There is something about the cold that strips away all illusion. It was winter 2017 when I crossed the border from Turkey to Greece and landed in Thessaloniki. Fourteen of us, huddled together, braving the ice-cold night. Some had been pushed back before – tortured, jailed, and sent back again. No one stayed long in any one place. “We were arrested here last time,” they would say, moving us along like shadows in the night. More than ten hours of walking through freezing rain, numb from the cold but unable to stop. That night felt like it would never end.
Cold has a way of breaking you down. I remember other freezing nights too. As a child in Tehran and Sanandaj, I stood in long lines with my mother for oil, shivering in the snow. But no memory could prepare me for that border. The brutality of it all. Six years have passed since, and yet that night haunts me. I am one of the lucky ones – lucky to no longer be there, waiting in fear and cold. But others are still there, trapped, stripped bare by men who wear uniforms and call themselves protectors.
They don’t just push you back, they strip you down – literally. The Greek border police beat us, took our clothes, money, and phones. Everything. They left people to die on the other side. I’ve seen the photos. Helpless bodies, abandoned. In the middle of it all, these men in power steal everything and send people back into the arms of death.
