READER’S DIGEST
July• 2019 | 131he found that it was too difficult and
too expensive. Nasrine and I would
have to go by land.
We took a six-hour train ride to
Thessaloniki, then a taxi to a town
near the Macedonia border. Nasrine
then pushed me along the road for
about half a kilometre. There was
nothing marking the border, just the
black line on the GPS on our phone.
We followed a sign to an area with
lots of white tents, sponsored by the
United Nations Refugee agency (UN-
HCR). The parliament in Macedonia
had voted to give refugees three-day
visas enabling them to pass through
legally and get a train all the way to
the Serbian border.
The little police station where we
had to get these papers couldn’t cope
with the crowds. Had we arrived a
couple of days later, we would have
got completely stuck. The Macedo-
nians ended up blocking the border
and teargassing refugees to stop them
coming. We had got through just in
time.
The trains were packed, and we
couldn’t imagine getting the wheel-
chair on. The Macedonia police told
us not to worry. After registering us
they called a taxi to take us to the bor-
der. The trip took just two hours.
In Serbia we took a bus to Belgrade,
then planned to go through Hungary.
But everyone said that the Hungarians
had built a fence and were going to
stop allowing people through. It was a
race against time. Nasrine used more
of our precious funds to hire a taxi to
take us to the Hungarian border.
It was about 10pm when the taxi
driver dropped us at a small farming
town called Horgoš. I was happy to
have crossed two European coun-
tries in one day, but it turned out we
hadn’t been fast enough. The border
was closed. We were too late.
There was nothing we could do, so
we looked for a place to sleep. A lot of
people were just huddled in the fields,
but we found a big United Nations
tent.
When we woke up we heard some
women saying that Hungarian police
had let a number of people pass. We
thought, having travelled all this way,
we should at least give it a try.
We took a bus to the crossing at
Röszke. We could see the tall fence
with rolls of razor wire on top. When
we got to the gate, it was closed.
Crowds were pressed up against the
fence, with riot police on the other
side.
“We are escaping war!” someone
shouted.
Until that moment, I had thought of
our journey as a big adventure. Now I
saw it was more like a tragedy.
By then, around 180,000 refugees
had passed through Hungary, just as
we planned to, heading for Budapest,
and then from there by car or train to
Austria.
Nasrine told someone I spoke Eng-
lish, and I found myself being pushed
to the front of the crowd, facing the