actually I also visit boring places

Planning your Mediterranean vacations be ready for the luxury interiors, sparkling cabriolets and deeply touching life stories. That’s not about Hollywood love-and-break affairs or artist’s adventures. That’s about war and death.

In the very south of France there is a museum town, Villfranche-de-Conflent. A medieval walled town, a little fortress of 13th century. Among the population of 80 people one Chechen family used to hide there.

I met Said on the way from Barcelona to Paris. He helped me to make the fake train tickets. That was such a tiny outrage for the guy who had been forced to use a gun since he was ten. He often looks back to the time when a random bullet could kill his friend. He can still remember how at the age of twelve he was standing along the wall preparing to be shot down. It was the miracle that saved him.

Once he had sheltered a couple of French journalists in his house in Grozny. His friends confessed later, that they were going to captivate them. Fortunately Said had driven journalists from Chechnya before something terrible happened. After almost 8 years they helped him to move to France. He changed the surname in his new French passport. And now he lives there with his three sisters and a wife.

He told me, that he couldn’t come back to Russia to see his father because he is still in the crime detection there. Answering the question “What did you do to become an offender?” he says: “I was just trying to survive”.
- Did you kill people?
- I’m not sure. May be in skirmish. Anyway I didn’t want to.
- Do you fear anything now?
- Yes. I’m afraid to stay alone.
- What is your dream?
- To help my friends to move to France when they are out of jail.
- What about your motherland?
- I do not care. Alexandre Duma wrote, that Chechens are French of the Caucasus. We are French so far.

But I remember Said standing on the beach totally charmed and saying: “I can’t believe that some of my folks are still in Chechnya while I’m here”.