SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Almost 10 years ago, a horrific boat accident was in world news, briefly. An old wooden boat built to hold just a few dozen passengers was loaded by smugglers with 300 refugees from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Iraq, that set sail from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesvos. But it rolled in the raging seas and sank. About 80 people died. The exact number may never be known. Reporter Jeanne Carstensen covered that story, and for 10 years, has tried to put together - at the lives of those who were lost, as well as those who tried to come to their aid or ignored or even exploited. Her new book, "A Greek Tragedy: One Day, A Deadly Shipwreck, And The Human Cost Of The Refugee Crisis." Jeanne Carstensen has reported for The New York Times, Foreign Policy and "The World" from PRX, joins us now. Thanks so much for being with us.
JEANNE CARSTENSEN: Thank you, Scott.
SIMON: Lesvos is famously beautiful. But what do you remember on that afternoon of October 28, 2015?
CARSTENSEN: It is famously beautiful. It was a beautiful day, but cool. And a lot of refugee rafts were coming across in the morning. We knew that high winds were coming up in the afternoon, and we hoped that smugglers would not send boats into the gale-force winds. But around 3 p.m., word started spreading around the island that there had been a terrible boat accident out in the center of the channel separating Turkey from Lesvos. And I was up on the cliffs with other people and looking through binoculars, and we saw this terrible sight of hundreds of orange and blue life jackets out in these roiling seas.
SIMON: I don't want to make this too much about the numbers. I want to make it about the people, but how many refugees arrive day after day, even thereafter, that month alone?
CARSTENSEN: Yeah. On Lesvos alone - in October of that year, 130,000 refugees came to the island of Lesvos. And over the course of that year, almost a million people crossed from Turkey to Lesvos and the other Greek islands. It was a stunning number of people.
SIMON: What made you want to stay with this story and try and fill in so much of what we didn't know?
CARSTENSEN: I witnessed the incident that day. I was in the village where the rescue was taking place, where the fishermen and coast guard were delivering the survivors. And I saw in the faces of the survivors that they had been through some kind of hell out there. And also, reporting on the island in the weeks after, I knew that there wasn't enough room in the morgue. There wasn't enough room in the cemetery to bury the dead. And all of these things - as a reporter, I realized I really didn't know how it impacted the individuals on the island. And I didn't know anything about the people who had lived through this shipwreck.
SIMON: Let me ask you about a banker from Kabul and his family, Hedayat and Zohra. Firstly, what sent them out of Afghanistan, which was dangerous enough?
CARSTENSEN: Well, he worked in a bank, and he was in charge of the loan department there, and he was targeted by gangs. And they even targeted his family - his wife, his two young sons - saying, we know where they are. And he felt that he could not keep his family safe in Afghanistan any longer, so they decided to make this journey. But the people in 2015 all had means. They all had regular professions, wherever they came from. You know, in my book, it's a loan officer; it's a psychologist; it's a young woman who studied journalism and wanted to be an artist. These were, for the most part, professional people who had the means to make this trip.
SIMON: There were a lot of people living in the Greek islands who came to the rescue, weren't there?
CARSTENSEN: Yes.
SIMON: I noted the words of Kostas Pinteris, a fisherman. There was no time. We just had to help. Many of them did, didn't they?
CARSTENSEN: Many of them did help. And they often helped in very simple ways - just handing out a bottle of water or pointing the direction to the road where people had to walk. But it was quite tremendous because these are small villages where people were arriving. So one village, for instance, has about 150 residents. And they had thousands and thousands of people from all different countries walking through their village every day during that period - caused a lot of tensions. Some people helped more than others. It wasn't universal. But overall, I saw a kind of decent response. But, you know, after months and months of this, it's not tenable. And people got exhausted. And it had too much impact on their lives, and it was hard for them to keep helping.
SIMON: Speaking just for myself, I'm haunted by so many painful vignettes of attempted rescue. I can't help but think of a man who didn't want to be rescued.
CARSTENSEN: Yes. Yes. That is Hedayat, at one point - the Afghan man who had his son in his arms, and when the lifeguards finally came to pull him out of the water, his son was dead in his arms, and he didn't even know if he wanted to be rescued. He certainly didn't want his son to be left behind. It was a very, very, very intense moment.
SIMON: Children are especially vulnerable in these passages, aren't they?
CARSTENSEN: They really are. They are very vulnerable. And one thing that I found out as I talked to people years later about the rescue, there were four Spanish lifeguards out there on two Jet Skis and the coast guard. And everybody, without talking or having any plan, they took the kids first. Even if they couldn't rescue the parents, they went for the children. And this is in part because hypothermia comes over children much faster. But it was also some kind of gut instinct when there are more people out there than you can rescue, let's at least rescue the children.
SIMON: What do we learn from these stories, do you think?
CARSTENSEN: I think we learn that these are human stories, that fleeing home to get to safety is something that any of us could have to go through. So it's something to really think about. You know, how can we help? Are we going to turn towards them, or are we going to turn away? But I don't think any of us really can escape finding ourselves in this vast flow of migration that is - it's ongoing. It's always been part of life on this planet, and it probably always will be.
SIMON: Jeanne Carstensen, her new book, "A Greek Tragedy." Thank you so much for sharing this story with us.
CARSTENSEN: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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