The No.1 Refugee
large group of refugees were approaching through a forest close to where we were. We hurried to a high ridge and put up our tent. We kept a lookout. I flagged it to the newsdesk as breaking news and prepared for a live position. We hoped to catch on camera the first of the refugees who had travelled by foot all the way from Greece. My phone rang. It was the newsdesk asking about the footage we were expecting. “You will be held responsible for the breaking news we flashed,” they told me. I reassured them and turned to the cameraman, who was panning left and right with the camera. I tried to kill the time by smoking; one cigarette followed by another. Then, all of a sudden, the cameraman shouted: “Aissa, look! A caravan.” “It is no time to joke,” I replied. But he repeated himself, his tone serious. I looked through the camera and couldn’t believe what I saw. “Sehr gut (very good),” I shouted. “Now, the real hard work begins,” I told him. “We record for history the arrival of the number one refugee into Austria.”
We spoke to a border patrol. They expected the refugees to enter through the forests, far from any border checkpoints, they told us. It was a convincing argument, but one that still wouldn’t help us to find them. Days went by and none of the refugees we had expected turned up. Then my phone rang again. This time it was an Austrian policeman I had become acquainted with during the weeks of our coverage. He told me that a
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