Khaled, 19 and Anas, 18.
“We’d been in the boat for 21 hours. The engine stopped, and then we just rolled backwards and forwards in the dark. I’d heard about boats sinking, so I was really scared.”
Adrift in the Mediterranean in the small wooden boat, Khaled and Anas waited – with hundreds of others – hoping against hope for the Italian navy to arrive. “Until I saw the ship on the horizon, I thought we’d soon be at the bottom of the sea. Just more numbers in the newspaper.”
School friends from Dera’a, south-western Syria, Khaled and Anas fled the country together in 2014. With the war behind them, they were smuggled by a network of traffickers across land and sea, rarely knowing where they were headed next. They were hidden in blacked-out minivans, squeezed onto the back of Toyota pick-ups that lurched through the desert, and forced to wade blindly into the sea in the dead of night to clamber aboard dinghies. “I guess you’d call it an adventure,” says Khaled laughing, unnervingly at ease with his experiences. “Anything was better than staying in Dera’a.”
They are now living at a refugee centre on the outskirts of Munich, sharing a room with several other Syrians and a much-used shisha pipe. Smoky afternoons are passed sharing stories of their “adventures”, and of their experiences in Germany – Christmas lunch with new German friends, ice hockey matches, and singing on the stage in Berlin. “Living here in Germany, we get to continue our adventure.”
(Words by Katie Welsford and Emma Pearson)
Writing: We lived together, travelled together, we will continue on the road together. A friend in exile… is home
Germany 2015
“We’d been in the boat for 21 hours. The engine stopped, and then we just rolled backwards and forwards in the dark. I’d heard about boats sinking, so I was really scared.”
Adrift in the Mediterranean in the small wooden boat, Khaled and Anas waited – with hundreds of others – hoping against hope for the Italian navy to arrive. “Until I saw the ship on the horizon, I thought we’d soon be at the bottom of the sea. Just more numbers in the newspaper.”
School friends from Dera’a, south-western Syria, Khaled and Anas fled the country together in 2014. With the war behind them, they were smuggled by a network of traffickers across land and sea, rarely knowing where they were headed next. They were hidden in blacked-out minivans, squeezed onto the back of Toyota pick-ups that lurched through the desert, and forced to wade blindly into the sea in the dead of night to clamber aboard dinghies. “I guess you’d call it an adventure,” says Khaled laughing, unnervingly at ease with his experiences. “Anything was better than staying in Dera’a.”
They are now living at a refugee centre on the outskirts of Munich, sharing a room with several other Syrians and a much-used shisha pipe. Smoky afternoons are passed sharing stories of their “adventures”, and of their experiences in Germany – Christmas lunch with new German friends, ice hockey matches, and singing on the stage in Berlin. “Living here in Germany, we get to continue our adventure.”
(Words by Katie Welsford and Emma Pearson)
Writing: We lived together, travelled together, we will continue on the road together. A friend in exile… is home
Germany 2015