Now Widad, 10, and the family live on the second floor of a big red farmhouse in Backhammar, a small community three hours west of Stockholm. They can see deer from the kitchen window, and they walk in the woods at sunset.
Her 4-year-old cousin, Zain, was slashed on his shin last summer as he was being passed over the razor wire at the Hungarian border in the dead of night. He still has two gouge marks on his leg, but the memories, if not the scars, are fading as he rides his bike to preschool, a chocolate bar from his mother strapped to the fender.
Her uncles, Farid and Ahmad Majid, entrepreneurial brothers who guided the family from their home in Syria through Europe with hundreds of thousands of other refugees last summer, are making plans to open a grocery store once they complete the long process of winning asylum and residency in Sweden.
Yet even as they do their best to assimilate and appreciate the new life they have won, they continue to feel the tugs of what they left behind — no one more so than Widad.
Her parents and two brothers did not make the journey to Europe because one of the brothers, Nabih, 9, has leukemia and was too sick for the grueling journey.
Nabih is in Turkey, being treated, but he needs a bone-marrow transplant, and the only remaining member of his family who might be a compatible donor is Widad. Yet as winter turned to spring in Sweden, she had not yet received asylum, and to leave to help her brother in Turkey before getting legal residency would mean she could not come back. So the family, whose journey through Europe last summer was documented by The New York Times, faced yet another set of challenges and wrenching decisions.
“It is a matter of life and death,” said one of Widad’s aunts, Amina Nouri, who is helping care for Nabih in Turkey. Which is why Widad was walking nervously one mid-April morning into an expedited asylum hearing, accompanied by a Swedish legal guardian and the anxious best wishes of her relatives.
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