Two days into the new year of 1997, two officers approached me and told me to come with them. I complied.
I got in the car fully expecting to be taken to a meeting with Social Services. I had been out partying the whole night before and was so indifferent to everything that I actually fell asleep in the patrol car. The officers woke me up at Sank Annæ Square in Copenhagen, where the car was parked right in front of the Oslo ferry.
One officer got out and was greeted by two men. One of them was wearing green pants and a green, fleece jacket and looked like a proper G.I. Joe in camouflage. He was tall and dark-haired. The other one was short, chubby, and looked like a lazy general.
“Sleiman, get over here. There’s someone I want you to meet,” one of the officers said.
I had no idea what was going on, but I shook hands with the two military-looking men and followed them onto the ferry. Once we were all on board, the officers sat down in a lounge filled with red chairs and started discussing something with the two strangers. After a while, the two officers got up to leave, and I got ready to follow them.
“Where are you going? You’re not coming with us. You’re staying here,” one of the officers said.
“Fuck no, I’m not staying here. I’m coming with you.”
I then attempted to get off the ferry, but I was instead detained and got into a fight with the officers and the two strangers. The four of them cuffed me and locked me in a cabin. From the window, I saw the officers leave.
This is a bad joke, I thought to myself.
Soon afterward, the ferry left the dock. I was left with no other options, so I went to sleep. I later discovered the ferry ride took eight hours.
At the breakfast table the next morning, I soon realized that I wasn’t the only abducted kid on the ferry. There was another boy named Jens. Very few words were spoken when the ferry arrived in Norway, and the two men ordered us into an old Volkswagen Golf. They drove into the center of Oslo, where they bought thick socks, a warm sweater, and a blue jacket for each of us.
We left the city and drove through a dazzling, sunlit, Norwegian winter landscape complete with mountains, rivers, and lakes. No one uttered a word in the car, but I was boiling with rage and quietly contemplated how I would go about smashing the two men’s heads in. If they were up to something, I was going to defend myself to the death. I truly had murderous thoughts. I had no idea what was going on and didn’t ask.
We took a turn and drove up a mountain and into the forest, where we continued down a winding road. Eventually, the car stopped in front of a Norwegian cottage in the middle of a vast, white landscape called Feforkampen in the county of Jotunheimen. We all entered the cottage, where we were finally given a brief explanation as to what we were doing there. As I was stuck in a strange country by myself, there was little I could do except talk to the other abducted kids and get their stories so we could compare notes.
Jens had stabbed his mother. Later, he told me that she had always invited men over, who would get drunk, have sex with her, and beat them both up. One day, he decided that enough was enough and stabbed her with a knife. I honestly can’t recall whether or not he killed her or merely injured her. His case was even worse than mine, and he didn’t have anyone, no family, nothing. We never really bonded, but unlike me, he seemed happy to be there.
After Jens, it was my turn to talk to the two strangers who brought me there. One told me that I was suspected of being an errand boy for a group of drug dealers in Copenhagen and that the purpose of the abduction was to mentally cleanse me. They wanted to erase my past. In a calm voice, I was also informed that it meant I would never see my family again.
“What are you talking about? Of course, I’m gonna see my family again.”
“You will never see them again in Denmark. Maybe they can visit you abroad once we’re done with you. But you won’t see your family again until you turn eighteen.”
I absolutely refused to cry in front of them, but I couldn’t hold it in forever. I just wanted to go to my assigned room. In there, I wept without making a sound because I didn’t want Jens to hear me. Is this the end of my life? I thought to myself. How were my mom and my siblings supposed to live without me? I had a girlfriend. We were so young, there was no way she was going to wait for me.
I began to weigh my options. Should I run away? If I killed the two men, I would go to prison in Denmark, but then my family would be allowed to visit me. This was my actual thought process at that moment.
When I woke up the next morning, the two men finally introduced themselves. Their names were Hasse and Jørgen. They told me they were former special operations soldiers and that their job was to teach me how to survive in the mountains. I will never forget Hasse. He told me he had once been in a fight with Jean-Claude Van Damme. Apparently, when Van Damme was in the military, a fight had been arranged between Danish and Belgian soldiers.
Van Damme was my hero at the time. “Get outta here. You’re full of shit. He would kick your ass any day,” I told Hasse.
I also said that I wanted to see my family, but they made it clear that that was not going to happen. I wouldn’t be given any money either. They would supply all of my food and clothing. They would also make sure I survived. I immediately wondered if it was possible to escape without killing them. “Watch out. I ain’t scared of you,” I said.
“That might be true. But we’re in charge here,” they said.
I attacked them in anger, but they ended up throwing me out into the snow. They told me “You can leave if you want to.”
I sat in the snow. I refused to give in. I was determined to prove that I didn’t need them. It was freezing cold, but my rage and stubbornness kept me warm. At one point, they tossed out some warm clothes for me. I put them on and went to the outdoor bathroom. I sat there for four or five hours until they came out and told me to come inside. Even the smallest concession was a sign of weakness in my world, so in my young mind, I had just won a battle of wills against these two tyrants. Of course, this pyrrhic victory left me sick for several days afterward.
There was a mountain in front of the cottage. I recall it being about three thousand feet high. One morning, Jørgen ordered me to run to the top of it. I ran halfway up the mountain, but then Hasse came out of the cottage.
“What the hell are you doing up there? Get down here. Who told you to run up there?”
“Jørgen did.”
“Jørgen isn’t in charge. I am. Did I tell you to do that? Why are you wearing so many clothes? Take them off. And you stay here till I tell you otherwise.”
Hasse left and soon Jørgen returned.
“Why are you down here? Didn’t I tell you to run up that hill! And who told you to take your clothes off? Put them back on and start running again.”
I began to run back up the mountain. A little later, Hasse came out and ordered me to come back down. They pushed me around like that all day long until sunset. They kept at it for four months until they felt like they controlled me mentally. I started to forget my friends and family.
One day, when Hasse and Jørgen told me to sleep outside all night, I jumped them while armed with a knife. Since I was a child and they were two highly trained and experienced soldiers, the attack was unsuccessful. They forced me to dig a hole in the snow and handed me a sleeping bag as punishment. I learned that it was possible to sleep outside in minus thirty degrees Celsius weather while fearing for wolves and bears. It was a damn good sleeping bag. It covered everything except my face so I could breathe. It was completely sealed apart from that. And comfortable too. That might have been the best sleep I ever had. The night sky was completely clear, and I woke up fresh in the morning.
I also learned that you could climb a frozen waterfall with an ax and spiked shoes and cover twenty miles on cross-country skis in a single day. I got very fit. At fourteen years old, I weighed 163 pounds, and there was not a single ounce of fat on my body. I started feeling better and better.
One day, Hasse and Jørgen gave me a pat on the shoulder. “You have done well,” they said. But I was still not allowed to go home. When I was done in Norway, they would send me to Eilat in Israel, where I would be taught how to dive.
They only allowed me one fifteen-minute phone call per week, but the one stipulation was I couldn’t use it to call family. The only phone number I remembered was that of a girl named Ayse, a girl from Ishøj who had a crush on me. She was friends with a girl named Fatima, whom I had a crush on. I was allowed to give them my address, and they sent me back cigarettes and letters.
With the cottage came four huskies. They were called Anabol, Blixen, Bokser, and Lisa. In the beginning, I despised them all because they smelled like shit and barked like crazy and also because I had been afraid of dogs ever since bikers from Red and White had gotten a large German shepherd to chase me around Askerød when I was twelve.
As part of the mental and physical training program, I had to take the dogsled and go fill different food depots set out for cross-country skiers. I rode alongside Hasse and Jørgen, but once, I lost control of the sled and fell off while the dogs kept running. I thought Hasse and Jørgen would stop and come to my aid, but they kept going.
When I fell off the sled, I thought, That’s it. I’m fucked. I wasn’t sure whether or not they were keeping an eye on me, but it was minus four degrees Fahrenheit, or minus twenty degrees Celsius, so I hurried back to the cottage before the snow erased my tracks. I walked eight miles, and when I got back, the others were there, warm and cozy. Things get dangerous once we need to start measuring temperatures with Celsius instead of Fahrenheit.
I asked, “Why didn’t you come get me? Why didn’t you come back for me?”
“Why would we do that? You know how to take care of yourself. We taught you.”
It was ski season, and there was a hotel nearby that was owned by a Danish family. I would help them in the restaurant and in the kitchen, where sometimes I had to peel ninety pounds of potatoes before dinner. The family was kind to me. They took me skiing, and I actually became quite skilled at both cross-country and slalom. Norway became my home, and I liked it there.
Come spring, the tourists left, and there was no more work for me at the hotel. Instead, I was supposed to go to Israel and learn how to drive. I had originally planned to contact my mother once my time in Norway was up, but three weeks before my departure to Israel, I was suddenly allowed to call her. “You’ve got fifteen minutes for your friends, and then you’ll get another fifteen minutes for your mom,” my caretakers told me.
When I called home, my mother was upset. “I’m leaving Askerød. Social Services said that I can have you back as long as I leave the municipality,” she said.
“Don’t do that.”
“But I have to. I want you back. I miss you. I agreed to let them take you away so that they wouldn’t kick me out. But I can’t wait till you’re eighteen.” We both started crying.
After that, things were set in motion. My mother had reached out to one of the local shot-callers in Askerød, who had contacted a Norwegian attorney. The attorney put pressure on Greve Municipality to send me home. My mother might have agreed to let them take her son away, but surely not to a foreign country.
It is difficult to determine exactly what happened next. Several people from Greve Municipality remember my case, but the details surrounding my abduction have since become obscured. I’m fully convinced that Social Services officials feared that the project was in fact illegal and that they rushed me back before it came to public attention. René Milo—the mayor-elect at the time who later would become the most prominent political figure in Greve Municipality—remembers the case. He is unsure if what they did was legal.
The rumor was people were afraid to go to the mall because of me. They claimed that Christmas trade had come to a standstill, and the shop owners’ union demanded action. Story goes it was a situation where a lot of citizens were uneasy, then the Social Services Board presented Milo with a solution which he accepted. I was to be removed. Can you believe that one person without superpowers could possibly deter people from holiday shopping? .
Greve Municipality has shredded the official documents from that time, in addition, they’ve attempted to reconstruct the course of events in an effort to cover their own asses.
So I was brought back to Denmark just as abruptly as I had been shipped off to Norway. I was informed that I had to be in Denmark within seventy-two hours, and I left with Hasse and Jørgen. When we arrived at Copenhagen Central Station, they said goodbye. No hugs or any other signs of affection were given when I departed.
Today, I have conflicting feelings about them. Sure, I grew to care about them in the mountains, but they were always rather cold. They had been hired to do a job, and the moment they said goodbye to me, it was as if all the time we had spent together meant next to nothing.
I also had mixed feelings about coming home. I was thrilled to see my family again, but my hatred toward Social Services was now full blown. These people hated me so much that they had sent me abroad and forced my own mother to abandon me so she wouldn’t get evicted from her home with her three young daughters. My mom wasn’t going to get me back if she didn’t move away from the municipality. So, when I got home, my family was forced to move to a women’s shelter.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to stay at the shelter with them. Instead, I lived on the streets of Askerød. It was the only place where I knew anyone, and Social Services couldn’t forbid me to roam the streets of the ghetto. I slept in basements, in friends’ apartments, and, occasionally, out on the streets. Almost daily, I would meet up with my mother, who took the train from the shelter to Askerød with a packed lunch for me. We would meet at the train station, where she gave me my lunch, and then she went right back to Copenhagen. Her love knew no bounds, but in my stubbornness and anger, I never thanked her.
One of the things I feel most guilty about is how ungrateful I was to my mom when she lived at the shelter. One time, when she and one of my younger sisters came all the way from the city to see me and bring me a homemade sandwich, I just took the sandwich and told them to leave because I was eager to hit the streets with my boys. I didn’t really think about all the things she did for me, and I completely ignored what she was going through because of me. Her only concern was to keep my belly full, and I was just being destructive and self-centered. It pains me to think about how she must have felt on the way back to be rejected by a son whom she did everything for. She is one of the greatest victims of my actions.
Nothing was gained for Greve Municipality. They had sent an angry, young, charismatic, love-hungry, fatherless, self-destructive teenager off to Norway, and in exchange, they had gotten the same teenager, only now he was burning with resentment too. At only fourteen years old, I was strong as an ox after four months of hard, physical military training, and I was now ready to wage war against everyone, René included.