Google Translation from an Italian Newspaper  – La Stampa

“I survived a year ago from Sweden looking for my missing brother in another shipwreck”
Roussom and Marx destinies divided family in distress

NICCOLÒ ZANCAN
TORINO
Every day that God sends on earth, calls him his father. “He’s a farmer, 80 years old, he is very tired: Roussom – he says – I just want the truth. If your brother is dead in the sea, have no fear. If your brother is in jail, I want to know. I am ready to accept any answer, except for the silence. “Roussom Abraham does not know what to say. This is the problem. No one knows. In the list of survivors of the Navy, the name of his brother Abraham Marx is not there, we checked out yesterday. The last phone call goes back to the night between 27 and 28 June: “Party Merawith Eritrea with his wife in March, passed by Khartoum and the Sahara desert, my brother was in Libya for two weeks. He was happy. Although concerned about the crossing. He said that the smugglers were taking them to the sea, leaving for Italy. “For three days I’ll call you,” he said. Since then I have not heard from him. ”

Roussom Abraham, however, has done it. It is one of the survivors of the sinking of 3 October. He had learned to swim as a child, throwing himself into the water of a river flowing behind her village. It remained afloat in the sea. For two hours and twenty minutes. Praying and gasping. There had told wearing a tracksuit white and blue, they had given him to cover himself. “I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” he repeated. Ate with distrust a Sicilian cannoli and told his story: “We were loaded onto the boat by beating with sticks. When we arrived off the coast, the captain has turned off the engine. It’s been two small ships, but no one has stopped. Then the captain he set fire to a blanket, after having sprinkled with gasoline. ”

She told him. A former military man with four children at home: “I ​​want to go to Sweden. Finding a job there and get me from my family. “Roussom Abraham arrived where he wanted. He lives in a small town in the North, full of lakes and houses with colored roofs. “I love Sweden. I feel good here. Today I went for the first time in school “education”. “He says so. But what does it mean, exactly? “I teach the Swedish language. When I’m good, I can realize my dream. I want to become a truck driver and traveling. They accepted my request for asylum. In two months I will have the documents. But without my brother I can not be happy. ”

Roussom Abraham called the only other contact in his possession, that of a smuggler. “He told me that he does not know. That has no news. That the only issue on the Italian coast has been a barge with hashish on board, with many migrants arrested. But I know that hashish is wrong and dangerous. I knew my brother, a good person, a student model, excellent English. But it really can be successful? “.

Hard to forget what happened at the end of June, in the Mediterranean Sea. Yet another boat intercepted, 158 miles north-west of Tripoli. But no one had ever seen such a scene, not even the soldiers involved in the operation Mare Nostrum: 590 people crammed into 30 meters. And down in the hold of the bow, with the hatch closed, 48 people crushed one another, suffocated. “It looked like a mass grave,” said the team leader Antonino Mobile Ciaviola. There is no history of hashish. There are these 48 bodies landed at the port of Pozzallo. “Fifteen bodies have been recognized by friends and family – now says the mayor Luigi Ammatuna – all others have received an anonymous burial in small cemeteries in the area.”

We do not know if one of those deaths is Marx Abraham. If somewhere was also buried his wife. We do not know whether they are dispersed into the sea, along with thousands of other migrants cut off from all the statistics. Dead. Or locked up in Libyan prisons. “Please, can you help me?” Says Abraham Roussom. “What should I say to my father, when recall?”. We do not know.