On one of the Thursday afternoons I love to spend with my grandfather, we're talking about the tent camp set up by illegal immigrants in Amsterdam. I tell my granddad about Sunil, a guy I got to know as an enthusiastic as charming manager of a small restaurant in my hometown. When I was facing financial nightmares, he offered me a job and we soon became friends.
Over a year later, I'm at the gates of Camp Zeist, a prison for illegal immigrants. I'm carrying a plastic bag with some things I gathered. Visiting Sunil. I walk through the barbed wire fences and am asked to leave all my belongings behind in a locker. After I've been frisked, my plastic bag is thoroughly inspected.
"Has the prisoner filled in a list in advance with the items requested?" The guard asks abruptly as he holds up a pack of coloured pens. The pens are not allowed.
I'm in the visiting room of the detention centre, and a moment later Sunil is brought in. We both feel uncomfortable. In order to break the tension, Sunil stands up to fetch me a cup of coffee from the machine to offer. Out of nothing, we are flanked by two guards.
"Sit down!" shout the guards to Sunil, sharply. I may have a cup of coffee, but I'm shaken up by the situation. I remain seated. "Is it always like this?" I ask Sunil. Gingerly he begins to tell.
He talks about prisoners who had no access to a doctor because they could not fill in the application form. About the poor food he was forced to buy at the prison shop. That people are harassed by security guards (trained on a course that lasts a mere ten days). Everyone faces the screams of the immigrants with mental problems. How these prisoners are put in isolation by a special unit, overseen by guards armed with batons. In there, they're kept for days in solitude in front of the cold eye of a camera.
How long people are imprisoned, is random. Sometimes months, sometimes years. Trapped without a rehabilitation program. No idea when they are free. For many people they are simply put on the street. So much homelessness. Some get a forced ticket to the country of origin. Their ankles and hands bound and with a hood over their head, they go on the plane. Some never come out, like Sunil's cellmate. He hung himself.
After the hour's visit ended, I walk out bewildered. At the gate stands a group of protesters of old age. The church group of Zeist is holding their monthly vigil. The protest leader is an 83 year old man. A fellow church goer is holding the megaphone for him: "that I must experience this again at my age!", he shouts.
"Plain concentration camps." my grandfather grumbles. "Are you saying this happens in the Netherlands?" I want to point his Godwin out to my grandfather. Can he say this? "Yes," I think, "that he may say."
And as for Sunil? He was - after six months of detention - left at the airport without a reason, money or passport
