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When did it become a thing that there's something inherently unlikely about a young, single man being an asylum seeker? I can think of many reasons why they would be. I very rarely write about personal stuff on Twitter, but here is the brief story of my late father-in-law. 1/15
He fled Communist Bulgaria in the 1950s, having been a medical student who was a dissident against the regime. He had been repeatedly tortured to try to make him act as an informer on his fellow student dissidents. 2/15
They took him in for a few hours at a time for beatings, because they knew that if he was held for a long time, then released, it would be suspected he had been enrolled as an informer. Eventually he had a tip-off that he was going to be arrested for a final time and tried. 3/15
That would have meant the death penalty. So he fled from Sofia, hanging underneath the Orient Express in the middle of winter and arrived, illegally, in Yugoslavia. 4/15
But this was the time of the Tito-Stalin divide, and the Yugoslavian authorities doubted his story: they thought he was a Stalinist spy and imprisoned him in Belgrade. 5/15
BTW, I first heard this part of the story at my wedding, when I asked one of the guests, an elderly man, also Bulgarian, how he knew my father-in-law. I expected he would say 'oh we were at school together' or something anodyne. 6/15
Actually, he'd been in the exercise yard of the Belgrade prison and had seen my F-i-L, naked and waist-high in cold water in the cells beneath. It was a punishment for having organized a revolt of the 'political prisoners' demanding to be treated as such, not as criminals. 7/15
The elderly man at my wedding had given my F-i-L his prison jacket, even though it left him without one in the cold. It was this that prevented my F-i-L from freezing to death. Eventually, the Yugoslav's took my F-i-L & some others to the border with Italy. 8/15
They fired guns at them to make them run over into Italy. As illegal immigrants they were arrested. My F-i-L ended up in a US-run international camp in Trieste. It was quite humane but not where he wanted to be. He escaped and was re-captured but escaped again. 9/15
Aided, ironically, by an Italian Communist cell, he was smuggled to the south coast of France, where he lived as an illegal immigrant, working in factories and as a street photographer. And, yes, he was a young, single man, like many who oppose horrible regimes. 10/15
Which also meant he had to live with the guilt of the reprisals the Bulgarian regime took against his family - they lost their jobs and places at university. But, at the same time, who else would have resisted the regime if not young, single men? 11/15
Eventually, by some chance (another long story), he completed his medical studies and qualified as a doctor. But he was still not a French national and was not allowed to practice as a doctor in France. So he went to what was then post-colonial Morocco. 12/15
And there, by another chance, the French Consul who he was treating for cancer somehow arranged for my F-i-L to get French nationality, and he returned to France. But he was told he still couldn't practice as a doctor as he had not taken the French Baccalaureate! 13/15
So he did that, and eventually became a much-loved and much-respected GP. He has been dead for some years now, but is still very fondly remembered by generations of patients. 14/15
So when people talk as if it is axiomatic that young, single men who seek asylum are making bogus claims, maybe they could remember my father-in-law's story, and all the other real human beings whose lives lie behind the statistics & the prejudices of the 'migrant crisis'. 15/15
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Frances Coppola @Frances_Coppola
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Nov 3, 2022
Great story.