Hara Hotel

Nonfiction
The Syrian humanitarian catastrophe

HARA HOTEL

A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece

By Teresa Thornhill

354 pp. Verso

Reviewed by Tom Glenn

Teresa Thornhill, a middle-aged Briton, worked with Syrian refugees at the Hara Hotel in Greece in 2016 for two weeks. Several months later, she went to Austria to meet with one young Syrian Kurd she had helped and to record the story of his clandestine walk through the mountains of Macedonia and his journey on foot through Serbia and Hungary. At the beginning of 2017, she returned briefly to Greece to learn what had happened to the Syrians she had tried to help. These three trips make up the three parts of Hara Hotel, a book that details the misery of the hapless Syrian refugees.

Woven through the story is the history of the rebellion against the bloodthirsty regime of Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar al-Assad; the rise of Daesh (acronym for the Arabic phrase al-Dawla al-Islamiya al-Iraq al-Sham, that is, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, more commonly know in the west as ISIS—Islamic State in Iraq and Syria); and the struggle of the third force set of combatants that opposed them both. The war resulted in some five million refugees. Most wanted to get to Europe; many used Greece as the route. But Greece was in the midst of an economic crisis. The refugees were caught in the vise between war and financial collapse.

Hara Hotel is the name of a small establishment some fifteen minutes from the Greek town of Polykastro near the border between Greece and FYROM, that is, “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,” a country whose name is still in dispute. Here, in a makeshift refugee camp on the forecourt of a gas station, some six hundred refugees were assembled in April 2016 waiting to cross the border en route to Europe. But FYROM closed its border. Teresa worked with other volunteers from Britain, Norway, and the U.S. doing all she could to feed, clothe, and house the stranded migrants.

The book abounds with the difficulties the refugees had living in tents with no source of income. They ranged from infants to the elderly. Their memories of living under the Assad regime and the cruelty of Daesh make for difficult reading. But I came away admiring these gritty people for their resilience and stamina. To have made it as far as the FYROM border, their tenacity in finding a better life—or even to go on living—showed fierce determination.

Part Two of the book is devoted to the story of Juwan Azad, a young Syrian Kurd. He and a handful of others decided to sneak across the FYROM border and walk all the way to Austria. They steered clear of all human habitation, traversed forests, scaled cliffs, and faced wild animals. Once in Hungary, they were able to hire a taxi. From there, they crossed into Austria.

The last section of the book chronicles Teresa’s brief return to Greece in a snow storm to find out what happened to all the refugees she’s met at the Hara Hotel. At another camp, she meets a teacher named Rima who barely escaped Daesh and fled to Greece. Whether she and the other refugees will ever make it to Europe remains unknown.

Hara Hotel is an instructive read but not easy to get through. The text is laden with Briticisms, starting with the use of a single quotation mark (‘ ’) rather than a double (“ ”) to set off quoted passages. The narrative relies on words many Americans won’t find familiar—"trainer” for a soft running shoe, “torch” for flashlight, “boot” for the trunk of a car, “gone four” for after four o’clock, “rank” for row, and “noughties” for bad people. Moreover, the writing needed another careful edit before publication. Little errors of punctuation and spacing distract from the force of the story.

Nor is Thornhill a writer by profession. Too often she interrupts her dialogue with secondary actions such as drinking tea or taking a drag on a cigarette. The flow of the stories the refugees tell Teresa is broken by descriptions of the speaker rising or sitting down. And the interspersion of historical events felt awkward. Beyond that, gawky and sometimes excessively long sentences slow the reader down.

But even with these limitations, I ended up admiring Thornton. Although she never mentions it, her courage and strength of character in volunteering to help refugees is inspiring. Her willingness to tell their stories to world largely ignorant of the misfortunes of Syrian refugees demands respect.

In sum, a book with minor flaws that is worth reading.

Tom Glenn is the author of four novels and seventeen short stories. His Last of the Annamese, published last year, tells of the fall of Saigon which he survived, escaping under fire when the North Vietnamese were already in the streets of the city.

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