Photographer Jamie Francis and I got to see something moving and momentous Thursday, a window into humanity and the war in Syria that I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

We watched in awe before dawn as Syrians staggered out of a 21st century form of hell into safety, breathing freedom for precious moments before entering a fresh round of uncertainty and pain. I felt a chill in common with anyone who ever saw survivors emerge from the Holocaust or walk unscathed from the tangled Twin Towers.

Some of the newly minted refugees who got out to Jordan Thursday had been trying to escape for a year or more, narrowly avoiding death in their final cross-border dash. Their expressions hinted at unspeakable horrors of the civil war they managed to leave behind.

“If the regime doesn’t like someone for any reason, they’ll cut their throat or strangle them with a rope,” said a 39-year-old man who made it out with his wife. “They pour petrol on the body and burn it to hide the evidence,” said the man, a laborer in a faded red Adidas jacket. He declined to give his name for fear of retribution.

“I’ve seen dogs eat bodies,” he said. “What you see on TV is nothing compared to what’s going on. Bashar al-Assad is a butcher. He’s worse than Hitler.”

Rare border journey

Khalid Takhayneh, an official of the International Organization for Migration, had generously picked us up at 2 a.m. Thursday at our Amman hotel for this rare up-close view of Syrian arrivals.

His driver steered the SUV north through desert darkness. We stopping six miles from the Syrian border, a point close enough some nights to hear the crashing of shells and bombs on the other side.

We arrived at the Rabaasarhaan Transit Center, a compound featuring a brightly lit steel structure half the size of a football field. Workers had lined up hundreds of blue plastic chairs inside the building. They’d set up a processing counter at the far end. At the center, they had placed a table arrayed with water bottles, baby formula and plastic cups.

We milled around with the officials, hands in pockets, feeling the overnight desert chill. Around 4 a.m., five large buses rumbled into the parking lot. Out stumbled the dusty, exhausted Syrians, smelling of sweat and fear. Some heaved bulky grain sacks out of the idling buses. Many carried sleeping children. Almost all of them had a dazed look, having survived death’s corridor at the border and then a 400-mile bus ride.

Children awoke, frightened to see uniformed police officers. But these policemen weren’t Syrian soldiers ready to shoot on sight. At the officers’ direction, Syrian men in flowing coats and turbans dumped out battered suitcases, depositing piles of ragged clothing, disposable diapers, cracked trinkets and simple plastic toys.

Syrian women peaked from behind veils as officers pawed through the piles, looking for weapons or drugs. One policeman confiscated a cement trowel, a sharp object likely intended merely for building a simple home.

A migration official wandered through the crowd, handing out shoes to barefoot kids.

Families rebundled their possessions and straggled into the processing center. To children aged 6 to 12, the sparkling array of water bottles appeared as an apparition. Kids gradually summoned courage and walked up to me, asking in polite Arabic whether they could have one bottle for their families. I smiled and motioned them on. Growing bolder, children mixed baby formula in the plastic cups, sipping the concoction with relish.

In all, more than 400 Syrians entered the transit center early Thursday, waiting patiently until each head of family approached the processing counter. They are the latest of more than 2 million in the second largest refugee flow in history, behind only Afghanistan.

One man in a flowing red and white turban told me he’d left his village more than two years ago, trying for a year to reach the border.

Agents had charged each man, woman and child more than $100 for the final ride past Syrian border guards. Arrivals said the guards peppered a smuggler’s car with bullets Thursday, killing a would-be escapee.

Some of the Syrians handed fake identification cards to Jordanian officials, who regarded them with amusement. The officials reserved sharp questions for weeding out Syrian government soldiers or members of Al Qaeda or Al Nusra, none of whom were detected Thursday. Jordan’s legendary hospitality for refugees was on display, despite Amman’s recent closures of nearby border crossings that had forced the Syrians on a hazardous detour hundreds of miles east.

Officials routed each family to one of two refugee camps. They issued bar-coded United Nations passes. Escapees became refugees, ready or not for an indeterminate stay in a dust-choked desert camp.

I caught up with the laborer again, spotting his rumpled Adidas jacket in the crowd. “This is all I have in life,” he said, pointing at two grain sacks stuffed with clothes. “At least my life is saved now.”