After a seven-hour journey during which she stood all the way in a human crush, she was dumped into an open field with no food or water or even a blanket to warm her during the freezing and rainy nights. After three days of unimaginable strain and misery, having swapped one hell for another, she was finally allowed to enter Macedonia and rejoin those of her family who fled Kosovo two days earlier. I watched as she fell into her sister's arms and both clung tight, sobbing loud and long. All the refugees watched silently and my camera team filmed the reunion. As they say in the movies, there was not a dry eye in the house.
Reunion is the happy little sister of tragedy.
Perhaps it was the timing. The coincidence that this exodus of Muslims occurred at the same time Jews remember their exodus from Egypt. It made me think of the exodus of my own family from Austria. I thought, as I rubbed tears from my eyes in a room full of sobbing people, that these, indeed, are the lucky ones. I did not mean they were lucky compared to the family members they left behind in Kosovo, whose fate they did not know.