BarcelonaSarah Mardini’s story is one of those in which reality surpasses fiction. In 2015, she was fleeing the war in Syria in a shepherd’s hut with her sister Yusra and 18 other people. The engine broke down and the two girls, professional swimmers, did not hesitate to throw themselves into the water, tie the ends of the barge to their bodies and drag it between terrifying waves and in the middle of the night. Three and a half hours later they all arrived safe and sound at a beach on Lesvos. Yusra would succeed in the Olympic Games in Rio and Sarah would decide to return to Lesbos to help the refugees. A true story of survival and heroism so mouth-watering that movie producers fought over the rights to make a movie out of it. At the end of last November, Netflix premiered the swimmers, by director Sally El Hosaini. Sorry for the spoiler.
Sarah Mardini was in jail for more than 100 days in 2018 in Greece when she was helping refugees. Greek police charged her with human trafficking. On Tuesday January 10, four years later and despite being one of the protagonists of the film, she will sit in the dock in a trial in which she can be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. If it was a fictional story, no one would believe it.
“At that moment you don’t think about anything, you just do what you have to do and that’s it. I’m a professional swimmer and a lifeguard, and I guess I wasn’t ready to die that day”
In a video conference interview with ARA from Berlin, where he now lives, Mardini eschews any heroism. “The boat was overloaded. The motor stopped and water started coming in. We had to lighten the weight and I jumped into the water. My sister and others did as well and we decided to swim along the lights of the island in front of us. At that moment you don’t think about anything, you just do what you have to do and that’s it. I’m a professional swimmer and a lifeguard, and I guess I wasn’t ready to die that day,” she says.
Broken adolescence
Sarah was 20 years old and Yusra 17 when she dragged the shepherd to her lungs. Her plan was to take advantage of the fact that the little girl was still a minor to get to Germany and ask for the reunification of her parents and her younger sister. They traveled with their cousin Nizar on a 29-day journey: after the Aegean there were still long days of walking, human traffickers, police armed with batons and aggressive dogs, racist hatred and male violence. “There were people who treated us like we were a plague, not like human beings,” Sarah recalls. But there was also a good side: the solidarity between the refugees, who ended up being like “a family”. “We took turns sleeping to protect each other,” he explains.
Now he has seen his story repeated in the Ukrainian refugees he has met in Germany, who have indeed been welcomed with open doors: “Everybody fleeing a war needs help and in this case there has been selective empathy, but I don’t like to compare. I have Ukrainian friends and we haven’t talked about our experiences because we don’t have to, it’s enough to look into each other’s eyes.”
“I have Ukrainian friends and we haven’t talked about our experiences because we don’t have to, it’s enough to look into each other’s eyes”
When they arrived in Berlin, they finally recognized them as refugees. Yusra didn’t give up on her dream of swimming at the 2016 Rio Games. She didn’t stop until she was accepted into a swimming club in the German capital and convinced a coach, Sven, that she was worth a try . After all that had happened, the mark of 1.09.21 in the 100m butterfly that he achieved as a representative of the team of refugee athletes under the IOC flag, was worth more than a medal.
One of the good things about the Netflix movie is that Sarah, now 27, is no longer just “Yusra’s sister”. The film also claims that its part in this story is equally important. After Rio, the lives of both sisters are separated: the younger one will continue her sports career, while the older one will return to Lesvos in August 2016 to help those who were going through the same trance that she had survived.
Return to Lesvos
“I had heard that the Syrian boys and girls who had arrived in Lesvos knew the story of the Mardini sisters and I thought I could really help them. When I got there they didn’t believe it was me, and I didn’t like the limelight either , I just wanted to use my platform to help others and raise my voice,” she says, unable to help but feel the weariness of someone who has had to tell her story over and over again.
“I joined a team of volunteers as a translator and lifeguard. One day we were doing our shift on the beach and the coast guards stopped us,” she recalls. It was 2018 and the Greek authorities, like the Italian and Spanish ones, began their particular crusade against rescue NGOs. She and her colleagues Seán Binder and Nassos Karakitsos were charged with human trafficking, money laundering and espionage, in what Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch consider an attempt to criminalize humanitarian activism on behalf of migrants and refugees in Greece Sarah spent 107 days in prison before being released on bail. The trial has been postponed several times and is now set for Tuesday.
“I joined a team of volunteers as a translator and lifeguard. One day we were doing our shift on the beach and the coast guards stopped us”
“Evidence? They don’t have any! The only thing they have is a WhatsApp group that they say we used to contact the traffickers, which is a lie. It’s an open group, where all the volunteers we worked on joined beaches in the south of the island,” argues the worker. For her, the ultimate goal of the case is to short-circuit solidarity. “They say that we are the ones who attract the migrants, but this is completely false: when I went up to the pasture, I did not know that there would be someone to help me. What they are trying to do is to scare those who want to help the refugees: to make people, activists and volunteers are afraid to go out there and get sea rescues to end.”
After four years with the sword of Damocles of a 20-year prison sentence, Sarah and her whole family (they were finally able to reunite in Berlin) await the trial and for everything to be nothing to start over their lives. And when all this happens, what? “Honestly, I don’t know. It’s hard for me to think about the future, because every year I tell myself that it will end but it doesn’t. I can’t even look for a job because I don’t even know how many days I’ll have to spend in Greece and there is also a lot of mental pressure. What I would like is to return to the art world, but I need to do it without fear. I also don’t want to work as a lifeguard anymore. I need to start again.”
