Vacationers to the Greek islands of Samos and Lesbos aren’t meant to cross paths with the refugees living in two of the EU’s most notorious detention camps. Notorious because of their filth and crime, certainly, but also because many of those registered as asylum-seekers wait years, not months, for an interview, and even longer for a decision on their case.
When Eyad Awwadawnan and his family arrived on Samos in 2017—from Syria by way of Turkey and a harrowing boat trip—there was no place to sleep but the woods. Like most refugees, they assumed that strength, patience, and a bit of luck would bring safety and care. What they found on Samos was an open-air prison where no one cares and no one’s safe.
Footnote Press
Journalist Helen Benedict’s award-winning 2010 book The Lonely Soldier included accounts of female sexual assault in the military that inspired a documentary film and a class-action suit against the Pentagon. In Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, released in October 2022 by Footnote Press, she uses a similar format: the personal testimony of five detainees in Greek camps. She explains that Awwadawnan became her co-author when the pandemic prevented her from interviewing refugees in person, but the Syrian contributes more than translations and a graceful prose: he is a camp survivor.
Together, they worked to win the trust of those they interviewed, allowing them to tell their stories in their own words while not revealing their full names to safeguard their asylum status and security. For many, speaking with the authors was a form of therapy or a choice “between the pain of telling and the pain of not telling.”
If Eyad, Hasan, Asmahan, Evans, Mursal, and Calvin testify to the grim reality of life in detention, Benedict’s fact-filled analysis adds essential context to their first-person narratives. When Hasan is forced, for example, by his Greek captors to sign a confession that he trafficked his companions, she points out that forced confessions are common and Hasan, who can’t even read what he has confessed to, is advised not to accuse his accusers. Benedict frames their struggle as a historic human displacement—eighty-four million people—not seen since World War II. She explains that since 2016 the European Union has paid Greece and Turkey to keep those in transit from landing on its shores. Their latest solution: high-security prisons on the islands of Samos, Lesbos, Kos, Leros, and Chios.
Each testimony highlights a heartbreaking personal history. Asmahan is sold to her husband at the age of thirteen and fights to keep her children as she flees the Syrian war and domestic violence. She arrives at Samos pregnant and, though no consideration is made for her needs, gives birth to Aziz. Benedict is especially effective in describing the fear experienced by women of all ages in the camps. Evans was thrown out by his mother for being gay; his partner is killed and he narrowly escapes from Nigeria when he’s eighteen only to experience the same assaults in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Iran, Turkey, and finally Samos. Benedict points out that seventy-one countries outlaw same-sex acts and forty-three specifically target lesbians. Rape is often encouraged as a corrective.
Every story shows exactly how vulnerable a stateless person is. On the run, Evans is befriended by a man who asks for no money and appears only to want to help. He’s given a fake passport and told he’s flying to Turkey. Instead, Evans touches down in Iran, is jailed for five weeks, and when he calls the number the man gave him discovers he’s been sold to a farmer. Evans escapes, crossing into Turkey on foot and paying a smuggler for his boat trip to Samos. A 6.7 magnitude earthquake coincides with his arrival. After a few months in the camp, Evans decides, “I’ve swapped homophobia in Nigeria for racism in Europe.”
Racism is also a fact of life for Calvin in Athens, where, at age thirty-six, he meets Benedict. He suffers nightmares as a result of his repeated torture and imprisonment, first in Cameroon at the hands of President Paul Biya’s notoriously corrupt government, then in Turkey and Greece. His refuge is English literature—first as a reader, then a writer. He dreams of being a famous novelist and those dreams allow him to ignore his thirty roommates and their unheated apartment. Still, it’s an improvement over his entrapment in the Moria camp on Lesbos with 16,000 roommates. Calvin contacts Benedict in great distress in 2020 after all of his documents are stolen; he then disappears.
One of the most eloquent storytellers is Mursal, whose two-month journey from Afghanistan to Iran and Turkey defies belief. She, her two sisters, and their parents flee the Taliban’s beatings and threats of forced marriages only to find themselves at the mercy of smugglers who exploit their helplessness in treks over the mountains and endless truck rides, where the slow or sick are left to die. “All this time,” says Mursal, “the smugglers had food and water, but they never gave us anything.” In one of many attempts to cross into Turkey, Mursal and her sisters are separated from their parents. Determined to protect her sisters from rape and starvation, the teenager leaves her childhood behind.
“Some people see refugees as homeless, nameless, unclean, uneducated, and criminal. Yes, we are homeless but not hopeless! We are nameless but not weak!”
It takes six tries before Mursal’s family, now reunited, arrives in Athens. Yet because they arrive on the mainland instead of at an island reception camp, they are officially unregistered and denied food, housing, hospital, and legal aid. Months later, the Catholic NGO Caritas finds them an apartment, and Mursal becomes the family’s sole support as a translator.
Like so many other battle-weary newcomers, she longs for acceptance but often finds hostility or those who want her to convert to their religion: “Some people see refugees as homeless, nameless, unclean, uneducated, and criminal. Yes, we are homeless but not hopeless! We are nameless but not weak! If we are unclean, it is because we slept in the forest, streets and tents, but we have clean hearts. If our crime is speaking up for our rights and freedom, yes, we are criminals.”
The journey changes everyone interviewed here, but that knowledge is power, especially for the women, who want to educate the West about the victims of its vicious policies.
In a final section, the authors report on the latest strategies being used to turn back the migrant flow. These include blasting refugees with “sound cannons” as they attempt to cross into Greece from Turkey; coast guards refusing to rescue boats, even with children on board; Greece imprisoning seven out of ten asylum-seekers and arresting activists and members of NGOs that try to help them. And, the authors point out, other Western nations aren’t much better. Rather than wasting more money on lethal strategies, Benedict and Awwadawnan recommend seventeen actions for the reform of policy in the United States and European Union, and many ways that their citizens can support new arrivals.
“Nothing will be as it was,” predicts Awwadawnan when he and his family flee Syria. That’s true for any refugee, only 2 percent of whom successfully resettle, finding adequate jobs, housing, and schooling that allow them to restart their lives. As Benedict writes, “Much of the pain expressed by the people in this book is about having risked their lives crossing continents and seas, only to end up belonging nowhere and mattering to nobody.” Enforced idleness is torture: children are not in school and parents can’t provide for them. These stories are the best argument I know for reforming immigration policies that trap people in a legalistic purgatory where even their dreams torment them.