When you read these stories back-to-back, the first thing you notice is how normal the people are before everything goes wrong. Sina was a chemical engineering student. For being the best of her year, she received a flatscreen TV. She fell in love with Dani, her drawing instructor, and they were married in front of three hundred guests on a July afternoon in 2013. That doesn’t sound like the beginning of a story about refugees. However, by the time you finish reading her story, she is in winter in Gothenburg with a son who was born somewhere along the way.
The true European story lies in the space between the before and the after, but most of us have stopped paying attention to it. The boats were the target of the cameras. For a moment, they came to the Turkish beach to see the small body. After that, they departed. The slow grind that starts after arrival—the part where a chemical engineer is reduced to a number on a form in a language she cannot read—is more difficult to capture on camera.
Part of the reason is that Eritrea itself hardly ever makes the news. Since the nation became a state, President Afewerki has been in charge. The conscription system he established in 1995 has done what fear systems typically do: it persuaded a whole generation that staying was just as risky as leaving. For thirty dollars a month, Sina put in twelve-hour workdays. Her husband wanted to cross the border, but he was sent to guard it. That posting contains a dark joke, and I believe his supervisors were fully aware of it.
The thing that most impresses me about Charlotte McDonald-Gibson’s reporting is how little melodrama she permits. Because Sina’s story is presented in a flat, almost administrative manner, it succeeds. The shipping containers were used as prison cells and buried in the desert. The temperature was 44 degrees. The cries that are inaudible through dirt. When you read about a wedding cake after reading those specifics, your brain must perform the task that the author declines to do.
Then there is Gazi Kapllani’s article from Calais, which he wrote from the harbor where the barbed wire rises and the police officers’ faces appear frozen. He makes a point that sticks with me. Europeans were in the camps in about the same fields seventy years ago. The 1945 displaced people sought a nation that would allow them to rest, just as Syrians and Eritreans do today. He claims that Europe has a short memory and a long history. It’s difficult to disagree with him.
Nearly all of the images from this era that people recall are of the sea. Two Malian men are being hauled out of the Atlantic by Juan Medina. The photograph by John Stanmeyer shows migrants on a beach in Djibouti raising their phones to pick up a Somali signal. An abandoned cradle discovered by a Reuters photographer on the Syrian-Turkish border accomplished more than a thousand statistics. Looking at these pictures now gives me the impression that we handled the crisis more like a moment than a beginning. It was just the start.
Europe is still unsure about what will happen after Sina arrives in Greece, after Dani survives, and after the baby is born. The trains continue to head north. The amount of paperwork keeps growing. Additionally, a woman who used to oversee a chemical plant is teaching her son a third language—possibly a fourth—somewhere in Gothenburg. To be honest, it’s still unclear whether the continent she has reached merits the dream she carried for it.
