Journalist Jeanne Carstensen spends most of 240 pages in a new book describing what happened one day, almost ten years ago.
It was Oct. 28, 2015, can Carstensen was on the Greek island of Lesvos, reporting on the ongoing refugee crisis. Thousands of people were trying to flee war in Syria and get to Europe. Most of them had some money—in fact, most of them could have paid to fly to Paris, London, Frankfurt, or other European Union cities.
But they couldn’t get visas, since Europe wasn’t dealing well with the crisis. So they paid smugglers to put them on boats to cross from Turkey to Greece.
On that day, a radically overloaded boat sank in the Aegean, with hundreds of people, including families with children, tossed into the sea.
Many of them died.
Carstensen was onshore when the survivors arrived. Then she spent ten years tracking down people who lived, people who tried to save them, people who went out of their way in a small town to offer them sanctuary—all while the governments of nations with far more resources tried to look away.
The result, A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis, is a stunning book. It’s a masterwork in reporting, and a powerful narrative. It’s also, at times, painful to read—as it should be.
We talked to Carstensen about the book, the experience of researching and writing it, and the lessons it holds for a society where migration is only going to increase.
48HILLS: You happened to be on the island covering the refugee crisis when this particular shipwreck happened. Talk us through that, how this all just started.
JEANNE CARSTENSEN: I was reporting over there. I had spent a little time on the island as a tourist. Loved it. Then in 2015, we all started seeing the news that this mass migration was happening, and I just really wanted to go cover it. So I got some grants from the Pulitzer Center and got some assignments, and I was just there as a regular foreign correspondent, and I’d been on the island about six weeks already, and I’d also been over in Turkey, so I’d been in the region. And that day, of course, it was an accident for all of us.
Thousands of people were coming every day, and thousands of people came that day. But everybody remembers this day because this shipwreck was more horrific than the other incidents that we had had, and that turned out it was a double decker boat. There were so many people on it. So already it was an overwhelming kind of situation for the locals, but that day, it just went into a hyper drive of panic—we can’t take this anymore, and we don’t want dead bodies washing up on our beach. And we don’t want to see these dead children in our village.
I did a story on it a couple of days later. A very general kind of story, and moved on, but. I knew that it had after effects, like the cemetery was full. They had to open a new cemetery. The morgue was full. I knew that. The shipwreck had caused a lot of problems, but I just didn’t know very much specifically about what had happened. And that’s why, a few years later, I decided to go back and really dig into it.
48HILLS: You talked to an amazing number of people. You’re a great writer, of course, but just the reporting and the research job here is. Kind of phenomenal. How did you find folks? How did you find survivors of the shipwreck? How did you find the fisherman who saw this happen. How did you find them?
JEANNE CARSTENSEN: It was dogged reporting. I started just by returning to Lesvos in 2019, where I had a ton of contacts. So I’m talking to nurses and fishermen and people there that I knew, and they were telling me, yes. This was a horrible day. And I started asking: Do you have any contacts from that day? Do you remember any people? And everybody remembered the day. And they had their own memories, but they didn’t have names of people. The only one that everybody kept mentioning was this huge guy. They’d say, oh, there’s this huge, really fat guy that I remember seeing. I don’t know his name. And so that was Okba in the book. Once I ended up getting a photo of him I got his name from a photojournalist who had written it down. But you have no idea of knowing where in the world is this guy?
I tried film crews that had filmed him and all the journalistic context. Did you write down his name. Do you know where he is? No.
I finally just wrote a short note about my search, had it translated into Arabic. And then put it up on medium. And then there was a Syrian friend of mine in Germany who was a refugee I had reported on earlier and stayed in touch with. I said, would you do me a favor and just paste this on Arabic Language Facebook?
And he did that all over. In Germany, in different countries in Europe. And a few weeks later, I get a text and he’s like, we found him, we found him. And then it was important to me because it was such a traumatic event not to just pick up the phone and call him myself.
I asked this Syrian friend of mine to speak with him, and explain who I am and see if he wanted to talk with me, and he did.
So there was that. And then with the guy Hedayat, who opens and closes the book. The young Afghan man. The greek nurse in the book, Zoe, had stayed in touch with him, but most Greeks are pretty journalist averse. And so, even though she liked me, she didn’t really want to give me his number. I don’t know what changed, but, like, six months later, all of a sudden, on Facebook messenger, she says, listen, I’m going to give you his number. And so I found a journalist in Kabul to call him and asked if he wanted to tell his story. And in that case, I was pretty nervous about it because I knew about the losses that he had suffered.
And it turned out he did want to speak to me, and also he spoke English well. And so. He had, gone back to Kabul. And by the time I found him, he was once again in Turkey. And so once I had found those two guys, they became this sort of anchor for me to begin the
48HILLS: It’s a really important book, and it’s very well written and researched, but I have to say, at times it’s hard to read. And I don’t mean, the language is hard to read. I mean. I mean, I’ve got two kids. I’m thinking about what it must be like to be in the situation where you’re not sure if you’ve lost your kids, where you’re in the water. You can’t find them. Where your kids don’t make it, where your wife but doesn’t make it. Or your husband. I mean, there’s times when, it’s not difficult to read because of the writing. It’s just painful to read. And there’s times when I’m just reading it and gasping, going, oh, my God. How did you write that? How did you deal with this as a writer?
JEANNE CARSTENSEN: It was very hard. Especially of all the stories Hedayat told. He opened up to me, and when I flew to Ankra it was 2019. And I realized it was two days of interviews. And I realized, and he told me that he’d never really told the whole story to anybody before. He was such a mature person and so able to share his emotions, but it was probably the hardest interview I’ve ever done in my life. He broke down in tears. But I kind of trusted him that he knew what he was doing and that he wanted to tell the story.
And I felt that it became my commitment to receive what he had to say. And witness this. But it was bizarre. Over many years living with this. And you have to craft it right. How do you write about somebody whose son is dying in his arms?
There were days and times when you almost feel like, can I ever do justice to what these people have shared with me? My friends worried that I was having trauma. I think I probably do in some way. But you can’t even compare it to people who have been this vulnerable.
But I wanted to give people a window into this ongoing shipwreck situation because, you know, it’s ongoing. In the Mediterranean. It’s like, yes. Children die in their arms. That’s what this fucking horrible, flawed system brings. That’s what happens. And I just felt like I needed to get that close.
There were several people out there who trying to drown themselves in the water, out of despair and shame because they already knew their family members had drowned. Obviously, I had to pick and choose what I said and try and find a way to show some of these horrible moments.
48HILLS: You just talked about this is still going on. This horrible, fucked up situation is still going on. Talk a little bit about that. Why all these people are getting in boats and trying to cross the Mediterranean? What’s going on behind this? And I know that this isn’t your job or mine, but what should we be doing about it as a society?
JEANNE CARSTENSEN: Yeah, it’s a very hard question. I mean. Just the quickest reminder about 2015. We’re four years into the Syrian refugee crisis, and most people think that all the refugees came to Europe. That’s bullshit. The vast majority who left Syria, they stay in the region, and like 5 million were in the region already in Turkey and in Jordan, in Lebanon. It was a breaking point. [German Prime Minister Angela] Merkel suggested and signaled that Germany would be open to receiving asylum seekers. Legitimate refugees from Syria especially. But also people were despairing in the region that the war was never going to end. They couldn’t go back. And so it was an opportunity for them to perhaps put down stakes in an area of the world where they could receive asylum. And at that time, I must have interviewed, briefly, hundreds of people when I was there in 2015. Just these quick interviews. Why are you traveling? And people really believed in Europe, in the west. They wanted to live in a place where they thought human rights were respected. These were people who were drawn even to the secular society. They might have been proud Muslims, but they were happy to go towards a more secular society.
And so it’s 2015. It was a mass movement of Syrians and the Afghans. Three decades of instability, ongoing war. The Taliban, corruption warlords and Hedayat and his young wife, a young family they were part of the generation that thought that after the US came in and they believed there would be a renaissance in Kabul and we’d be modernized, and they wanted to be part of that. But the corruption was too strong. And you know what happened?
His family was targeted. So those are some of the reasons. It was over 50 percent Syrians, around 25 percent Afghans. I think Iraq would be the third group of people. Lebanese. A lot of people trying to get out of Iran. You even had people in that flow coming from Pakistan and Bangladesh and sometimes India. Or Kurdish people from different parts of the region. They didn’t feel safe, whether it was in Turkey or whether it was in Iraq, so it’s what they call a mixed flow.
But these were people with resources. They weren’t necessarily wealthy, but they were working people who did not really want to leave their homes, didn’t have another chance, couldn’t stay in the region and thought this is our opportunity to try and build a better life.
48HILLS: And what we should do about it.
JEANNE CARSTENSEN: It’s really complicated, but I think that, number one, we have to acknowledge that migration is always happening, and it’s always happened, and it’s always going to happen. And I think that there’s a kind of denial around migration, and it’s sort of on the one hand, at times, our leaders and politicians will say, “We have these human rights obligations, and of course, we’re going to help these asylum seekers.” But then out of the other side of their mouth, they’re wanting to keep the other side of their population happy. And. They’re using migrants as they’re always been used, as kind of a political football. I don’t know the answer, but. I do think we need to acknowledge that it’s an ongoing situation. I think that might help.
There’s a lot of mobility in our world now. There’s global capital, there’s. communication. There’s goods moving around the planet. We need to have some sort of reasonable system for work permits, people that could move around the planet legally. But what we’re doing is kind of the worst of all worlds because we try and say that we still believe in human rights, although we don’t say that here in this country anymore under this administration. But at that time, those words were still being spoken.
But that one of the ironies of my book is that all of those people had enough money to fly to Europe or to take a safe boat to Europe, but they were not allowed. They were not issued any kind of travel visa, and so they had to pay $2,500 to this transnational smuggling network. These people are very, very dangerous, but they were also providing a service, and so our flawed policies are leading to the growth of this industry.
But I can’t solve the problem, which is in part why I wrote the book. The way I did, because what I was hoping is that it would make people ask questions. Let’s start talking about. Solutions.
I think we have to support local populations. You can’t just say, oh, all the Greeks on these islands just are supposed to be heroes and take care of everything. When it’s impacting their lives, they should also be considered part of the equation.
Everything we’re doing now in the US is absolutely the wrong thing to be doing. It’s the ultimate demonization. And at least at that time on Lesvos, as horrible as it was, locals were meeting these people. There was some attempt at integration and kindness. And I think the real danger is when migrants just get pushed behind locked doors and there’s no actual humane interaction.
