Hope and Hopelessness
Seven weeks later, November
WHEN I TOLD Ben, the division editor for overseas correspondents that I’d be spending Thanksgiving in Paris, he sent me on a detour via the Netherlands to follow up on a story that had surfaced in Reuters the international news agency, and he wanted a more in depth exploration.
After the crazy chaotic color of Cairo, it was a different sort of culture shock landing at Schiphol airport, close to Amsterdam’s city center. The wide concourses and plethora of luxury goods took some getting used to.
I hopped on the local train, which was a twenty-five minute ride downtown, scanning the posters for the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, wishing I was here for a little longer, but also wishing this job was out of the way so I could be hours nearer to seeing Jack.
We’d hardly managed to speak to each other at all during the intervening weeks. He’d been on exercises, with a comms blackout for much of the time. Sometimes I woke in the morning to find a short text or sometimes an email waiting for me. Mostly, I woke to the disappointment of not hearing from him at all.
I was becoming addicted to Jack, but instead of the cravings fading the longer we were away from each other, they intensified, doubling in strength every week we were apart. It wasn’t a good recipe for a long-distance relationship, and that worried me.
I checked the address I’d been given, then entered the coffee shop, pulling my small wheeled suitcase behind me, and glanced around.
I immediately caught the eye of an older woman whose round smiling face was welcoming.
My interviewee was an older Dutch lady named Jacoba, living on the southern edge of the Zuidplaspolder, one of the huge manmade polders that held back the North Atlantic, less than an hour from the city.
I knew that she was seventy-three, but she looked a decade younger with her bright eyes and mostly dark hair. She stood to shake my hand, towering over me.
She caught my surprise and laughed.
“I’m the little one in my family.”
I thought she was joking.
“All my sisters are taller. I’m only 1.78 meters.”
I squinted, working out that she was about 5’ 10”.
“I’m Jacoba Visser. Thank you for coming. I was surprised when I got an email from such a prestigious newspaper as the New York Times. But please, call me Coby.”
Her English was excellent and I keenly felt my lack of linguistic skills.
“Well, we really are interested in world news,” I said, smiling at her to soften the words.
“I’m glad to hear it.”
We ordered our coffees and Jacoba told me to try the oliebollen, the Dutch version of donuts, but with dried fruit and lemon zest, then sprinkled with powdered sugar. Heaven. I couldn’t help thinking how much Jack would have enjoyed them. Despite his denial, that man had a sweet tooth.
I sat back in my chair with a pen and notepad, as well as recording our conversation on my phone, ready to hear her story.
“I was born during the War,” she said. “I was very young, so sometimes I’m not sure if it’s my memories or the stories I was told growing up. But we were an occupied country, the Nazis controlling us with an iron fist, and my father had a wife and baby daughter to feed. He was a blacksmith and also skilled with metalwork, an enormous man with hands like hams, very strong. The Germans needed men like him, so we were better off than many because he was of value, but by the time I came along, many of the people were starving. It was five long years before we were liberated. I’ve heard the stories a thousand times from my parents.
“My father used to pretend to like the Germans. By day, he’d fix things for them and by night he’d be with the Resistance blowing them up again. Very dangerous, and all the time he’d be stealing food from the Nazis. My mother told me that one time he came home with a pocketful of butter that he’d taken from the plate of SS officer at an outdoor café while his back was turned. My father could have been shot for that, but we were hungry.”
Her eyes tightened as she talked, the old memories crowding out her smile.
“I was only four by the time the war ended, we were all as thin as beanpoles, skinny ghosts with bad teeth. But I do remember the casual violence, the daily struggle for survival. And I still remember the two Jewish families who lived in the village and disappeared one night, never to be seen or heard from again. I’ve often wondered whether they fled or were taken. Now I’ll never know.” She sighed. “I promised myself then that I would always support those in need, and I have. I raised my children to be givers not takers.” Her large hands folded in her lap. “I supported the asylum seekers when they first came. We all did. We welcomed them, housed them, clothed them, but now . . . we have too many immigrants,” she said sadly. “We are a small country. We have to build polders to make new land, and we are always afraid that one day, one storm, and the sea will take our land back. But they keep coming, hundreds every week. We house them, clothe them, feed them and give them money to live. I was one of the first ones volunteering at the shelters, before we became more organized.”
She shook her head.
“But now I sound like Geert Wilders, that awful man.”
“What do you mean?”
Until now, I’d just listened to what she had to tell me. A good journalist knows when to ask and when to talk. Coby had a story to tell.
“Wilders is a right wing politician. He says all the migrants should go home. I used to ask, to what? To broken cities? To killing? But now . . . I don’t want them here anymore.”
“What changed your mind?” I asked gently.
She pushed her chin out.
“It happened this summer. I was on my bicycle. It was warm out and I had shorts on. I was going to pick up vegetables from a friend who grows them. There were three of them lounging by the bus stop, drinking. And they called me a whore as I rode past. A whore! Because I had bare legs! I’m seventy-three years old! No one has ever spoken to me like that my whole life!”
Anger and hurt warred in her bright blue eyes, and she sighed.
“Where I live, it’s not a remarkable town, or even very interesting. But now it’s exceptional for the large numbers of dark-haired, dark-eyed young men huddled together in groups, watching the passing cars. It’s not because they’re Muslim,” she said tiredly, “It’s because they’re young men without roots. They’ve left behind their families, their community leaders, everything they’ve known, and all they carry with them is their fear and anger. Go anywhere in the world and take a group of homeless young men, and you will see the same thing.”
Then she looked up at me.
“But I’m old and this scares me. I don’t want this in my home town. I want to cycle in my shorts in summer as I have always done. I don’t want to be called a whore. They shouldn’t be here if they can’t respect our ways.”
Her face sagged, her youthfulness drained by strong emotions.
“It’s not much of a story, I know. But I am not the only one. Other women started telling me that they were afraid to travel by themselves now. I have survived a war, Miss Buckman, but now I feel like the war has come to my land again.”
We talked a little more and I thanked her for her time. I didn’t want to be late for my next appointment, but her words about being rootless struck a chord.
As she’d hinted, the problem wasn’t just cultural dissonance, it was the lack of roots. These young men—and they were 99% young men—had been sent away to make better lives for themselves and eventually their whole families. But here, in a strange country without their traditions or their community ties, or even a common language, the guidelines for acceptable behavior had been torn away. There were few older men to govern them, no mothers, grandmothers or sisters who could remind them that half the world was female. They couldn’t work and were reliant on state benefits, stuck in a cycle of boredom and frustration while Europe decided if it was possible to assimilate the 13 million migrants who had arrived over the last .
I also suspected that Coby was right: large numbers of unsupervised young men of any nationality would be equally untamable in similar circumstances. Even children—I’d read Lord of the Flies in high school.
My next stop was to interview some of those young men in one of Amsterdam’s many shelters.
I met with Pieter, one of the volunteers who worked with migrants in the city.
“I want to show you two places today, Miss Buckman, so you can see what we’re up against.”
The first place he took me was an abandoned office building not far from the central area near Dam Square.
“Thirty-two men live here,” he said. “They moved in because otherwise they would be out on the street. We don’t know the real figures, but the government says that there are 100,000 refugees and asylum seekers in my country. It could be double that—we just don’t know.”
He pulled aside a battered tarp and led me into the darkened building.
“There’s no heating or electricity, but they have access to running water and toilets. That’s all. There’s nowhere to cook, so they survive by begging on the streets and on what organizations like mine can give them.” He gave me a sideways look. “Sometimes they steal because they are driven by hunger. It is terrible, Miss Buckman, to be hungry.”
He shook his head.
“Internationally, we are seen as a tolerant, liberal country. But the anti-immigration party is popular in the opinion polls, and the government doesn’t want to attract more asylum-seekers. Now they have implemented a harsh policy, very tough, especially cruel during our freezing winter months.”
“Can the men here apply for asylum?” I asked.
“One or two of them, perhaps. But the others, they’re all men who have had their claims rejected. They are supposed to go back to their country of origin. But they are afraid, so they run away from the official shelters, and now they live here.”
The building felt cold and damp. I saw piles of cardboard boxes that had been dragged inside to give some insulation from the coming winter. Piles of newspapers were scattered like straw, and the stale air stank of despair.
“They can’t work, so they have no money. We bring them food, but there’s so little we can do.”
His frustration and anger bled through his words.
“Will they talk to me?” I asked, as I snapped some photographs.
Pieter nodded.
“I have arranged for you to speak to Tareq. He came from Libya, and walked or hitched from Italy. When the Jungle was torn down in Calais, he ended up here.”
I’d heard about the infamous Jungle, a massive migrant camp in France, filled with thousands of men, women and children, desperate to get to Britain, but stuck on the coastline, just twenty miles from their goal. Britain didn’t want them and neither did the people of Calais. Eventually, the Jungle had been torn down and the people rehomed throughout France, although I’d since read reports that many were drifting back to live rough, in the continuing hope of finding a way to slip past the guards and get to Britain. Most tried to hide in the back of trucks returning from continental Europe; a few tried to walk through the Channel Tunnel, risking being killed by the trains that thundered through—all in the belief that the streets of England would be paved with gold, or state benefits. They were often disappointed in both, but at least it was safer than where they’d come from.
Pieter rattled out some guttural Dutch to one of the men who’d been watching us with dispassionate eyes. He shook his head twice before standing up and leaving.
Frustrated, Pieter tried another man, with the same result.
He rubbed his forehead and turned to me.
“I’m sorry, Miss Buckman. They say Tareq isn’t here. I don’t know if that’s true, but they’re scared to talk to you. I’ve told them you’re a journalist, but they’re afraid it’s a trick.”
“None of them will talk to me?”
Pieter shook his head.
“I’m sorry, no. But I’ve arranged for you to visit one of the established shelters, too. Perhaps you will find a story there.”
His voice was tired and cynical. I couldn’t blame him for that.
He led me outside into the daylight, and I dragged the crisp, clean air into my lungs.
“No one would choose to live like that,” he said bitterly. “But it’s better than being sent home to die.”
I watched as his hopelessness hardened into determination.
“Even though many are economic migrants and not fleeing warzones?” I questioned him.
He shrugged.
“Yes, they wish for better lives. That’s all. That’s why we will never stop helping them, why we push the government to do more. They run regulated emergency asylum centers, but the refugees are not allowed to cook for themselves, they have no privacy, and it is very hard for them to mix with locals. That breeds fear, on both sides. But in our shelters, run on contributions from the public, they can lead as normal lives as possible. But we are small, we only help a few and there are many.”
The second place could not have been more different. The first thing I noticed was the smell of cooking and the spicy scents hanging in the air. The second was children’s drawings tacked to the walls. And then I saw them, dark-eyed boys and girls whose ready smiles and rapid chatter showed their contentment. Their parents, however, seemed tired and defeated, but still proud to show me how they gained a little privacy by hanging blankets to create small rooms.
They had cooking and washing facilities here, but their frustration at being reliant was apparent.
“I was a civil engineer in Raaqa,” said Nizar, speaking through an interpreter. “But when Daesh swept into the region, I was afraid for my family and for my life. We took our car and left, but when we ran out of gas, we had to leave the car. We had to leave everything. We are here with only our memories and the clothes on our back. I feel I have failed my family as a husband and father.”
Tears reddened his eyes, and he wiped them away angrily.
“All I want is a future for them, but we are waiting here, waiting to see if a future will be given to us.”
I thought a lot about what both Coby and Pieter had said as I took another train, heading south to Paris. I thought about what Nizar had told me and what I’d seen at both shelters. So as I wrote my story and downloaded the photographs I’d taken onto my laptop, I hardly saw the countryside as the train rushed past, until we rolled into Paris Nord station. I emailed the story to my editor, but there was no answer to the problem, no conclusion, and very little hope.
I rubbed my forehead. There’s a certain dichotomy required when you’re a journalist. You have to care about what’s happening, you have to care about the news that you’re writing, but you also have to be able to switch off. It’s always a fine line between protecting yourself emotionally without suffering from compassion fatigue. I wasn’t sure I’d ever got it right.
I needed a dose of my sexy Marine to bring the joy back for a few, precious days.