A.: I hope that not everywhere in Europe is like Greece. When we arrived in Greece and we saw how things were here, we hoped things weren’t like that elsewhere. M.: One day we’ll tell our children about that. When I grow up I will become a journalist and I am going to write all these things that happened to us. us not to speak and to get out of the van. We stayed there for ten minutes. (...) They pushed us back with a wooden boat. There was one police officer with us on the boat. They put us by force into the boat. They had handguns and machine guns. They sneakily sent us back. • Pregnant woman with family • Women M., from Afghanistan (single mother)162/ pushed back from Evros in October 2012 M: We walked in the woods for about 6-7 hours and then we slept at night. (…) The day after, we walked again for about 4-5 hours when the police arrested us. We thought it was the European police, as they spoke three different languages. We were some minutes away from the main road, when they arrested us. They had dogs with them. The dogs found us. The children were crying. The police were shouting at us and insulting us. They arrested us and put us in a van with no windows. They took us to a camp. We were almost 20 persons detained there. No matter how much we implored them, they just told us that we had come illegally and we should go back. There were people from Palestine, Afghans and of some other nationalities. My child was the only underage. We stayed for 24 hours in this place. They didn’t give us anything to eat or drink. We begged the authorities to let us stay. We cried. We told them that we were forced to leave our home. But they told us they had the order not to let us come. They were also joking and laughing at us. They were unleashing the dogs against us. They were making fun of us, asking us how we were doing. They laughed at us, with our fear. (...) We were kept in a wooden place, which was like a storage room. On one side there was this wooden room and in front of us there was the forest. In front of it, there were trees and many dogs. There wasn’t any building nearby, something like a police station. There were no other houses, nothing. But every 15 minutes, they would come and go, so it must have been somewhere close. (...) They had locked us inside this wooden room. Then after one day and night they told us not to make any noise and not to say a word. They put us in vans. After driving for two hours, they stopped next to the river. They told 162 | Interviewed in Athens (Greece), January 1, 2013 60 | aNNEX-iNTERVIEWS M.S. (wife)163; M.H.S. (husband); A.R.S. (underage son), from Afghanistan164/ pushed back from Evros in September 2012 165 M.H.S (husband): ‘The Greeks sent us back three times. The first time, was when we crossed the land border from Edirne to Greece. I was with my pregnant wife and my four boys. We were a group of approximately 15 Afghans: our family and several single men. (…) While crossing the fields, my wife fell down by the riverside and strained her foot. (…) I held my wife and we walked until the morning, when we arrived in the first village. (...) With difficulty we took her to a bridge. We had seen rail tracks in about 30 minutes walking distance from the bridge. It was a highway bridge. In the village, we asked the inhabitants the way to the refugee camp. The people told us we should take a bus and that it was far away. After one hour more or less that we were sleeping under the bridge the police came. They took us with a police van with no windows. (…) After 10-15 minutes of driving we arrived at a place, which looked like a police station. It was a place with police vans parked outside. There was an old building, a yard and a big tree. In front there was only a street and occasionally cars passed by. In the back we could see some old buildings but no one seemed to live there. (...) We were around 20 persons in the beginning, but the police kept bringing more people. In the end we were 30-40 persons. There was one woman who was in a very bad condition; she was also pregnant. We were all kept outside. (...) Until night, we all thought that they would transfer us to a camp. The police also was telling us this. It got night, and we hadn’t eaten for 24 hours. There was only a water pipe we could drink from. (...) Some police were dressed in green, others in blue. I am not sure, but the two officers guarding us looked like soldiers to me. They were speaking Greek. 163 | By the time of the first push-back from Evros she was pregnant. 164 | Interviewed in Athens (Greece), June 14, 2013. They are together with four minor sons and a six months old baby girl with serious health problems, due to its premature birth. 165 | The family was pushed back later another two times from Lesvos in February and April 2013. The two other push-backs were also documented but are not included in this report, due to space restrictions. aNNEX-iNTERVIEWS | 61