The huge Athens ferry arrived again that morning. It was the length of a soccer field, and at least five stories tall. The bottom half of it was painted blue, and BLUE STAR FERRIES was written in big words on the side. A radar bar spun near the bridge, and antennas and satellite dishes sprouted from the roof. It looked like the pictures Mahmoud had seen of cruise ships. Its lifeboats alone were bigger than the dinghy they had left Turkey in. Mahmoud tried to get Waleed interested in the big ship, to get him excited about their first trip on a boat that big, but his little brother didn’t care. He didn’t seem to care about anything.
A big ramp on the back lowered, and refugees streamed on board the ferry. Mahmoud’s mother wept as they climbed a ramp with the other passengers. She kept looking back over her shoulder at the tent city, hoping, Mahmoud was sure, to catch a glimpse of someone carrying a baby who might be Hana. But she never did.
The inside of the ferry was like the lobby of a fancy hotel. Every floor had little clusters of glass tables and white upholstered chairs. Snack bars sold chips and sweets and sodas, and televisions played a Greek soccer game. Refugees who still had belongings stuffed their backpacks and trash bags under tables and into the overhead compartments. Mahmoud and his family settled into one of the booths, and his father searched for a plug to charge his phone.
“Mahmoud, why don’t you take your brother and explore the ship,” Dad told him.
Mahmoud was only too glad to get away from the sight of his mother’s broken face, and he took Waleed by the hand and pulled him out onto the promenade that ran around the outside of the ship.
Mahmoud and Waleed watched silently as the ferry pulled away from the dock, the ship’s huge engines thrumming deep below them. The awful sea that had tried to swallow them was calm and sapphire blue now. The Greek island of Lesbos was actually beautiful when you saw it from the sea. Little white buildings with terra-cotta roofs rose up tree-covered hills, and on top of one of the hills was an ancient gray castle. Mahmoud could see why people visited there on vacation.
Besides the refugees, there were a number of tourists on board. Mahmoud could tell they weren’t refugees because they wore clean clothes and used their phones for taking pictures instead of looking up overland routes from Athens to Macedonia.
Another refugee had laid out a mat on the deck, and he was praying. In all the bustle of waiting in line and getting on board, Mahmoud had lost track of what time it was, and he pulled his brother down with him to pray alongside the man. As he kneeled and stood, kneeled and stood, Mahmoud was supposed to be focused only on his prayers. But he couldn’t help notice the uneasy looks the tourists were giving them. The frowns of displeasure. Like Mahmoud and his brother and this man were doing something wrong.
The vacationers dropped their voices, and even though Mahmoud couldn’t understand what they were saying, he could hear the disgust in their words. This wasn’t what the tourists had paid for. They were supposed to be on holiday, seeing ancient ruins and beautiful Greek beaches, not stepping over filthy, praying refugees.
They only see us when we do something they don’t want us to do, Mahmoud realized. The thought hit him like a lightning bolt. When they stayed where they were supposed to be—in the ruins of Aleppo or behind the fences of a refugee camp—people could forget about them. But when refugees did something they didn’t want them to do—when they tried to cross the border into their country, or slept on the front stoops of their shops, or jumped in front of their cars, or prayed on the decks of their ferries—that’s when people couldn’t ignore them any longer.
Mahmoud’s first instinct was to disappear below decks. To be invisible. Being invisible in Syria had kept him alive. But now Mahmoud began to wonder if being invisible in Europe might be the death of him and his family. If no one saw them, no one could help them. And maybe the world needed to see what was really happening here.
It was hard not to see the refugees in Athens when Mahmoud got there. Syrians were everywhere in the streets and hotels and markets, most of them, like Mahmoud’s family, planning to move on as soon as they could. Mahmoud’s father thought he had the right documents to travel freely in Greece, but a woman at an immigration office told him he would need to go to a local police station first to get an official document, and the police told him he would have to wait up to a week.
“We can’t wait a week,” Mahmoud’s father told his family. They had found a hotel for ten euros a night, per person, and the people of Athens were very friendly and helpful. But Mahmoud knew his parents only had so much money, and they still had four more countries to cross before they reached Germany. Mahmoud’s mother would have stayed a week, or even longer, to keep asking everyone she met if they had seen a baby named Hana. But it was decided: They would take a train to the border of Macedonia and try to sneak across during the night.
Josef watched from the deck as another little boat snuck through the flotilla of reporters and fruit sellers and Cuban policemen surrounding the MS St. Louis. This boat held a familiar-looking passenger, and Josef realized with a start that it was Dr. Aber, Renata and Evelyne’s father, who already lived in Cuba. Josef ran through the ship until he found the sisters in the movie theater, watching serials.
“Your dad’s coming to the ship!” Josef told them.
Renata and Evelyne hurried after him. When they got back to the ladder at C-deck, they got an even bigger surprise—Dr. Aber had gotten on board the St. Louis! Officer Padron was looking over some papers Dr. Aber had brought with him, and a small crowd had gathered to see what was happening.
Renata and Evelyne ran to their father, and he swept them up in his arms. “My beautiful daughters!” he said, kissing them both. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
Officer Padron nodded and said something in Spanish to Dr. Aber, and Dr. Aber smiled at his daughters. “Come! It’s time for you to join me in Cuba.”
“But what about our things? Our clothes?” Renata asked.
“Forget about them. We’ll buy you new clothes in Cuba,” Dr. Aber said. His eyes darted to the policemen, and Josef understood. Somehow Dr. Aber had gotten someone official to let him come get his daughters off the ship, but he didn’t want to wait around any longer in case the policemen changed their minds. He carried Renata and Evelyne to the ladder, and Renata barely had time to yell “Good-bye!” to Josef and wave before they were gone over the side.
Josef was speechless, but the rest of the crowd wasn’t. Angry passengers surrounded Officer Padron and the other policemen, demanding answers.
“How come they got off the ship and not us?”
“Can you help us?”
“How did they do it?”
“Let us off the ship!”
“My husband is in Cuba!”
“They have papers! Right papers!” Officer Padron tried to explain in broken German, but that only made the crowd madder.
“We have papers! Visas! We paid for them!”