Beyond the Headlines: Capturing the Human Tragedy of the Refugee Crisis

In the summer of 2012, I stood high up on the rocky cliffs of northern Lesvos gazing out across the Aegean at the Turkish shoreline just five miles away. The international sea border between Turkey and Greece lay out in the middle somewhere, but I wasn’t thinking about national boundaries. I was on vacation. It was my first visit to Lesvos and the eastern Aegean, and I was enraptured by the elemental landscape of rock, sea, and sky that hadn’t changed much since Homer’s time. A tanker may have passed by, a fishing boat or two, but signs of modern life were scant. I could hear the timeless tinkling of brass bells as sheep clambered along rocky trails in the mountains high above me.

Besotted with the island, I returned the next spring in search of Orpheus. A Greek friend had recounted the myth of Orpheus’s head and lyre washing up on Lesvos after the enraged Maenads decapitated him in Thrace; I loved that his severed head never stopped singing. I swam at the remote beach where tradition has it his head floated in, and I visited a cave some experts believe was the site of the oracle of Orpheus. At the end of my stay, my friend and I circled the island in her boat, camping under the stars for two nights. As we zoomed up the narrow straight separating Lesvos from Turkey, we stayed close to shore, remaining in Greek waters; once again, the significance of the nearby sea border didn’t cross my mind.

But by 2013, the Syrian civil war was already in its third year and millions of refugees were fleeing into nearby Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey. The waters where I had mused about Odysseus voyaging home from nearby Troy, or Orpheus singing, would soon become the center of the largest influx of refugees into Europe since World War II.

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Two years later, I returned to Lesvos, this time as a reporter covering the refugee crisis that had exploded in the eastern Aegean. The international sea border I had previously ignored had become a geopolitical hot spot as day after day thousands of people risked their lives to cross it in order to reach Lesvos and other Greek islands—their entry point into the European Union and hoped-for asylum. It was a stunningly beautiful, but windy afternoon on October 28, 2015. Once again, I stood on the cliffs of northern Lesvos looking across the Aegean toward Turkey. But this time I saw flashes of orange out in the water—people in life jackets flailing in rough seas. There had been several refugee shipwrecks already in October, but from what I was hearing this one was catastrophic—an overloaded wooden boat carrying hundreds, sent by smugglers from Turkey, had sunk halfway across to Lesvos.

Rescuers brought survivors to the fishing port of Molyvos. Notebook in hand, I walked through the disaster scene as volunteer medics pumped babies’ chests on the cobblestones. I saw men carry body bags off a Coast Guard vessel. Volunteers in neon vests ran through the crowd distributing water and dry clothes to groups of wet, frightened people. No authority was in charge in the village, and it was hard to get reliable information about the scope of the disaster.

Dozens of survivors huddled inside the small Saint Nicholas Church at the entrance to the harbor, some openly sobbing, others rubbing their eyes or cradling children. I stepped inside to interview people about what happened, but I felt uncomfortable invading their privacy when they were dealing with so much grief. I closed my notebook and left.

In the following days, I reported on the aftermath on the island—no more room in the cemetery to bury so many refugee dead, the overwhelmed reception system, mounting anger that the European Union wasn’t doing enough to stop the senseless deaths. I heard that entire families had drowned. Several children had been orphaned.

Meanwhile, the ongoing crisis unfolded at a relentless pace. Boat after boat disgorging new arrivals, growing mountains of discarded neon-orange life jackets. On October 28, the day of the shipwreck, more than 6,500 refugees had landed on Lesvos. The next day, another 6,500. Then the next day, and the next…More than 130,000 refugees arrived to Lesvos in October alone, almost half a million by the end of the year. The numbers staggered the mind, but at the same time, blurred into abstraction.

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Four years later, people were referring to the entire Mediterranean Sea as a graveyard. Nearly twenty thousand people had drowned or gone missing trying to cross from Turkey or North Africa into Europe between 2014 and 2019. By 2024, the number would rise to over thirty thousand. The deadliest incidents received coverage, but most shipwrecks passed with little notice. The precise number of dead and missing was rarely known. Journalists and aid workers often summed up the life stories of the passengers by their nationality—Eritrean, Syrian, or Afghan—and their status as migrants. Their specific humanity remained obscured.

It haunted me that I had been so close to the events of October 28, but didn’t know many details about the refugees either. I had seen the locals, international volunteers, and aid workers in action but wanted to understand more about what it was like to be on the front lines of such a traumatic event. Unlike the vast central Mediterranean where refugees traveled for days to reach Malta or Italy, the October 28 wreck occurred in waters only six miles wide. Media footage from the rescue at sea and chaotic scene in Molyvos was broadcast around the world. I and many others had reported on and later investigated the tragedy, yet I felt that something essential was still missing.

Odysseus. The Wager. The Titanic. The Titan submersible that imploded while trying to reach the Titanic. Refugee journeys—and shipwrecks—are also epic in scope. I wanted to try to understand the October 28 shipwreck in all its dimensions, to try to comprehend the aspirations, bravery, and loss of the people involved. October 28 was the deadliest refugee shipwreck in the eastern Aegean in 2015. It also was a singular event that changed the lives of specific people, with middle names, high school diplomas, diabetes, a love for poetry, and countless other particularities.

Telling this story involved a broad search. The boat went down between Turkey and Lesvos, but after burying their dead, the survivors left the island to continue their journeys. In October of 2015, the borders were still open and most made their way to Germany or another European country. A few may have returned to their home country. I had no way of knowing. I found four people—a bank loan officer from Kabul traveling with his pregnant wife and two young sons; a thirteen-year-old girl, also from Afghanistan, traveling with her journalist father, mother, and three siblings; a school counselor from Homs, Syria; and a young woman, an artist, also from Syria—willing to talk to me. They spoke about why they left home, why and how they got on the boat, and the losses they had suffered, some of which were more than anyone should have to bear.

The people of Lesvos were later nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for their compassionate response to the refugee crisis. But just calling them “heroes” obscures more than it explains. Many islanders were angry that they had to bear the cost of distant wars, or they held anti-migrant views. But among those who helped, a majority, their heroism consisted of many selfless, often quiet acts that happened beyond the gaze of any cameras. I uncovered as many kind gestures as cruel. The more I interviewed people—activists, the coroner, interpreters, fishermen, volunteers, restaurant owners, a priest, and many others—the more I admired the personal choice they made to go toward a problem, to help even with a bottle of water, rather than turn away.

The number of forcibly displaced people, either inside their own countries or outside as refugees or asylum seekers, almost doubled from 65.3 million in 2015 to more than 120 million by mid-2024. If the displaced formed a country, it would be the thirteenth most populous on the planet. Experts believe this trend, driven by conflict, and exacerbated by climate change, could double again in the next decade. These numbers signal that any of us could find ourselves having to flee our homes, or, like the people on Lesvos, having to choose whether to turn toward, or away from, people who need our help.

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This is a story about one shipwreck on one day, but events unfold in context, so it’s also the story about why so many Syrians and Afghans were on the move in 2015 and how their mass arrival impacted Lesvos. I include many people in the book because I want to show the astounding diversity of participants and viewpoints. Some of the heroes could be jerks, while members of Greece’s justifiably maligned Coast Guard could be kind. After the shipwreck, Lesvos’s right-wing mayor called for safe passage for refugees from Turkey in order to stop the bodies washing up on the island. Nor were the smugglers a uniform lot. While most were driven by greed and showed a total disregard for human life, some believed they were providing a needed service to the refugees, or they were only involved temporarily to solve their own economic problems.

Director and writer Bryan Doerries presents ancient Greek tragedies to help people overcome trauma. In The Theater of War, Doerries writes that tragedies can “help us see the impending disaster on the horizon, so that we may correct course and narrowly avoid it.” I take inspiration from this.

The October 28 shipwreck wasn’t a play or a movie; it was a real tragedy, and one that was not singular in its horror or in the way people and organizations reacted to it. I wrote this book because I believe we need to pay attention to the human impacts of our migration policies. Increasingly, we are militarizing borders, restricting access to asylum, and criminalizing those who try to help. I hope A Greek Tragedy will serve to wake us up; my hope is that we will not turn away.

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Excerpted from A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis by Jeanne Carstensen. Copyright © 2025 by Jeanne Carstensen. Reprinted by permission of One Signal Publishers/Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.