refugees Quotes

“Salva made up his mind. He would walk south, to Kenya. He did not know what he would find once he got there, but it seemed to be his best choice.”

“I wouldn’t have done it if I had known people wouldn’t believe us.”

“Mahmoud’s mother broke down in tears, and his father let the life jackets he carried drop to the ground. The smuggler had just told them their boat wasn’t leaving tonight. Again. ‘No boat today. Tomorrow. Tomorrow,’ he’d told Mahmoud’s father.”

“The vacationers dropped their voices, and even though Mahmoud couldn’t understand what they were saying, he could hear the disgust in their words. This wasn’t what the tourists had paid for. They were supposed to be on holiday, seeing ancient ruins and beautiful Greek beaches, not stepping over filthy, praying refugees. They only see us when we do something they don’t want us to do, Mahmoud realized.”

″‘We’re not criminals!’ one of the other men in the cell yelled at him. ‘We didn’t ask for civil war! We didn’t want to leave our homes!’ another man yelled. ‘We’re refugees!’ Mahmoud yelled, unable to stay silent any longer. ‘We need help!‘”

″‘Don’t you see?’ Lito said. ‘The Jewish people on the ship were seeking asylum, just like us. They needed a place to hide from Hitler. From the Nazis. Mañana, we told them. We’ll let you in mañana. But we never did.’ Lito was crying now, distraught. ‘We sent them back to Europe and Hitler and the Holocaust. Back to their deaths. How many of them died because we turned them away? Because I was just doing my job?‘”

“We’ve spent too much time talking about it and not doing anything. It’s not safe here. It hasn’t been for months. Years. We should have gone long ago. Ready or not, if we want to live, we have to leave Syria.”

“It’s not easy to start over in a new place,′ he said. ‘Exile is not for everyone. Someone has to stay behind, to receive the letters and greet family members when they come back.”

“They take away our people’s lives.”

“It’s not possible to be this frightened and to stay alive.”

“Why do they keep us behind high wire fences like we are criminals?”

“So we are in prison here because the government doesn’t want us.”

“While it is true there are people who don’t want us here, there are others who welcome us, and are happy to share their country with us.”

“Mum seemed more and more often to sit gazing out of the window, oblivious to us.”

“I know I’ll be alright when we get out.”

“She was getting more and more headaches, and spending more time in our room.”

“Zainullah’s angry now. Zahra’s withdrawn. She used to be so bright and bubbly. But I think it’s making Hassan get some sense. Everyone gets nightmares.”

“Guards kept telling us that no one wanted us in Australia.”

“But that’s like the Terror. Everyone who didn’t do what they wanted was removed. Had we landed in a situation like the one we’d just escaped from?”

“I usually tell the two Z’s stories about home, and about Dad and our Bahkhuls or Arjays. Yes, it is good they hear these stories. Not about things from here.”

″...look at all the things that I am capable of, and think of all the things you could call me - a student a lover of literature, a budding architect, a friend, a symbol of hope even, but what am I called? A refugee. Some people believe that I gave up my homeland and lost my parents in order to become a refugee; some people actually believe that I gave up thirteen months of sunshine to live in the cold and to be called a scrounger. I didn’t.”

And so this story reminds us of what we should already know- that refugees are people. Scared, dispossessed, desperate people. That’s it, that’s all that should need to be said. Yet that’s so often the last thing we hear...

A refugee from war and violence, his safety and security relies on him facing the bureaucracy of the English asylum system. It’s a daunting and dehumanizing process.

Shooting and shouting result, and the family is ordered to leave the country. An almost duplicate scene labeled “Eritrea” follows. In an effort to show that neither country embraces the union of this Ethiopian man and Eritrean woman and its progeny, the question immediately arises, are the soldiers Ethiopian or Eritrean?

“I can remember my mother refusing to go out into the street because she couldn’t stand the sight of all the children begging for bread when she had nothing to give them. Her first worry was for me and my brother, and every slice of bread she gave another child meant one less for us.”

The only thing he has to pass the time away with is his pet mouse Snow, the novel Robinson Crusoe and other books, and a small window overlooking the town. He has to hunt for food on his own and still stay hidden from soldiers. It is a great test for Alex to see if he can make it through tough conditions, and also wait for the arrival of his father.

“The stores on the Polish side were hidden by the wall. Sometimes we looked longingly up at the windows above us, because we could have seen so much more from the. There was just no way to reaching them, though.”

Officials try to soothe people but the population panics and everybody tries to escape from the danger zone. Among the refugees are Janna-Berta, aged 14, and her brother Uli, aged 7, who have lost their parents in the accident.