Not long after that, Saja and Nawara were walking home when they sensed that they were being followed. They turned to look behind them and spotted a tall, nicely dressed man with what looked like a knife in his right hand. They recognized him as the person who had come to their door asking for their passports and posing as a policeman. Terrified, they quickly crossed the street and joined a neighbor they knew who was nearby. Later, when the girls told Hanaa and Shokri what had happened, the family realized they had no choice but to move. Hanaa called UNHCR again, and legal officers visited them to learn more. She told them the entire story of what had happened to Doaa and the threats, including the sexual harassment the girls were facing, which forced Hanaa and Shokri to pull them out of school. The UNHCR officer told the family that they were qualified for UNHCR’s resettlement program due to their precarious situation. Sweden was one of the countries accepting “vulnerable” Syrian refugees. “Sweden,” Hanaa said, “that’s where Doaa and Bassem wanted to go.”
Doaa was determined to do everything she could to get her family out of Egypt. Her anger at the people who were threatening them temporarily shook her out of her grief and into action. She turned to UNHCR’s Erasmia Roumana, a caseworker Doaa had come to trust, for help. The process would be long and complex, Erasmia explained. While Doaa’s family would have a strong case, Greece had no established resettlement program with another EU country. Erasmia explained that Doaa had the option of applying for asylum in Greece. If she received it, she could settle there and have the right to travel and eventually apply for citizenship. But Doaa’s heart was set on Sweden; she and Bassem had planned to make a life together there. If she couldn’t get there with Bassem, she’d get her family there, and if she couldn’t get her family there, then she would have to go by herself. Once in Sweden, she would carry out her and Bassem’s original plan alone—to apply to the Swedish family-reunification program and bring her family to join her.
Every day Doaa struggled with despondency, but fighting for her family’s safety gave her a new resolve, and over the next few months her life began to come together. Her story had captured the imagination of Greek civil society. The mayor of Chania called on national authorities to grant her Greek citizenship for her heroism. Unfortunately, nothing came of it, but the request helped Doaa see herself in a new light—as someone who was brave and strong.
Then, on December 19, 2014, the prestigious Academy of Athens presented Doaa with their annual 3,000-euro award for her courage. Her visit to Athens and the pride she felt in accepting the award felt like a watershed moment, and she began to look to the future. She told herself that she would not stop fighting until she was reunited with her family. After that she would study to become a lawyer, so she could fight for justice. She had seen too little of it in her life.
In pain from being away from her family, she struggled to overcome the despair and grief that would at times engulf her spirit. For the first nineteen years of her life, she had always been surrounded by family. Now that she was on her own, she found it easier to be alone with her memories than to share them. She felt different from girls her age, and while she enjoyed the company of her host sisters who were kind to her, she knew they could never understand what she had been through. She couldn’t find the words to express the horror of the deaths and suffering she had witnessed or the depth of her own grief. Her sorrow threatened to overwhelm her whenever she tried to talk about it. After the evil she had seen, it was hard to trust people again. Doaa felt that she could help herself and never turned to anyone else for aid in overcoming her trauma.
At times during the ordinary rituals of everyday life, a sudden memory from her days in the water would hit her so powerfully that the pain would come back all over again. One day, as she was brushing her hair and looking in the mirror, she smelled Bassem’s cologne and swung around to see if he was standing behind her. Friends back in Egypt told her of rumors that he was alive and in a prison there. Part of her wanted to believe it was true, although almost every night her mind replayed the scene of his drowning before her eyes. She tried to think of ways she could have kept him alive. It would take her hours to return to sleep after that, and the next morning when she woke, she would hope the visions of his death had just been a dream and that he would be waiting for her outside her door.