Sometimes it’s not easy to talk about memories. They are mostly vague, distorted, embellished, dramatized and full of gaps. Many things cannot be checked in retrospect, and yet experiencing and remembering opens up a special perspective on certain events.
Sometimes memories are the only traces left of the past. It’s the same when Asma, a young Afghan woman, talks about her escape.
Asma told me about her memories. She fled Iran to Germany with her family in 2015. The then 15-year-old remembers fragments and various details. She forgot a lot, didn’t understand a lot.
She can’t remember if she was in the mountains in Turkey for ten days or a month, but she remembers getting on a boat at 1am and arriving in Greece at noon. She does not know the word “smuggler” but speaks of men to whom she gave money. She knows in which countries they were on the route, but does not know a single city by name.
Nevertheless, I would like to tell Asma’s story here. I cannot verify whether the facts are correct. I can only roughly understand the exact escape route, since she herself does not know exactly. If I had talked to her parents or her sisters, they probably would have told me the story differently.
But this is Asma’s view of what she experienced. It is her memories, made up of fragments and events that have been memorable for her personally and that convey a glimpse of what it means to set out and leave everything behind, only with a vague hope for a better life .
Asma was actually born in Afghanistan. But she doesn’t remember this country. She was about six years old when she went to Iran with her parents and siblings. It was because of the Taliban – that’s what her parents told her. And they were very poor. “Our family suffered a lot,” she says.
The eldest brother, whom she did not know, died there. The only thing she could take with her was her mother tongue: Dari. But the memories are missing.
Today she knows that her childhood was difficult. At the time she didn’t understand. They lived in the Iranian city of Shiraz. The parents shared a small apartment with six children. She remembers that there was a small, dark room and that she was afraid to sleep in it. Instead, the whole family slept next to each other on the floor in the large room.
She says: “My mother was a housewife and my father was a kind of delivery man. He loaded a handcart and brought various things to the stores. There is no such thing here in Germany. But in Iran, these jobs do Afghans. Afghans do heavy work there because they have a lot of strength. We didn’t have much money to live on. We had to work hard.”
But then something happened that changed everything. Her older brother, who was 17 or 18 at the time, became ill. They had to take him to a hospital with severe abdominal pain. He died. “We never found out what happened to my brother,” says Asma. According to her, the hospital wanted money, which they didn’t have. That’s why they didn’t tell them anything. “My mother was very sad,” she recalls. “She always fell and had no strength. I always had to help her get home. She cried so much that her eyes turned white.
The decision to leave the country arose from the hopeless situation they were living in. One day Asma’s mother got up early and said: “We’ll just go.” And they left, only her older sister stayed and got married in Iran. Her parents and her three younger sisters went to Tehran.
Asma’s memories are patchy here. She knows that her parents sold a house in Afghanistan and ran up debts to relatives in order to get the money they needed to flee. She remembers one man who just ran away with the money and another who felt sorry for them and helped them. She knows that her mother organized everything and kept the family together.
They sat crammed together in a car from Tehran to the border. And then there were the mountains in Turkey. She remembers steep cliffs from which she almost fell. Her sisters were small and walked at the back of the crowd. Her mother took care not to lose them.
Asma says, “The man hit my mother and yelled, ‘Faster! Faster!’ He hit me once too. But I could walk by myself.” And then there was the water. She cannot say what kind of water it was. She remembers that her little sister fell in and that the man wanted to drown her there. “My mother then wanted to throw herself into the water,” she says. “She said, ‘If we do, we’ll both die!
And if we have to go back, then all together!’ She didn’t want us to be separated.” According to Asma’s estimate, they were in Turkey between ten days and a month. And eventually they came to the sea.
“We were in the water from 1 a.m. to 11 a.m. We were in Greece at 12 p.m.,” she says. In her narrative, the boat was made of plastic. One had gone down, but they could get onto another. Your memories are fragmentary at this point.
“My little sister didn’t have a life jacket,” she says. Her mother broke her t-shirt so she could hold on. Arriving in Greece was also chaotic. She speaks of “Viktoria Park” and probably means Victoria Square in Athens, a contact point for refugees.
She remembers many people, languages she didn’t understand and one person who gave her a banana. Overcrowded trains, foot marches and sleepless days and nights followed.
At some point they were there. In Munich. “We had to wait a few days and were checked,” she says. “We had to undress. They checked to see if we had any weapons with us. They wrote down how much money we have. I’ve forgotten a lot about what happened.” She recalls having their heads sprayed with spray because of the lice. “But we didn’t have any lice,” she says.
They lived in different camps. Once they were given eggs, which they weren’t used to, but their mother forced them to eat everything. There were many African people and they were scared because they had never seen black people in their life. And they slept in bunk beds from which her sister fell.
The police came and arrested her. A resident beat her for no reason. Asma’s sister once had to go to the hospital where she could not communicate. Various experiences follow each other at this time. Anecdotes from a time when they could not find peace.
For about three years now, the family has lived in accommodation where they can lock the door to their living area. You are allowed to stay in Germany, but finding your own apartment is not easy. Asma says they hardly ever talk about what happened. Otherwise your mother would cry. Her father hardly speaks. And her sisters hardly seem to remember the escape.
Asma thinks about the now. She is now 22 years old, has learned German and is doing her qualification. She interprets for her parents, who hardly speak any German. She cares, reads the mail. The mother does the rest: shopping, cooking, washing.
Asma’s everyday life is shaped by the close family ties. “We fight a lot, but we also laugh a lot,” she says. What does she wish for? “I want a better and safer life. I don’t want to be afraid that someone will shoot me or that a bomb will explode under my feet.” She wants to get an education and buy a motorcycle. “I want to be a little bit free,” she says. (Eileen Kelpe, volunteer at the Michaelsbund)
The original of this post “A young woman’s experience of flight: “I want a better and safer life”” comes from Sankt Michaelsbund.
