At last, I saw Fire at Sea. It hit me like a punch to the gut. I was glued to my seat. When we left the cinema, I could not stop thinking about what I had seen. It was not just a documentary: it was a complicated narrative told at a measured pace and in hushed tones, but with captivating power and subtlety. The scenes impressed themselves upon my mind, sequence after sequence. At first glance, these images might have seemed similar to the many that we have seen in recent years. But the way Rosi had shot them, unmediated and with no filters, made them uniquely poignant. He had pulled it off. I felt victorious too, because I had wanted this so badly: a raw, unequivocally clear message that would shatter all the lies and prejudice surrounding this issue, awaken the public conscience, and open people’s eyes.
That night, in the hotel, Rita had to shake me awake more than once. I was sobbing in my sleep and breaking out in cold sweats. I was reliving one of my worst nightmares.
It was July 31, 2011. As always, I was on Favoloro Pier. A great many refugees had come in that afternoon. Around nine in the evening, a fishing boat of roughly thirty-six feet in length docked at the pier, with two hundred and fifty people on board. With a younger doctor I began to examine the passengers, allowing them to disembark one by one. They were all distraught. Some were wailing and tearing at their hair; others were weeping silent tears. We could not understand why: no one was severely ill, and there had not been any deaths on board. The last migrants to disembark told me there was a problem in the hold, but said no more.
It was almost nightfall and the boat was empty. I found the hatch to the hold, which was in fact a freezer for storing fish, and lifted it. The opening was narrow, and below it was pitch black. I could only just squeeze through and lower myself inside. It was stuffy, and there was an unpleasantly sweet smell in the air. Blindly, I felt for the floor, and found that it was soft and uneven beneath my feet. I took a few tentative steps forward. It was a very peculiar sensation, as if I were walking on cushions. Meanwhile, the strange odor had thickened and was now unbearably strong. I fumbled for my mobile telephone and switched on the torch.
The floor lit up, and I found myself in a chamber of hell. The hold was paved entirely with corpses. I had been walking on dead bodies. Innumerable young bodies. They were naked, piled on top of each other, some with limbs intertwined. It was Dantesque. The walls were scratched and dripping with blood. Many of these young dead people had no fingernails.
I scrambled up and out of the hold and vomited on the deck. I was shaken, lost, overwhelmed. I could scarcely believe it was real. I went to tell the others on the pier what I had seen; they too were in disbelief. Then a fire fighter climbed down there, and we began to bring up the bodies. He tied loops of rope around them and we hauled them out, one by one.
We laid the victims down on the pier. Many had fractured skulls and hands. They had clearly been beaten. The survivors were the brothers, sisters, and friends of those massacred in the hold – that was why they had been so distressed. The traffickers had threatened and intimidated them into remaining silent, but as soon as the police began to question them, the awful truth came out.
The first fifty migrants to board the boat in Libya had been stuffed into that freezer. They were the youngest and thinnest, and had been selected to go first because they could most easily fit through the hatch. Another two hundred and fifty were above deck. The boat was overloaded. The only air in the hold entered through a tiny porthole, but the passengers underneath were told that as soon as the boat left the harbor, they would be allowed on deck. Twenty-five of them were released, but then the vessel grew unstable and the traffickers stopped the others from following. Unable to breathe, they yelled and tried to climb out, but the smugglers beat them and threw them back into the freezer. Desperate to escape, they tried to push their way out all together, so that even the blows could not stop them. But human violence knows no limits. The smugglers took the cabin door off its hinge, planted it on the porthole, and sat on it. There was no more air, no more life.
Fifteen minutes was all it took to snuff out twenty-five lives. Fifteen minutes in which those poor young people did everything they could think of to survive. Fifteen minutes that must have seemed a century to them.
When I examined their bodies, I could see why the walls had been covered in blood. They had been trying to tear the boards off them, scraping until their fingers bled and their nails ripped, until their hands were reduced to raw flesh and splinters.
For days afterward, I could think of nothing else. I could not forgive myself for having stepped on and desecrated the victims. Images of scratched walls, shattered bones, and blood-soaked rooms came back to ambush my mind again and again, like a scene from a horror film.
I heard those young people screaming in despair. They had stripped off their clothes in their struggle to survive in that airless, lightless hole. I saw their fractured hands clawing at the wood. Fifty bloody hands. Twenty-five screaming voices. And the others above deck, forced to remain impassive though they knew exactly what was happening. They had to pretend they could not hear the imploring voices of their companions as they died like rats in a trap. When I thought about the brutes that did this, I saw red.
On that night of nightmares in Berlin, my rage had floated back to the surface. The next day I awoke feeling wretched, still drenched in sweat.
In the morning, Rita and I returned to Rome. She went straight on to Lampedusa, but I stayed in the capital in case we were summoned back to Berlin. And indeed we were. On the evening of the verdict, February 20, 2016, Rosi and I sat side by side. Each time a prize was given, we trembled. Sixth place, fifth, fourth, third – every name called out on the stage made us jump. When they read the name of the film in second place, we leaped for joy. We had won. We had been awarded the Golden Bear.*
We could hardly believe it. Fire at Sea had swayed the jury. I shall never forget Meryl Streep’s words: “[Fire at Sea] is urgent, imaginative, and necessary film-making.” The work of twenty-five years flashed before my eyes. I almost had another stroke.
But my excitement soon subsided. It is true that we had succeeded in spreading our message, but it is also true that those who should have done something concrete in response have failed to do so. Instead, borders have been callously reinforced, barriers and insurmountable walls erected. Closed borders, minds, and hearts. No one paid attention to Pope Francis’s words on Lesbos, calling this “the worst humanitarian disaster since the Second World War,” or his gesture of welcoming three refugee families into the Vatican.
I was received by the pope in a private audience immediately after his visit to Lesbos. In his eyes, I could read sadness like mine. He was conscious that we are surrounded by invisible walls without doors, that we are fighting a hopeless battle against those who want to rid themselves of the problem by simply ignoring it.
That day I was shaking with emotion, though I had told myself to stay calm. Not long before that, when the pope visited Lampedusa shortly before the shipwreck of October 3, 2013, my feelings had got the better of me and I had been unable to speak to him. When I came face to face with him in private, I wept. “Holy Father, help us,” I said. “Keep us from having to see more dead bodies in Lampedusa. Let us go to Libya and bring the migrants here ourselves. Let us stop allowing all this to happen.”
The pope gave me a rosary, a chaplet that I have kept with me ever since. Then he spoke of all the pain he had witnessed on Lesbos, which is Lampedusa’s sister in suffering.
Fire at Sea arrived on the island two months later, on April 16. The screening was a grand affair, especially since we do not have a cinema on the island. Rosi and I were very nervous. We were afraid Lampedusans would find fault with the film or be upset by it. But our fears were unfounded. Although the audience had a few quibbles, the film was a success on Lampedusa too.
And on that extraordinary day, something even better happened. The RAI, Italy’s public service broadcaster, had wanted to make a donation to Lampedusa’s health s
ervice in honor of Fire at Sea. They had contacted me to ask what would be most helpful, specifying that the donation did not necessarily have to be linked to the refugees. So I had asked for some musical instruments for the center for disabled children, since I had noticed that they enjoyed plonking away on their plastic toy pianos.
When the children took a real keyboard, a guitar, and a bright red accordion out of the boxes, they began to play as though they had never done anything else. They were ecstatic. Half the island joined us in the center’s main hall to celebrate. We were all moved to see the joy in the eyes of Rosalba, Celestina, Franco, and Salvatore. Only Claudio, a boy I am especially fond of, was not there. When the party was almost over and I had given up hope of seeing him, he finally arrived. He hugged me and then, trembling, he picked up the accordion. For a moment he struggled to find the keys, but then the music streamed forth as if by magic. It was a marvelous sight, everyone playing, singing, and dancing together.
At last, I was home. In all those months of great tension and emotion, that day was the best by far. That place was my very own “red carpet,” the place where I could truly live life to the full.
* In 2017, Fire at Sea was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Never shall I forget
If the walls of Lampedusa’s clinic could speak, they would point to a book we have read but forgotten all too soon. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel narrates his experience of being deported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald, where he lost his identity and became nothing more than a number. “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed,” he writes. “Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”
I quote these words because they are not too far from our reality.
When one group of refugees arrived, I examined some seventy emaciated children. They were dehydrated and starving. They had traveled “third class” on the boat for seven days, crammed into the hold with all the others who could not afford to pay for passage above board. Their bodies were scarred with knife wounds, cigarette burns, and other torments inflicted on them by their jailers.
Libyan prisons are the new concentration camps. The conditions under which migrants travel across desert and sea are not dissimilar from those of the death trains that transported victims of the Holocaust. People who want to put up walls and turn refugees away today are not acting all that differently from the Nazi collaborators who, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, embodied the “banality of evil.” Anyone willing to countenance thousands of children dying at sea or living in subhuman conditions within the confines of refugee camps is just as cruel as they were.
Two people played especially significant roles in reinforcing this belief of mine. The first I met in the clinic of Lampedusa, which is fast becoming not only a locus of recovery but also one of discussion and chance encounter. In mid 2014, the Polish reporter and poet Jarosław Mikołajewski came to my office to interview me about the crisis. Almost in spite of myself, I poured out my heart to him. I explained what was happening and told him how indignant I was at the scale of the tragedies we were seeing. I told him everything. I wanted him to take a little of my outrage home with him to his country.
But that was not my only reason for confiding in him. I also felt an inexplicable affinity with this man whom I had known for only half an hour: I could sense his empathy. “Despite our different origins and experiences, we both have the bare, unarmed instinct of brotherhood,” he later wrote to me. “We know that the human race is our family, and that all of our fellow men are a part of us.”
When in October 2015 I was invited to Kraków to receive the Sérgio Vieira Mello Award for humanitarian action, Jarosław took me on a bar crawl. We made a stop at Alchemia, a well-known club in the historic Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, and drank vodka. It was a surreal experience. I could not remember the last time I had been somewhere where there would be no continual telephone calls and requests to come to the pier. Time had stopped, and he was the person who had made it stop.
The second encounter, which was also thanks to Jarosław, took place during that visit to Kraków. At the hotel Austeria, the beating heart of the local Jewish community, we sat at a table with Leopold Kozłowski. Known as the “last klezmer,”* Kozłowski is a musician, composer, and singer who appeared in the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List.
Jarosław introduced me to Kozłowski and told him a little about my job. The musician looked into my eyes and, just as I had done with Jarosław, immediately began to speak. He told me things that, according to Jarosław, he only ever said to people in whom he saw his own humanity reflected. He told me how during the Nazi Occupation he had watched the Jewish population of Kraków die; how he had lost everything. “And when I say everything, I mean everything,” he said firmly. He spoke about the two years he had spent in concentration camps, accompanying the victims to their deaths with his music. The Nazis had forced him to play for their pleasure. Time and again, his art had saved him from being exterminated. The testimony of this small, strong, ninety-six-year-old man left us aghast.
“Pietro looked at the old klezmer,” Jarosław wrote in a private account of that meeting. “No, he was not old, but ancient – ancient as his people who were chosen for eternal suffering. The doctor’s face was like that of John Paul II on the eve of his death, when he wanted to greet the world from Piazza San Pietro but could not. Leopold rose and seized his hand. It was clear from that handshake that the two would understand each other, in that moment and for ever.”
Sometimes, unfortunately, cruelty comes from unexpected quarters. One day, two hundred and fifty migrants arrived at the pier. They were all in good condition, and as usual, the guardia di finanza was helping to transport them to the reception center. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw two well-built soldiers bundling a couple of the migrants into a jeep. They were thin sub-Saharan boys, exhausted from their journey. Instead of heading into town, the jeep drove off in the direction of the airport. I pointed this out to the other doctor who was with me, and we jumped on my Vespa to follow them.
We pursued the jeep into the open fields, where the soldiers pulled over. They dragged their passengers out of the vehicle, and, for no reason whatsoever, began to rain kicks and punches on them. Just like that, in an act of gratuitous violence. I accelerated hard until we caught up with them.
“What are you doing, you gutless bastards?” my colleague said. “Stop that right now!”
They could only have been on Lampedusa for a few days, because they did not recognize us. “Who are you and what do you want? Show us some ID.”
“Who are you, and what do you think you are doing?”
Tension mounted. It was like a scene from a western. The soldiers had not expected company, and had certainly not anticipated our reaction.
“Come with us to the barracks.”
“On the contrary,” I said, “you are coming with me, because I am going to make sure you will not get away with this.”
It was agreed that I would go with the soldiers and the boys in the jeep, and that my colleague would take my Vespa to the reception center and notify the staff that we were on our way. Meanwhile, the two migrants were on the ground. Though they were clearly in pain and terribly afraid, they said nothing. I went to them to check for serious injuries. Luckily, they had no broken bones. Carefully I helped them into the jeep one by one, and sat beside them, doing my best to communicate that no further harm would come to them. The soldiers got into the front seats, and we set off in silence. When we reached the reception center, I helped the boys inside and asked a trusted interpreter to take special care of them. Then we went on to the barracks.
The comandante was surprised to see me getting out of the jeep with his men. He came and
gave me a hug: “What brings you here?”
The two soldiers hung back. Now they had seen the comandante greet me, they knew they were in trouble. I told him the story, my voice shaking as I struggled to contain my rage. “Comandante, either these two leave Lampedusa before the day is out or I shall make this a matter of national and international news. These clowns will be the laughingstock of Italy. Here I am, almost killing myself to save as many people as possible, and they have beaten those boys black and blue. What were they thinking!”
I was on the warpath. Those soldiers had no excuse for acting like fascist Blackshirts, and there was nothing to be said in their defense. The comandante glowered at his men, visibly embarrassed.
The next morning, the soldiers had already been transferred elsewhere. They never set foot on Lampedusa again. Who knows what would have happened if we had not caught up with them in time. What is more, their disgraceful conduct once again risked damaging the credibility of their colleagues, hundreds of whom fulfill their critical role in helping refugees with due professionalism and humanity.
* Deriving from the Hebrew for “instrument of song,” a “klezmer” was a roving fiddler who played traditional Jewish music at weddings and other celebratory gatherings in fifteenth-century eastern Europe.
The boat cemetery
In the summer months, it is customary for the fishermen of Lampedusa to take tourists aboard their boats, and show them the sights along the island’s coastline. In addition to the Kennedy, my father had an old boat called the Pilacchiera that he often used for this purpose, and I loved to play tour guide for our passengers. One summer in my teenage years, a ship arrived in port carrying none other than the president of the Republic, Giovanni Leone. My father and I jumped at the opportunity to offer our services, and we spent a week showing the president around on the Pilacchiera. The job made me feel important, not least because Leone was fascinated by the beauty of Lampedusa. Every day he would ask us to show him something new: heartstoppingly exquisite vistas, glittering beaches hidden away in the island’s wildest corners.
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