Registration at the Border
- By Erica Johnson Debeljak
Refugees under police escort to Brežice last October.
(Jeff J Mitchell, Getty Images, from The Guardian)
During the month of October 2015, Hungary closed its southern borders and refugees crossing Serbia were diverted through Croatia and Slovenia. Each day some eight thousand refugees began entering Slovenia, a country with a population of less than two million. Upon entering the Schengen zone in Slovenia, refugees were gathered at three collection points—Dobova, Rigonci, and Brežice—where they were required to register before continuing their journey onward to Austria and Germany. On October 20, a fire erupted at the Brežice collection center, burning twenty tents, and blackening the earth. The refugees burned fires to keep warm during the cold autumn nights, though rumors circulated that the fire was lit deliberately to protest the poor conditions at the center. The logistical problems caused by the influx of refugees have caused tensions so great in the region that there is now talk in the local media of renewed Balkan wars.
She arrived at the clinic with her baby at about ten in the morning. It wasn’t a proper clinic, just a couple of hastily equipped rooms, next to the warehouse where the clothing and food was stored. The clinic was manned by international medical staff and by a single translator, named Mohammed. The other two receiving points on the border were not set up to offer full medical care, so our little clinic did a brisk business, mostly dealing with upper respiratory infections and gastrointestinal ailments, and, Mohammed—the only translator in the muddy miserable patch of the world we occupied at that moment—was needed everywhere at once.
A police officer had driven the woman and her baby from one of the other two collection points on the border, but nobody knew which one. Likewise nobody remembered seeing the policeman who had dropped her off, and even if they had, he probably would have been wearing a surgical mask, so it would be virtually impossible to identify him among all the black-clad officers swarming through the area. Each of the police and soldiers and other uniformed personnel wore surgical masks and gloves. We were supposed to wear them too, had been instructed to do so by the head of the civil protection unit who was our coordinator. He told us that we wouldn’t be allowed to work without them and that we had to change them every hour. The weather was damp and cold, almost freezing, but my hands still managed to sweat profusely beneath the synthetic rubber material and I kept pulling the mask down from my face. I somehow thought that they would be able to understand me better if they could see my lips, and that I would be able to understand them too, although this train of thought was irrational. They weren’t wearing masks, after all, and in most cases we shared no common language. Only a few spoke a word or two of English and none the local Slovenian.
By the time I noticed her, the woman stood in the narrow entryway of the makeshift clinic. Her baby had been diagnosed with measles and given whatever palliative care might ease the symptoms during their onward journey. Under normal circumstances, several days of bed rest would be recommended, until the fever passed, but these were not normal circumstances. The woman was small, almost childlike, and seemed even smaller, overwhelmed as she was by her squalling, screaming, pockmarked baby. She wore a headscarf, not black but a shade of taupe, a blanket draped across her shoulders, as well as several heavy skirts that fell down to her narrow ankles and small feet. Despite the attire, she did not look as if she came from a village. She had a slightly cosmopolitan air about her, and I imagined she was the daughter of a bourgeois family from Damascus or Aleppo. The pale skin of her face and hands was delicate and translucent, almost the same color as her headscarf, and her eyes a bright almond black.
She stood there in the hallway, feet apart, knees slightly bent, as she rocked the screaming baby with a kind of robotic desperation. I had the urge to relieve her of the child, to give her a chance to calm down and catch her breath, and at the same time soothe the baby a little more gently. I’d seen uplifting scenes on television of volunteers raising babies from rubber rafts, holding them in their arms, saving them from the frigid waves. But the head of the civil protection unit was obsessed with hygiene above all else, and I didn’t know if we were allowed to handle sick babies.
Eventually the woman quieted the baby without my help, but still did not leave our area. She sank down onto a large metal box-shaped canteen that stored hot tea, property of the Slovenian Ministry of Defense. There she sat, sleeping baby across her knees, motionless as a statue, staring out at the line of refugees waiting for their belongings to be searched and for their names to be registered with the border police. Some time later, through the translation services of Mohammed, we learned why she did not rejoin their ranks.
The policeman who had driven her to the clinic several hours earlier had declined to take her husband and her other two children into the squad car. According to a Red Cross volunteer, the local police were reluctant to take large groups into their vehicles.
Did she know where she had come? Was it Dobova? Rigonci?
No, she shook her head, she didn’t know.
Did she recognize the police who had driven her?
She looked around at the masked police officers milling about. No, she shook her head.
Had she made any arrangements with her husband?
The baby was crying, the policeman was leaving, there was no time.
Nearly a thousand refugees waited in the fenced areas behind the warehouse to be lined up and registered. The hundreds that had already been registered waited in another fenced area in front of the warehouse for the buses that would take them on to Austria. The two other such registration points on the border were equally crowded, equally chaotic. There was little coordination between the three locations. There was no organized meeting place for separated families.
They’re all going to the same place anyway, a policeman shrugged his shoulders.
I leaned forward and touched her shoulder. It will be all right, I spoke from behind my mask.
Just that single touch and those few words, so clearly a lie in any language, released the tears she had been holding back. They streamed from her dark eyes across her cheeks and into her scarf. I withdrew my hand. Mohammed recited the names of her husband and two children and the Red Cross volunteer wrote them down on a piece of paper. The two borrowed a megaphone from a police officer and marched off to the back of the warehouse to meet the buses coming from Rigonci and call out the names. Before they left, the Red Cross volunteer asked me to find a more comfortable place for her, somewhere to sit other than a tea canteen, a place to put her baby down for a few minutes.
The warehouse where we were based wasn’t really a warehouse, just a long corridor in the basement of the Brežice police station with four or five small rooms on one side of the hallway. The corridor itself was stacked almost to the ceiling with donated clothing. Shoes, the most needed commodity, were jumbled around the sink at the entrance to the corridor. Some small effort at organization had been made: children’s clothing at the far end of the corridor, men’s and women’s in the center. Diapers and infant’s clothing occupied one of the small rooms, blankets and men’s parkas another room. Only a fraction of this bounty made its way to the refugees. They weren’t allowed to look through the clothes themselves and find what they needed, so we volunteers ran back and forth between the fenced-in areas, trying to interpret shouted requests, fingers spread to indicate shoe size. Despite the freezing temperatures, the men’s parkas never made it out to any would-be recipients. Packages of diapers remained untouched, forgotten in the confusion.
I had noticed while looking through the shoes and clothing that one room along the corridor had no supplies in it, just two single beds. I guided the woman back to that room and she laid her baby down on one of the beds. She sat for a moment and I brought her a cup of hot tea—also not routinely offered to the refugees because of the complexity of serving it and the difficulty of holding a hot plastic cup with all the other stuff, the babies and the bags, they had in their hands—but she refused. She held up her hand in a gesture of self-abnegation and murmured two English words she knew.
My family.
I stood by helplessly, thinking that perhaps this was not best place for her after all, hidden inside. If her husband came by, he wouldn’t see her. But at least she was able to put the baby down for a while, though she herself could hardly relax. Indeed she had hardly sat down on the bed before she bounded up again and rushed outside and began speaking in Arabic to some of the people standing in line. It was as if, momentarily relieved of the weight and responsibility of the sick baby, all the panic and terror she had been holding at bay flooded her body. She cried with a sudden wild abandon, gesticulating with her small pale hands. It was the most animated and expressive she’d been since her arrival.
Feeling uneasy, I returned to the baby and found the head of the civil protection unit standing in the corridor outside the room in an absolute fury. He yelled at me, demanding to know why I had brought the child back there, and, in an instant, I realized that I had broken the most fundamental rule of our arrangement. The whole complex choreography of the center—the masks and gloves, the police in riot gear, the fenced-in areas, the food and clothing stacked inside the building, the refugees stacked outside—had a clear logic: yes, to provide minimal care in a humanitarian crisis, but above all to keep us and them apart, in our two separate spheres. Narrow conduits of contact existed—Mohammed, the international doctors, the volunteers rushing in and out of the warehouse, shoes and sweaters clutched in their hands—but that one of the refugees, even a baby, would be allowed among us, in our inner sanctum, represented a violation of the worst kind, flagrant as a drop of blood on a pristine coverlet. It wasn’t so much about hygiene or security: it was a matter of principle and definition, a question of caste, and they were the untouchables.
I pleaded with him to stop yelling, so as not to wake the baby, and promised to solve the problem immediately. Earlier, I had spotted a white plastic picnic chair next to the dumpsters. I grabbed a blanket and ran for the chair and soon the woman and baby were settled in front of the warehouse.
At about that time, two hours before the end of my shift, a number of events occurred that distracted me from the fate of the young mother. A good Samaritan arrived with ten sterilized bottles and we made formula with hot water from the sink in the corridor. Three buses arrived to take some, but not nearly all, of the registered refugees on to Austria. In the ensuing panic, a melee occurred, and a young man was stabbed in the head. The victim was treated in our clinic and then rushed to hospital. Shortly after, more than a thousand unregistered refugees were dropped off in the larger fenced-in area behind the warehouse and it was decided we would set up a food line there. The next hour was spent transporting food and tables and plastic bottles of water around the building, while the crowds of men, women, and children watched us from behind the fence. At one point, I ran into Mohammed and asked him to check on the young mother, to tell her that there was a place for lost families to regroup on the other side of the Austrian border. I saw the volunteer from the Red Cross who shook her head in disgust, remarking that the new arrivals would surely have to spend the night in this godforsaken place.
For the next hour, I stood behind the tables, distributing two slices of bread, a can of sardines, and a bottle of water to each adult, apples, dates, and biscuits to the children, a liter of milk for families with three children or more. A half hour after my shift had ended, as darkness descended and the black muddy fields grew blacker and colder still, I told the two volunteers that I had driven from Ljubljana in the morning that I wanted to leave.
Were they ready to go with me?
They were.
We dropped off our bright orange vests and nametags at the front of the police station. We dropped our surgical masks and gloves into a garbage bin. We walked past the dumpsters, past the stinking area where the six portable toilets were being serviced, past the row of ambulances and military vehicles, and finally across the muddy parking lot. We got in the car, I started the engine and pulled out of the lot, heading in the direction of the freeway—the direction of home.
Erica Johnson Debeljak is a translator, writer, and columnist who lives in Slovenia. Among other works, she is the author of Forbidden Bread; her novel, Tovarna koles (The Bicycle Factory) was published this year by Modrijan Press.
