Travelling to the Promised Land
As tourists criss-cross the skies in crammed aeroplanes refugees are walking across Europe, searching for the Promised Land.
We’re driving past the park next to Belgrade’s main railway station and Boban points to a crowd of people camping out under the trees.
“Refugees, from Syria. They walk here,”
he says in broken English.
“Yes, the Serbs, the people here, they bring them food and clothes, help them a little bit. But they don’t want to stay here. They are moving on …to Germany.”
In England I am with my friend in the Kent town of Folkestone, close to where the ferries come from Calais and the tunnel emerges from France.
“See that hotel over there,” she points to an ugly building overlooking the long jetty where soldiers boarded boats taking them to the trenches of World War One. “They say they’ve put them up in rooms out the back there.”
The refugees have been told not to go into the breakfast room when the tourists are there, it might upset them, according to the local newspaper.
Europe is flooded with refugees, in numbers similar to the end of World War Two. Tragic stories emerge daily. And here we are just wandering around, sight-seeing and trying to find ways to get out of the heat.
It seems almost wrong to be here, an Australian passport safe in my handbag.
“They don’t know what to do, they just don’t know what to do,” my friend says of the authorities and that includes the UN, the EU, the UK government and everybody else.
When I get home I read of fighting breaking out on the border of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, and remember much happier days in the 90s spent there and where we lived in Kos, now overrun with refugees coming via Turkey.
And then I hear more news of drownings and more than 70 people dying in the back of a truck.
Could we just open up all the borders and let people go wherever they bloody well want to? You know like most tourists do?
Well, it’s just one idea.
And perhaps sorting out the problems back home. Oh yeah, we’ve tried that, haven’t we?