In October 2020 I was in Thessaloniki. When I was walking in the street, a motorbike, three cars and one black van stopped. Two guys came out of the car, they said they were from the police, but they didn’t have uniforms and were wearing masks. They showed me their police ID and asked me for my documents, but I did not have them with me. It was around three in the afternoon; we were four of us. Two of my friends showed their asylum seeker cards and they let them go, but they took me and my other friend. They took us to the van. There were four more people inside. Two of them were Afghan, two Arabs. When I wanted to show the photo of my asylum seeker card they smashed my phone.
In the evening around six, when it was dark, they handcuffed us. They put us in the black van. The weather was very cold, and it was dark everywhere. We could not see outside because there was no window. We went to another place; they left us in the van for around two hours. I think it was around five in the morning when we reached the border. When we arrived there, they took all our clothes. We were all naked, we only had socks and underwear. They took my wedding ring and my necklace. Then they start beating us with batons and wooden sticks and kicking us. They beat us until they got tired. They broke the hand of one person and pulled another man from his hair on the ground.
They put us in a very dirty room, where there were feces and a terrible smell because people were not allowed to use the bathroom. It was a big place with three or four rooms. The place was full of clothes and bags. Our room was full of other people’s belongings. There were a lot of torn pieces of Turkish Lira on the floor. They were all wearing face masks all the time. The policemen were around 20 people with dark green uniforms. They had a Greek flag on their arm attached to the uniform. They were armed with batons and a pistol.
We were 84 migrants there, some of them had Greek ID and (refugee) passports and spoke fluent Greek. Most of us were from Afghanistan but also some from Syria, Pakistan, Somalia and Palestine. There were families with children. There was even a two-month-old baby, and it was crying the whole time. The police shouted to be quiet. One woman was bleeding, all her pants were red, but no one paid attention to her. I don’t know what happened to her, maybe they raped her. There was also a policewoman, but she also didn’t pay attention.
We stayed there from five in the morning until around six in the evening without food, water and clothes. There were six women, four children from two months to six years old. They made the women also undress and touched them everywhere and only left them one piece to cover themselves with. The oldest person was an older man around 65 years old. He was walking with a stick, and they even took his shoes away. Inside the room we were not handcuffed but the police were around us in the room. When it got dark, they started beating everyone who made even a small noise with the long wooden stick. The face of one person was swollen very badly. I think they beat him on his face.
After that they took us on a truck, but we were not fitting everybody in, so they were beating and pushing everybody. We sat above each other for around one hour. One person passed out.When we arrived, they pushed him down and poured water on him so that he woke up. We were next to the river. When we arrived at the river, they also started to search the women again in front of everyone and they were touching them on their breasts.
There were seven Pakistani guys who spoke Greek and Urdu, they also wore masks and were helping the police. They inflated the boats and carried the stuff to the water. Every time two of the Pakistani men got into the boat and put eight of us in the boat and drove the boat to the other side. They did not fully go to the other side, but they pushed the eight people into the water and returned back to the other side.
After going back and forth, the Turkish police started shooting. The Greek police told us to move more down the river to try from there. Then they started to push us back from that location. They pushed all of us back to Turkey.
They pushed me into the water, there was a tree, and I held onto the tree and pulled myself out of the water. Turkish police arrested all of us on the other side. There were more people on the other side, around 100. I think they pushed other people back before us. The Turkish police gave a piece of bread to everyone and took us to the army trucks and took us to a military building which was around half an hour away. They kept us there for two weeks and forced us to sign the deportation papers. I told them that if they send me back (to Afghanistan) I will be killed but they forced me to sign the paper, and they handed me the deportation paper. After that they sent me back to Afghanistan by plane.
| Stories of Resistance, Lesvos 2025 Despite blanket denials from Greek authorities, “pushbacks” in the Aegean Sea and Greece’ Evros border region are a horrifying reality. For years, the Legal Centre Lesvos has collected hundreds of testimonies of survivors of border violence. Together with Fitilia, over the next year we will publish a series of these anonymized* accounts, with the intention to show that behind every statistic, there is a person risking their life to reach Europe. While these stories highlight the brutality and violence of Greek and European border policies, they are also stories of resisting border regimes. They are a call to action – a stark reminder of the urgent need to continue the fight to dismantle the borders that surround us and with it the violence of Fortress Europe. *All identifying details, including names and exact dates have been removed, however, the stories published remain true to the survivors’ own accounts, and all have consented to the publishing of their testimonies. |