On Monday, after spending the day with Ahmad and Farid Majid in their new home in Sweden, The New York Times’ Anemona Hartocollis went back to the family’s farmhouse. She set her laptop up on a coffee table.
At 9 p.m. in Sweden (3 p.m. back in New York), they all watched via Facebook Live as one of the photojournalists who’d traveled with them across Europe won a Pulitzer Prize. Mauricio Lima was supposed to be with them, actually, until he got the urgent call from the Times to come back to New York.
“We were both devastated, since we were looking forward to the whole team, in a sense, being together — the Majids, me, Mauricio and the translator, Grace Kassab, who had been on the first part of the journey from Idomeni, in northern Greece, over the summer. Mauricio resisted, but he was not given a choice,” Hartocollis said in an email.
By Monday, she made the guess that Lima’s sudden departure had something to do with the Pulitzer Prizes. So she set up her laptop and watched the Times’ Pulitzer video with the family.
Hartocollis shared her experience on Facebook and spoke with Poynter via email about what it was like to watch the announcement with the Majids, what’s changed since her journey alongside refugee families and how the family she followed is doing now.
August 31, 2015.
Members of the Majid family sleep with their children in their arms in a wheat field as they wait to cross the barbed wire fence at Horgos, Serbia, into Hungary. (Photo by Mauricio Lima, New York Times)
We spoke last September as you started traveling with migrants and refugees. Can you tell us a little about what (if anything) has changed since you started?
Oh, well, practically everything has changed. As I described on my blog and in the long story that ran in the Times, the route that they took was arduous — they had to dodge gunfire at the Syrian/Turkish border, take a rubber boat from Turkey to Greece, then walk and take trains and buses across Europe. They managed to cross Hungary’s razor-wire border fence in the dead of night, outwitting the border guards. They even spent some time in prison in Denmark. But they made it!
Now the route they took is essentially closed, as countries along the way have sealed their borders and in some cases changed their policies toward refugees. Thousands of people are trapped at the Greek border with Macedonia, tens of thousands in Greece. Under a new agreement with the EU, they are being sent back to Turkey, and for every one sent back, someone in Turkey is supposed to be sent to a host country in Europe. But that program is too incremental, and the migrants and refugees have found new routes, some even more dangerous than the one the Majids took, like the boat trip from Libya to Italy, and it seems they will continue to look for new routes.
What was it like to watch the Pulitzer announcement with the people who were the subject of Pulitzer-winning work? What did they think of it?
The Times was showing the event by live video for, I believe, the first time. The family gathered in their living room with me, Grace, the translator, and a few friends.
Before the sound came on, we almost immediately saw Mauricio standing in the newsroom next to the other photo winners, Sergey Ponomarev, who had also photographed the Majids at the beginning of their trip, Daniel Etter and Tyler Hicks. The family was excited. We all were. Grace translated to Arabic as Mauricio made his speech, but of course when he mentioned the Majids by name, and took the trouble to tick off their names one by one, there was no translation necessary. The look on their faces was pure concentration.
But I don’t think they needed a Pulitzer to tell them how to feel. We all shared a very intense experience, so we have that bond, and they are naturally hospitable and hard to resist. Mauricio stayed in their home with them, at their insistence, and Grace and I are trying to resist, just so we can get some rest, but our hotel rooms have gone empty some of the time.
How is the family adjusting?
They had lost weight on the trip through nine countries (10 if you count Syria, where they started), from all the walking and no regular meals. They were tired, sad, stressed, running on adrenaline. They were sleeping on the ground and in the Keleti train station in Budapest for five days after the Hungarian government stopped the trains from running, on principle, so the refugees would not be able to get further into Europe.
When they got here, they were in a refugee camp with hundreds of other people, where there was some tension and their future was really uncertain. Since then, they have been moved to a house, all 12 of them, including a new baby born to Ahmad and Jamila in November. It was instantly clear how much happier they were. They are still refugees, or technically asylum seekers, in name, but they are looking forward to moving on from that. The children could not go to school in Syria, because of the war, but they are in school here. It is clear they have begun to understand Swedish, much better than they can speak it. They are on a new path.
