the main street. Her son, who was 8 months old began to cry from hunger. Then, a group of men arrived, dressed in normal clothes and carrying weapons. They caught them. They began speaking to the group in English. One of the men in the group, his phone began to ring. They asked him who was calling and he said it was his dad. They said he was lying, and took him away from the tunnel. The group heard him screaming. They began torturing him with an electric stick, he was only 20 years old. The men were all dressed in different colored clothing.
Two military cars arrived with 8 officers inside. They took them to their headquarters on the border, searched them and threw them in prison. They were very harsh with her and when she asked for food and milk for her son and her money, they only gave her a tiny bit and when she requested hot water, they said there is toilet water so she was forced to prepare dirty water. She put it in his bottle, it was cold, she put it under the sun in order to warm the water, the baby was 8 months old at the time.
She did not know what time it was but in the middle of the night, they got in a big military car and they arrived to a dark forest, they opened the door, the people were wearing black masks and she thought that they had arrived to the end of life, the darkness was frightening and she exited the car in fear. She dropped the child's bag on the ground and all of the diapers scattered and his bottle and his belongings and she tried to gather it all; they put them in a small inflatable boat to the other side of the river and told them to go and to never return a second time.
When she returned, her son had to go to the hospital for 4 days and was put in intensive care because of the polluted dirty water, he had chronic inflammation in his intestines since he had a virus.
‘Possibly my question is, I swear to God, why, what is our guilt that we left our homeland, or our country we escaped from war, are dying in the seas, are being arrested without a crime, they are treating us as prisoners of war [as if] we are coming to European countries to have fun or tourism or entertainment’
‘How are they looking at us? No person, no human likes to leave his homeland, his country, a human just has to be far from his soil and he becomes without value’.
‘As long as the war is continuing in Syria migrants are forced to flood, there must be a solution or an alternative because migrants or they accept us or they stop the war, there is no solution other than this within the confines of the law’.