"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here"-21st Century Refugee Camps

Below is an excerpt of my Book Standing with Harry. It’s a reflection on Covid, my struggles with rectal cancer during the first year of this modern plague as well as a memoir about life with Harry and his Last Stand that I was his co pilot for. It is written as a series of letters to my Dad.

Hey Dad,

Following the 2016 Referendum, we spent the summer working on your last book. I hated that we didn’t have enough money for a proper holiday. Instead, I took you on picnics or to the lakeshore near our apartment, so you could enjoy the summer sun. However, neither the book nor the season allowed us to escape the news about the growing humanitarian crisis, the war in Syria, had created. For over a year, refugees were fleeing in their thousands to Europe, Turkey or any nation that would accept them. The war in Syria produced a refugee crisis worse than the one which erupted during the dying days of World War Two, when millions of European refugees took to the roads to flee armies clashing over the blood lands of Europe. “At least then,” you said, “People after suffering so much themselves in a merciless war wanted to be generous with the peace.” Now, they don’t give a shit because they don't understand the heartache wars produce.”

The longer you lived, the more your early past seemed to repeat itself. “Intolerance, narcissism, and greed, will be written at the entrance to the tomb of the early decades of the 21st century.” You were becoming increasingly impatient with politicians, and the news media's indifference to poverty, racism, economic and inequality. “The suffering of the ordinary is just a collection of  buzz words to get well off people elected to parliament.” You were pissed off and started to feel that nothing we had done since Peter died had altered anything for either good or bad.

In the Autumn of 2016, we decided it might make a difference if you travelled to Europe’s refugee camps and broke bread with the displaced people of the world who were being ostracised by Europe, the USA, the UK, Australia, and Canada.

We took the Euro train to Calais to meet refugees who lived in a sprawling unregulated camp dubbed the “Jungle,” by its inhabitants. On the train, we felt ashamed as we ate a breakfast of fresh croissants and excellent coffee, knowing that the refugees we were about to meet were underfed. A taxi took us from the Euro Star station in Calais to an underpass at the entrance to the refugee encampment. Seeing it, you said, “this is worse than the chaos in 1945.”

It was a desolate, horrible place made more unwelcoming by a November rain that spit from an angry dark sky. I feared for your health there because you were easily chilled. On every trip, I always had visions of you taking sick and dying, and then feeling responsible for it.

Volunteer aid workers met us at one of the entrances to the camp. When you crossed into the camp, you whispered to me “abandon all hopes, all ye who enter here.” It was a dismal strip of industrial land on the outskirts of Calais. It was densely packed with over nine thousand inhabitants from the Mideast, Africa, and Afghanistan, all ill-equipped to withstand the harsh winter approaching. The residents slept in donated tents, burned refuse for warmth, and lived in such unhygienic conditions that diseases like TB were rampant. But you still didn’t decline the hospitality of some Afghans when they brewed a cup of chai boiled in condensed milk. I remember feeling as you listened intently to their stories about escaping from their country, both pride in what you were doing and concern because they were openly coughing, and I was worried about some communicable disease spreading to you.

It was hard to push you through the camp in your transport wheelchair because the pathways were rutted by rain as well as the trod of thousands of feet. At one point, a group of refugees offered to lift you aloft in your chair to better understand the horrors they lived in. We declined, but for our day there, I couldn’t get an image of you and your wheelchair hoisted on the shoulders of refugees, as if you were a battered image of a saint being carried by supplicants in a church procession.

The Jungle didn’t feel like the refugee camps you had visited as a young man at the end of the war when you were stationed with your RAF unit in Hamburg. Then you said, refugees knew that to be in an allied displacement camp signalled that the horrors they had endured during the war were almost over. Now though, most refugees rot in substandard camps in developing nations or on the fringes of Europe.

After we left, we felt sick knowing that few of those people in the Jungle were going to be allowed to find sanctuary. They were simply going to be perpetually on the run or deported back to their own countries where they’d die from politics, theocracy, or economics. Anyway, we looked at it; those people had drawn the short straw in a corrupt world ruled by the entitled.

It's a big ask, I know, but I need your help. I got sick with a mild infection last week, which slowed my scramble to find the cash for rent. I am shorter than normal this month.

So, if you can subscribe to a paid membership, thank you. I appreciate the loyalty of each subscriber. You have allowed me to build a community.

Next month, my early pension begins. It is not much,. I couldn't live off it but it adds to the base that keeps me housed.

Right now, at around 1100 subscribers, with 10% as paid, I need to increase my subscription base to 3k or double my paid subscriber base for an income of $14k (Canadian).

So, if you can please subscribe. It is appreciated by me and it ensures the work of Harry's Last Stand has a working beachhead.

Take care,

John