Damascus to Berlin; a Syrian family’s escape

WATCH ABOVE: Germany took in 37,000 Syrian refugees last week and there’s been a great response of generosity from residents in the country to help settle everyone in. Jeff Semple reports.

BERLIN – Reem Habashieh and her family say they made it through 16 days of living hell in their flight from Syria, and are amazed they all made it to Germany alive.

They count themselves lucky to have escaped the fate of so many others embarking on the treacherous journey, who have either drowned by the rough waves of the Mediterranean flipping over their rubber dinghy; or suffocated in overcrowded trucks speeding them through Europe past border police.

“Sometimes I wake up and I feel like, thank God, I’m alive,” 19-year-old Habashieh, who studied economics at the university of Damascus, recounts in fluent English.

“I’m lucky, I’m a blessed person.”

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Habashieh, her mother and three younger siblings arrived in Berlin a week ago, five of the 37-thousand who have flooded into Germany this month seeking a new life.

Now that they’re here, they’re embarking on another unknown journey, trying to start a new life in a country full of strange people, cold rain, unfamiliar smells and voices they don’t understand.

WATCH: Syrian migrant recounts her harrowing journey to Germany

Habashieh leads her family on buses, subways and commuter trains through the German capital, organising essential first steps like registering to file their asylum applications.

In remembering the family’s trek across Europe last month, Habashieh says “people were mean, we had to sleep under the sky, it was very dangerous.”

“It took us about 16 days to reach to Germany. We started from Turkey. We had to go in a rubber boat in the sea to reach a Greek island,” she explained. “In that island the Greek people weren’t really so nice because it is for tourism so people are mean, are very reserved, yes. They let us to sleep just under the sky, in the port of ships, yes. They didn’t give any care or any help to the refugees.”

“The part of Hungary was really dangerous, was really scary because the police there are acting very mean to people, are being very racist against Islam also because they looked at us like ‘oh you are wearing hijab like you are a terrorist or something.'”

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“It was really awful and dangerous.”

Raghad, Habashieh’s 11-year-old sister, a skinny girl with long brown hair and a big cheeky smile, got so tired sometimes along the way that Mohammed, her burly 17-year-old brother, had to carry her for hours.

Yaman, a lanky 15-year-old, dragged his feet on his own.

Khawla Kareem, their 44-year-old mother, says she’s still exhausted from their odyssey, but that her maternal urge to bring her four children to safety filled her with the power she needed.

Her husband died three years ago, and being left alone to care for the children amid a brutal civil war helped her make the difficult decision to leave everything behind and flee Syria.

It was also three years ago that the war hit home as the front line between Bashar Assad’s Syrian army and the Free Syrian Army crossed the Damascus street they lived on and they were literally caught in the crossfire.

She remembers how life during the war simply stopped for them.

So earlier this year Khawla Kareem, an elementary school teacher, collected together 12,000 euros (13,400 US dollars), selling the family car, and bought plane tickets to Bodrum on the Mediterranean Coast in Turkey.

She paid traffickers to take them across the sea in the small rubber boat to the Greek island of Samos, only to find out moments before they got onto the boat that they had to leave behind all of their belongings on the beach; laptops, clothes and precious objects carrying memories of their past life.

They took a ferry to the mainland, then worked their way through Macedonia and Serbia into Hungary, where she hired another human smuggler, who spirited them on his minibus with dark tinted windows past international borders and north to Berlin, dropping them off on the outskirts of the city last week.

Germany has said it expects some 800-thousand migrants this year, and the government has indicated that refugees from wars like in Syria can count on being given asylum in the country.

Others, like migrants from Serbia, Kosovo will likely be returned to their home countries, which Germany considers secure.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t many challenges ahead for people like the Hasbashiehs.

For five days, they’ve been standing in wait, squeezed together with hundreds of other refugees at the central registration point for asylum seekers in the German capital.

In the line is a cross section of those who have shared their plight in recent weeks: young mothers hugging sick babies; a Syrian army defector wondering whether he should tell the truth of his military past on his asylum application; lonely, unattended teenage boys whose eyes are still filled with the terror they’ve witnessed.

They crowd under the maple trees in the city office’s dusty compound, pushing and shoving in one big line slowly snaking its way into the gray high-rise building.

Some are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, others from Eritrea and Sudan and still more from Albania, Montenegro, Kosovo and elsewhere.

All of them came for a better life in Germany.

Their most important belonging right now is their “magic number” which will allow them to enter the building and finally register to file their asylum application – when it’s eventually called.

The Habashiehs have been holding on to a small blue ticket numbered T00140 for five days, watching in vain so far for it to flash up on the black screen.

Some in line say they’ve been waiting two or three weeks for the overwhelmed German officials to finally get to them.

In the meantime, city and community officials have been working overtime on weekends and pensioners have come out of retirement to help process all the newly arrived migrants.

And residents have come out in droves as the scene repeats itself around the country, bringing those waiting food and drinks, donating toys and clothes and sometimes offering rooms in their private homes.

After the adrenaline-charged escape from Syria and the nearly 4,000-kilometre (2,485-mile) journey, the slow bureaucracy now seems to take forever for the Habashiehs.

They’ve been lucky enough to get a room for themselves at a former barracks in Berlin’s western Spandau neighborhood where they were put up with 1,600 other new arrivals.

Just a few days later, and they would have had to make do with cots on the floor of unheated white tents.

But until their application for asylum is officially submitted, it’s hard to think ahead, not knowing whether they will stay in Berlin or be relocated elsewhere in the country.

Habashieh dreams of becoming a student at one of Berlin’s universities, her brother Mohammed wants to study information technology here and then work in one of the Arabic Gulf states.