by
Pamela Kerpius

Recorded:
13 May 2022 +
3 March 2023

Published:
17 April 2023

Meet Khalid.

25 years old and from Idlib, Syria.

To reach his home in Europe he crossed six countries: Syria, Lebanon, Belarus, Poland, Germany and the Netherlands.

He moved from Idlib in the northwest to the capital city Damascus, where he lived with his family for ten years before his final departure from the country.

On 31 December 2012, he boarded a bus to Bcharre, a city in northern Lebanon, where his father had been living. Previously his dad worked as a television producer in Damascus, but was fired for reporting stories against the government regime. He was in trouble and fled for his life to Lebanon. To this day he remains wanted by the Assad regime, and that also came at a price for Khalid. To cross the Syrian border he would be required to pay a bribe of 700 USD to authorities. He paid the fee and entered Lebanon. He spent eight hours on a bus to Bcharre. He was elated to see his father when they reunited after an entire year.

But still, life was bittersweet. “You see someone you love, but you leave more behind,” said Khalid about leaving the rest of his family, his mother and his brothers and sisters, behind in Syria.

He stayed in Bcharre for over five years, experiencing acute discrimination from the prevailing attitude against Syrian immigrants, he said, a legacy of the Syrian-Lebanese war of the 1980s that had calcified to institutionalized discrimination. It was during this time he began his habit of wearing a formal business suit, a quiet protest he would use again and again to dignify himself against the degrading anti-immigrant atmospheres he would face in the years ahead.

For years in Bcharre before that, however, his days were timed with injustices. A curfew was imposed on Syrians in the city, requiring them to be at home by 6:00pm. Khalid said if he was caught out he’d be beaten, even if it was for a small errand out of house. There were signs over public toilets and shops that read, “No Syrians.” He was barred from the beach where he was stopped by a posted sign, “No dogs. No Syrians.”

He felt his life going nowhere here, not even being able to complete his education given his nationality. He was not allowed to have relationships with local women. This, a rule he defied. He fell in love. He was young, just 18, and his girlfriend, who was a couple of years younger, would meet him in secret. It was a highly fraught situation that put both of their personal safeties in danger. And it was, finally, the risk of that relationship coming due that broke it up. When the girl’s brother learned about Khalid, he called his friends and they beat him ruthlessly, breaking his teeth and damaging his arm badly. “That was my leaving ticket,” he said. He never heard from the girl, his first love, again.

In June 2017 he left for Beirut, Lebanon, a big, multicultural city that promised more open-mindedness and opportunity. It was three hours on a bus until he arrived in the city with just a single piece of luggage in hand. A friend gave him a place to stay and connected him with work as a waiter at a local restaurant. For the four years he remained in Beirut he moved around a bit. And while he never seemed to settle into the city as a true home, it was in 2019 during an eleven month gig with an EU-based theatre organization that he found his calling as an actor. Before, Khalid had a YouTube channel showcasing some performances, but it wasn’t until his participation as a regular player with the theatre that he really understood his voice in politics through performance.

“[I was] fighting racism through theatre,” he said of his time with the troupe. All of this was happening in the early months before the Covid-19 pandemic struck worldwide. He was introduced to the idea of the Netherlands as a possible place to call home during this time as well. Two players in the theatre group were Dutch. They connected him to the culture and inspired him to consider the country on a deeper level. But as the pandemic finally bore down, his movement was paralyzed in Beirut until late 2021 when violence erupted in the city. There was a shootout. He was tired and thought to himself, enough.

“Am I going to be a victim?” Khalid asked, or was he going to make this his moment of exit. He spoke to his parents and pleaded his case for the better life he envisioned for himself in Europe. They agreed and contributed what they could to bankroll his travel, his mother offering a small collection of gold bracelets to sell, his father some cash.

On 26 October 2021 he applied for a tourist visa to Belarus at its consulate in Beirut. It took a few days to process, and another two days of wait time for the negative results to come in from a Covid-19 test required for his entry, and that of a few friends traveling with him. On November 6, 2021 his Belarusian visa was approved.

On 8 November 2021, he boarded a Belavia Air flight from Beirut to Minsk, Belarus, one that should have been rather affordable, normally priced at around 200 USD. His, however, was priced at 1,600 USD, a reflection of the route’s sudden scarcity. All other flights had been canceled due to a high uptick in migration from the region. The EU was putting greater pressure on the situation, he said, forcing Minsk to halt the processing of tourist visas. He put down the cash for his ticket, and he was lucky the transaction occurred when it did: shortly thereafter, everyone else was denied. At midnight, his was the last plane out of Beirut to Minsk for tourist visa holders.

He arrived the next morning immediately to his first hurdle and heartbreak at passport control. There was a delay for a missing renewal stamp on his Syrian passport. He knew before it was something he’d eventually need, but he had put it off because the cost was so high. The stamp cost 200 USD per year, but his salary netted out to be no more than 300 USD per month, making the renewal a luxury he couldn’t afford. Instead, Lebanese control relayed his choices. Pay the fee now for the stamp and enter, or forgo the stamp and be banned from entry to Lebanon for life. He refused to pay the fee for what he saw as extortion. It won’t be until his dad leaves Lebanon that he can see him again.

“You can see the problem we have now,” Khalid said.

Immediately upon his entry to Belarus on 9 November 2021 he booked a tourist package to fit in and look the part of an average traveler. His choice was rooted in simple logistics too. He needed a place to stay and the package deal included a hotel. It’s where he went right away to rest. He was in his room the whole day. “I felt sick,” Khalid said. He took no tours, and there was a lot of pressure on him to perform, as well, because he was the only one in the group who spoke English. It fell upon him to talk or translate, navigate with directions or read maps. In the lobby of the hotel itself he heard a barrage of Arab speakers as he entered, all of them came hard on approach pretending to ask for a cigarette or make some other small talk, but they were smugglers offering transit through Europe. He was lost, intimidated, and really needed help.

“That’s why I love TikTok,” he said, where he is an active user with an impressive following for his activist videos (over 127,000 at time of publishing). There were postings from people saying it wasn’t needed to use smugglers – you could do it yourself, he said, with just individual support. So, on the recommendation of a friend, he was connected with an independent man to do just that. His friend himself had used the man’s services the previous month in Poland, which included transit, hotels and other basic needs.

Khalid spent four nights in Minsk. The tour group by then was pressuring him to join after days of absence, and it pushed him to make the decision to leave. “That’s when I put on my suit,” said Khalid, and he left.

The taxi driver he found was charging him extra, inflating the cost because he knew Khalid and his friend were migrants. The ride, Khalid said, should have been around 100 Rubles (or about 40 USD), but the driver insisted on 240 Rubles (about 100 USD). A crowd was starting to gather around their increasingly visible negotiations, and getting scared it could draw attention of authorities, he agreed to the overpriced rate, and at about 8:00pm on 13 November 2021, the taxi – designed to hold five people in the car – departed with seven, including the driver, from Minsk enroute to Brest, Belarus.

12 kilometers from the Polish border the driver dropped Khalid and the rest of the passengers. He would take them no further because nearby military would seize his taxi if he was caught.

It was late, probably after midnight when they poured out of the vehicle into the dark on foot. He was scared. The group filed into the forest to change their clothes, take something to eat, setup the GPS and plan their next steps. It was cold and hazy. They were depending on the phone to get them moving in the right direction. Khalid wore his suit, but this time it was covered with layers of puffy jackets to keep out the cold. They wanted to light a fire, but it was too risky to have open smoke and flames that would signal border authorities to their presence.

It was five whole hours walking in the dark, deliberately staying off main roads in the padding of forest along it, and stopping for five minute breaks at most to keep up the momentum. Now, they were just 1 kilometer from the Polish border. They had come prepared with tools in their backpacks to cut fence wire or anything else that obstructed their path. But along the way they were told not to do this, for if they were caught damaging property they’d be punished. “They have dogs,” Khalid said, emphasizing the intimidation they faced from border security. In the end, he and his friends left the tools behind.

They slept on the ground in sleeping bags the next day, 14 November 2021, and that night they rose to continue their movement toward the border fence. This was it.

He approached a series of fences, there were three in total, each a few meters apart. He made it over the first. He arrived at the second and an alarm set off. The fence started vibrating.

“I got that feeling like something really bad was gonna happen, like in a Hollywood movie,” Khalid said, he could hear the soundtrack in his head.

Still a few meters behind him at the first fence were the others in the group; a road for military vehicles was between the second and third fences, and that’s where he heard the border authorities approaching. He saw an attack dog in its truck as it got closer. He decided not to move, to just stay still and wait for the guards to calmly come to him.

“It was the longest ten minutes I have ever spent,” Khalid said, of the military making its way to him. Two soldiers jump out of the truck and “immediately they ask my friends to raise their hands up.”

“I start[ed] to speak in English and start saying, we’re surrendering,” he repeated, “so they understand that we’re not here to make problems.” Their guns all the while trained on him.

The Walkie-Talkie on one of the soldiers clicked on. An incident at another point along the fence – more people crossing. The truck pulled away. One soldier was left behind with Khalid and his friends.

“Who’s the leader?” the soldier demanded.

Khalid raised his hand. He was told to translate to the rest of the group. The soldier patted him down, checking every pocket and inside his bag. When he found anything he liked, he took it for himself – petty things like a pack of cigarettes, but also his mobile phone.

The phone confiscation seemed more a matter of protocol in the end, because as he took each one he also took the name of the person to match it; later, when Khalid and his friends were returned across the border and deposited at a migrant camp their phones were returned. It was some unmarked, unofficial dropping ground – “It’s just a spot in the forest,” he said – where for a moment, at least, the Polish state may evade the responsibility of human reception. Out of sight, out of mind. Not in my backyard. A repudiation that could be measured with a meter stick.

It was, however, a good thing Khalid and his friends got their phones back, not just for the gesture of a sympathetic soldier, but because phones can be veritable lifelines for people on the move who rely on them to see where to go next, and to connect.

The authorities surrounding them were “really nice” in the end, Khalid said, because they brought them water – “because we didn’t have water!” he interjected, explaining it ran out just hours before he hopped the first fence. Border authorities let them set up tents without disruption, and sent a car with people, dedicated food runners, who in exchange for cash would pick up food at the grocery store and return it to them in the forest.

“We were allowed to make fires there,” Khalid said, about his first chance to warm up. When he arrived there were others already building one. They borrowed the sparks. That’s how it works. Fires are always aglow from the new people arriving to take light off an existing fire, building in perpetuity until the next group is caught and deposited at the site.

Most people were picking up twigs and snapping off branches in the surrounding forest. One friend was so strong he picked up a whole tree, threw it over his back and tossed it into the fire – “He was like Hercules!” Khalid said.

And while he insisted he was strong and brave enough to attempt the crossing again that night, the Belarusian officer who heard his pleas at the camp begged to differ. “You’re free to do whatever you want,” the soldier said to Khalid, “But this is all about your safety so I’m giving you advice to stay here.” There was too much control in the area at the time. He’d be caught. And then, a twist.

“You’re free to do whatever you want,” said the officer, “except go back to Minsk.”  That would be denied, “There’s no way.”

So at the edge of the Belarusian state and before three fences blocking entry to the Polish state, Khalid found himself in a makeshift state. Sure, there was food to eat, water to drink, a tent shelter and fire to keep warm, but there was no pathway to or from this improvised space. Returning through Belarus wasn’t an option, but going ahead to Poland wasn’t either. As the logic frequently flows in these liminal places of human movement to which we mistakenly give the name illegal, however, the forces of keeping one out can be as strong as those with the interest to push one in, and thus out of your jurisdiction.

Try tomorrow, the Belarusian officer told him, who Khalid described as “both a gentleman and a dictator at the same time,” for blocking him from Minsk but urging him toward Poland. He told him to wait the night and he would direct him to a spot along the fence that had light military presence the next day.

“So basically,” Khalid said, “the Belarusians were helping us to cross the border.”

People who go back to Minsk, or attempt to, Khalid said, were regularly beaten – some just for expressing the wish to return to Belarus’ capital city. There was already a group he’d seen at the camp that officers had beaten and dropped off. No one is really your friend, even if favors and sympathies are sometimes expressed.

“Being someone on the borders, you’re just a product,” one side pushing you to the other, the other pushing you back, or forward to the next state. “That’s how I feel. You’re just a product,” said Khalid, “everyone just wants to make money from you.”

There were over a hundred people at the location in the forest that night wondering what direction the wind would take them next. Families, children – “there were children playing in the forest,” he said – all congregated together and calling up basic survival skills in the cold. For Khalid and his friends, they set up tents by the fire, because they heard there might be rain, rolled out their sleeping bags and went to bed. To his luck, it just sprinkled a bit before morning, when he woke to a breakfast of chocolate bars, the calorie-dense snacks he consumed to survive.

He believes the Belarusians took their phones for the night for “coding,” whereby they would be applied to a tracking system, so in the event they go back to Minsk they could be found. Whether true or not, he can’t say, but the fear that it could be was message enough. Twenty-one people had their phones handed back when the officers arrived that morning, 15 November 2021, with an announcement that in the hours after nightfall trucks would return to take them to a safe crossing point on the border.

Khalid’s friends didn’t believe it. They took a vote and the No’s prevailed. There was just too great of a concern that these officers wouldn’t deliver on their promise, that instead they’d be dropped for show at a camp, where media is known to be stationed reporting on the situation. It would be all for show and they were losing time.

“We decided to move,” Khalid said. They would cross that night on their own. With their phones back, they located themselves on Google maps and saw the point on the Polish border were they would attempt to cross was just a kilometer away.

9:00pm. They gathered their things, pumped each other up, and escaped.

“No one is really guarding the camp,” he said in truth, “It’s just a gathering place, let’s say,” so leaving a destination that wasn’t marked to begin with was not a big deal. His next steps, however, would be.

Somewhere in the bushes a soldier called out in Russian. They’ve been spotted. The security detail on a motorbike had a dog, a Pit bull, and he’s ready to unleash it. Khalid does not speak Russian, but the language of violence is universal. The soldier gave Khalid and the others a choice: come out and surrender, or be attacked by the dog.

“We heard the part about the dog,” they lampooned as they tripped out of the brush with their hands up.

A sense of humor is always the better course of action, if you can muster it: Khalid can. For him, that path is luckily inevitable, watching life slip, day by day, into an alt-normal that’s a lot less reliant on rationale than it is the absurd. Who could expect their route to be charted like this when built into the objective of going home implies also its necessity? This – the certainty, the requisite – of home is the same for Khalid as it is for everyone else on earth: a place to be from in peace.

It was a new world, however, in which he found himself in the crosshairs of justifying the obvious. And it was him, least of all, who could believe any of this could happen if it weren’t actually happening to him: overcoming hurdles of violence as a means of securing his peace.

“Are you stupid?” the Belarusian officer offered as he was dumped back at the campgrounds an hour later, “I told you to wait!" Khalid groused that he wasn’t sure he could trust him – his group thought it was safer to venture out on their own.

The heightened stakes were clear to Khalid and his friends merely by nearing the border. The equipage of the affair on the Polish side had a presence that was altogether more dense and impenetrable than the experience on the Belarusian side so far. Khalid could overhear soldiers within earshot talking on their radios, hear the din of drones, the clack of heavy metal equipment, and, of course, dogs.

In the end, 21 people, including themselves, filed onto a bus. It dropped them some distance, maybe about thirty minutes driving, to an easier crossing point. The soldiers had stripped their official attire. They changed into plain clothes to covertly make the transfer, proving smugglers can come in many shapes and sizes.

Khalid and his friends hid in the bushes for an hour before they decided to move. When they finally did, the group broke up, some going in one direction, others on a modified trajectory. One man in another group cut a piece of fence, setting off the sensor and putting all the guards’ attention on that singular section of the border. It was with that window of opportunity that Khalid in his group of six crossed the Belarus-Poland border.

And there they were, deep in the forest of Poland. The man he had hired as an independent contractor to help transfer him through eastern Europe had fallen through though, and in the end he had to contract the smugglers he was intent to avoid. Khalid called his dad and other members of his family for money. It was all for a deposit required to enlist the trafficker, a price of 3,000 USD per person, a transaction that feels like a big leap of faith.

“The weird thing is, we don’t know who is the person we’re dealing with. He’s using a fake name, he’s using a fake number, he’s changing his number every single day,” Khalid said. It’s like talking “to a ghost.”

But the deal secured, he walked to the meeting point given to him 20 kilometers away. His water was gone. He hadn’t showered in days. He was walking only at night to stay hidden from view. His phone was off to preserve battery, so there was no access to a flashlight either. Tree branches smacked him in the face and in his eyes over and over. The only relief that came was in the form of a river, dark and blackened by dirt and whatever else, that provided his first drink in hours.

He was still four hours from the hotel once he and his group made it to the pickup point. But at the hotel, he found immediate, primal relief that was difficult to describe. He turned on the tap at the sink inside the bathroom. “I opened it, and just put my mouth there and drink, drink, drink the water until I got full,” he said. “It was the feeling that it was the first time I drank water.”

It had been nine or 10 days since he had bathed. It’s hard to estimate the feeling of that in words, but he tried. “That shower,” Khalid said, “it was like you have a heavy weight on your shoulders and you just, like, drop it away.” He watched the flow of water come over his head and take a swirl of dust and dirt to his feet and down the drain.

The smugglers provided a kind of amenity kit. There were toiletries, and razors to shave. “We all shaved actually,” said Khalid, nodding that this was essential to blend in with the crowd, to appear manicured and smooth.

“See how they work?” Khalid said, “They think about every single detail. It’s crazy, but these people, it’s like a profession for them.”

The trafficker is attached to the outcome of a successful arrival in Europe, because of the structure of their pay. The $3,000 per person fee, in fact, isn’t a sum immediately accessible, rather, the payment posts if, and only if, the passenger being trafficked makes it to his or her final destination, Khalid explained. “They’re not allowed to take the money even if I die, even if – even if whatever thing happens to me they are not allowed to take the money until I report that I am in this point, that I am in Germany right now….That’s why they are thinking about the smallest details.”

He was desperate for a night’s rest in a bed, but there wasn’t time to relax – he only stayed at the hotel for six hours before it was again time to move. At 8:00pm a taxi arrived at the hotel for his transfer to Germany. The driver agreed only to take him to the bridge, avoiding a proper border crossing himself. After 8 hours of driving Khalid got out of the car and closed the door. He opened his phone, because like so much of his trip, he was going to document this moment. He recorded a video on the bridge making his first steps into Germany, at the eastern border city, Frankfurt an der Oder.

It was a quick stop. He continued immediately to Berlin, about two hours west of the border town. He was shocked by the city when he arrived, the fact that he was experiencing it after having seen only images of this world-class place on the internet or on his phone.

“Everyone was running off to their world, everyone was just busy,” said Khalid, when he arrived in the throes of Berlin’s metropolitan crowds. People refused to speak English with him when he asked for help, even at the info desk at the train station. “The main station of Berlin, it’s bigger than the airport in my country,” he said. And after all, it was a friend in Bochum, Germany, who booked his ticket for him. He was lost besides. It was hard to understand how the train system worked without knowing a word of German and this being his first time there.

He was also hungry. Covid rules were still in place so finding a restaurant where he could sit down and be served was impossible. He rushed to the first place he saw for takeaway and ordered a chicken sandwich. He stood outside with the hot sandwich sinking his teeth into it, “It was the nicest chicken burger I ever ate,” he said. And finally feeling a bit more nourished, he focused his energy and got to his next train, to Bochum, where he’d stay briefly with his friend. It had been seven years since he saw him in Syria.

It was one night at his friend’s home, mostly staying inside watching movies and relaxing on the couch. And though he was a little paranoid to be in public, he’d get out to explore the city anyway. “But you feel weird,” he said. “You feel like you’re not welcome, let’s say. Because everyone refused to speak English.”

There was just one woman who used English with him, and even then it was because he volunteered to help her with a heavy bag she was carrying. It was altogether confusing and unnerving to see the response of the people around him. In Berlin, a woman told him he looked askew wearing a red tie and suit; he looked akin to a Russian oligarch, she said. In Bochum, people assumed from his dark hair that he was Turkish, and spoke Turkish to him, a language he doesn’t speak.

“If just a small misunderstanding happened with the police, they’re going to take me and force me to stay in Germany – and I didn’t want that,” said Khalid. He was paranoid about being out. In Bochum, he fell asleep on one of the trains. It took him to the end of the line, where, in his suit and tie, a couple of officers approached to say it was the last stop. He feigned urgency, glanced at his watch, which was broken, and said “Holy moly, I’m late for an appointment!” and dashed off. “It was all because of the suit.”

On 19 November 2021, Khalid took a train from Bochum to Aachen, a small city that borders Belgium to its southwest, and the Netherlands to its northwest. He had done some internet research to figure this next step. “You know, the rumors are really bad. They told me, if you take a train immediately from Bochum to the Netherlands there’s going to be a border check and they’re going to leave you inside Germany,” he said. “So I decided to enter the Netherlands walking.”

At 9:00am he reached Aachen train station, exited, and began walking. It may have been just 40 minutes walking to the Dutch border, but there was still a distance to go. As he crossed into Dutch territory he was nonetheless elated. He called his father thanking him for supporting him on this journey. He could feel the possibilities growing, in spite of the exhaustion.

The nearest police station according to his Google searches was fifty kilometers away in the southern Dutch city, Maastricht. There was cash in his pocket but the public transit system in the Netherlands is digital. He begged the bus drivers to let him aboard with the money he had, but was turned away – company policy. “But I was happy. I wasn’t annoyed at all,” he said, he was in the country he wanted to be and so close to his goal.

And it was almost comic how the challenges continued to pile on in the final stretch. The SIM card was spent on his phone, so there was no taxi service he could call or alternative transportation to look up. There were two holes in his shoes, the same shoes he’d had from the start, back in Belarus and in the Polish forest. “I walked from 11:00am till eight o’clock in the night, one way,” he said. “I was taking one or two minute breaks, because if I make it a little bit longer, my feet would start hurting.”

The starting city in the Netherlands was Vaals, in the extreme southeast of the country, just beyond the German border. He took in views of the countryside while he walked. He watched cows grazing, he said, “I saw how beautiful it is over there.” When night fell and he reached Maastricht station at 8:00pm, he saw a restaurant and ate more than five sandwiches, famished. He hooked into the station’s Wifi and contacted a friend who booked him a ticket online.

The rest happened quickly.

He took a train from Maastricht to Amsterdam. He stayed the night in Amsterdam with a friend. The next day, 20 November 2021, he went to the police station in the city. “It was the first time I entered a police department without being scared,” Khalid said, “I wasn’t scared at all. I cried tears like a little baby. I think it was because of the shock.”

The police took his passport, handed him a train ticket east to the first-claim asylum camp. Like in Germany, he was lost. He asked directions in English anyway. To his surprise, “everyone was welcoming, smiling. Everyone was speaking English, everyone is – it’s like moving from one world to another, moving from Germany to the Netherlands.”

“That’s why I love this country,” Khalid said. "It’s the people. The people always make it good.”

He took the train from Amsterdam to Emmen. He took the bus from Emmen to Ter Apel camp and claimed his asylum with the Dutch immigration office, the IND, on 20 November 2021.

He is 26 years of age now and living in Waddinxveen, Netherlands. We recorded this story at his former housing camp, a temporary men’s shelter in a converted expo hall beside the TT World motor raceway in Assen, Netherlands on 13 May 2022, and in Waddinxveen, Netherlands on 3 March 2023.

Khalid is an amazing human being.

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