I Just Wanted to Save My Family

October 12, 2020
Pélissier delivers a riveting meditation on love, family, and the perilous lives of asylum seekers. He opens with the story of his charmed romance with a beautiful Syrian woman named Zena who was working on her PhD in Lorraine, France. They fell in love and married, but things took a dark turn after Zena’s family became endangered in war-torn Syria. Hoping to help his in-laws, Pélissier drove to Greece, where Zena’s family had been detained on their way to France from Syria, but instead of facilitating their escape, he is accused of trafficking them by Greek officials. Released after appearing in court, he returned to his wife without her parents and siblings. After Zena’s family’s separation from Pélissier, the memoir switches to their point of view, following them to Hungary, where they are apprehended and taken to a migrant camp, and finally to France, where they receive asylum. The memoir is striking in its ability to remain harrowing and suspenseful while also digging deeply into the emotional dynamics of an extended family that’s been pushed to the brink. Pélissier’s stirring account exposes the inhumanity of asylum seekers’ plight and illuminates how precious and precarious the right to freedom can be.

October 15, 2020
A French legal expert's account of how efforts to rescue his Syrian refugee in-laws turned into a protracted legal and political nightmare. P�lissier married his wife, Zena, in 2012, just as the conflict in her native Syria began to intensify. In 2013, while visiting her parents, the newlyweds discovered that war had forced them to move from the outskirts of Damascus to an area they believed was safer. Over the next two years, the family endured the kidnapping and imprisonment of Zena's father, the rejection of their application for asylum in France, and a grueling journey involving smugglers that took them to Greece and almost cost them their lives. Desperation forced the family to contemplate using human traffickers again to get them into Italy. Unwilling to allow his in-laws to experience further trauma, P�lissier went to Greece in 2015 to take them back to France with him, knowing that French law would allow him to do so without punishment. Greek officials arrested the author and forced him to return home while his in-laws were forced to again use smugglers to help them get to France. In the years that followed, P�lissier and his wife battled to keep her family in their town only to be told everyone--including Zena's now-ill father--would be deported. In 2016, another town offered the family refugee status, but a year later, P�lissier became embroiled in a long, costly legal battle with the Greek government, which accused him of being a "human trafficker." Both sobering and informative, this story of human suffering--which is told in both P�lissier's voice and the voices of some of his relatives--calls necessary attention to the brokenness of democratic legal systems and their terrifying inability to effectively handle ongoing humanitarian emergencies like the Syrian refugee crisis. Eye-opening reading for anyone interested in learning more about refugees and their plights.

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