Out of Syria: France took me in and now I must repay the debt

There were 120 of us, mainly Syrian but some Iraqi and Afghani too, I think. Some were on their own but there were families too. In that moment we were as one. Any differences were not important. We'd been brought to the airport in Athens from camps across the city because the French government had determined that we should be given an opportunity to build a new life in France. Unlike the almost 7,000 others still in the camps, we were about to take that final step to a life we'd fled home to realise.

What we did not share was the nature of our journey to then. I knew mine to have been harrowing but, relative to many others, to have been nothing. The decision to leave my family in Turkey was because we calculated it lessened the risk of failure. Others who boarded the flight to France were alone because a bullet or bomb had determined that was their reality.

Refugees or migrants have no monopoly on hardship but there can rarely have been an occasion when 120 people boarded a commercial flight between two European capitals with so much emotional baggage. In the group known to me was a tapestry of heartbreak that made me ashamed at the upset I felt because I would miss the imminent birth of our second child.

Among us were some for whom war had buried partners or children. My sacrifice was temporary. The next stage of my journey strengthened the prospect of a peaceful future with my family. For others, the flight to Paris carried only the hope of a necessary emotional transfusion that would allow new life to run through the veins of those carrying most hurt and least cause for optimism.

Raw emotion

It’s extraordinary that in the midst of such raw emotion humans can still think of the most basic things – the casual cup of coffee or whether you’ll get a window or an aisle seat – but I found my mind behaving as it had done over the years I’d lived and worked in the Gulf. I morphed almost into the businessman I had once been and the one that I saw in Athens airport moving purposefully through check-in, security and on to departure gates.

As quickly, I drifted back to the secure, almost comfortable, status of refugee where nothing would be expected of me other than to follow the instructions of those in charge. It was the feeling of dependency that had started to take hold over the months in the camp.

I reminded myself that the last time I’d travelled between countries it was in a dinghy in the dead of night when the “pilot” had, with the engine running, abandoned me and 39 other souls to our fate, somewhere 500 metres off the coast of Turkey. That image grounded me about my status among the thousands in Athens airport that morning.

My son was born on my second night in Paris. Maybe fate determined his father should no longer be in a camp when my little boy came into our world. My wife sounded exhausted when we eventually spoke. Relieved and happy but, completely drained by, not just the delivery, but by the tension of the last few weeks.

That night, holding our little boy, she asked me to not speak with her mother. It seemed that now I had made it to France my mother-in-law was even more angry. My wife and I had risked all to find a new life in Europe. Now, in France, we had a clear path to all being together within a year. Of course, I should have been with my wife for the birth but the only way that could have happened would have been to have taken her and my daughter on the hazardous journey from Turkey to Greece. I could never have taken that risk.

I’m proud of what we have done. I’m proud we did it together. I’m proud that in our marriage we jointly make the important decisions about our family. I’m proud my wife and two children are safe and I have now just to prove myself a worthy future citizen of France in order for the easiest – but most important – part of their journey to be made.

It could take up to a year but my wife and children are one flight away from being with me when, inshallah (if God wills), our life as a family of the French republic can commence. It will be then when our decision that I should leave Turkey for Greece alone will be shown to have been correct. Only then.

Empty of soul

It was numbing to be a newly arrived Syrian refugee and days later the atrocity occurred in Nice. This was not the action of a believer in the Koran, not the action of a follower of Muhammad. This was the action of someone so consumed by hatred and so empty of soul that he considered himself worthy of ending the lives of scores of innocent people. Children. Whole families. Grandparents. More than 80 people mowed down by a maniac in a truck who would have had us believe it was done in the name of religion. My religion!

I felt darkness, a mixture of shame and anger. I worried that friends in the camps in Greece who had interviews scheduled with the French embassy would find their cases stalled. They did not. Their appointments were conducted as though nothing had changed. I hope earnestly that all of us given this chance by France will repay its openness by becoming committed citizens who will contribute to French life.

Mustafa is a pseudonym adopted to protect the identity of the author, who is a refugee from Syria. He was in conversation with Fintan Drury