can’t shake the fear that something could go horribly wrong — as it has for thousands who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean or at the hands of ruthless people traffickers.
As Khalil and Maha tell it, they crossed into Turkey 25 days ago, a number Maha keeps repeating, having religiously counted every night of their flight.
From there, they made their way to Bodrum on Turkey’s western coast, roaming through the woods until they found a smuggler with an inflatable boat.
Maha says the boat was meant to carry four people, but the smuggler packed the entire family and seven others on board. Several hundred metres off the coast, water began entering the boat and the group almost drowned, before turning around and making it back to land.
From there, they travelled north to Izmir to find a better way across the Aegean Sea, using money given to Khalil by his family to pay the 3,600 euro fee — 1,200 euros per adult and 600 per child — for transport to Mitilini on the island of Lesbos.
After two days on Lesbos, they reached the Greek mainland. Using smugglers, they then navigated the woods of Macedonia and Serbia and ended up in a camp just across the border in Hungary. “We saw one man try to escape by climbing a fence,” said Maha. “They searched for him with planes and the police beat him when they caught him. I saw him bleed.”
There are dozens of Syrians on the train. One man who looks on the brink of exhaustion fears his brother may be among the 71 found dead in a refrigeration truck last week on an Austrian motorway. “It’s very difficult, very difficult,” he says.
Khalil and Maha are Kurds and proud of their heritage. A year ago, they say, they tried to escape the fighting in northern Syria by moving to Erbil in the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq. But they found it too expensive and were forced to return to Kobani.
Khalil takes pride in how the Kurds fought back IS militants there. He shows pictures on his phone of Kurdish women fighters, proof he says that Kurds are more like Westerners than Arabs. As the train pulls into St Poelten station in Austria, activists are waiting on the platform holding up banners of support for the refugees. But Maha is scared.
“Is this a protest against us?” she asks.
Two hours later, close to midnight, the train crosses the border into Germany, stopping in Passau. Two German women, carrying state-of-the-art sport bikes, enter and shriek when they see Maha, breastfeeding Nour beneath two empty bike racks. Gesturing wildly, they insist she get up. They have paid to use the bike racks and say they don’t care where the family comes from or how tired they are.