“Is this Europe?” That’s the question German photographer Kai Löffelbein heard again and again from refugees landing on the island of Lesbos, Greece, this past fall, where 2–4,000 migrants and refugees were arriving daily. So catastrophic is the situation there that, after dire sea crossings in leaky boats helmed by armed smugglers, many arrivals doubt they’ve come to the right place.
The refugee crisis in Lesbos is one of the most dire in Europe, where more than one million refugees arrived in 2015. Since the beginning of this year, 18,000 migrants, most escaping war in Syria and Afghanistan, have arrived on the small eastern Aegean island. At least 42 people have drowned off trying to get to Lesbos in the past two weeks alone. While abstracted statistics like these sum up the sheer magnitude of the situation, they fail to convey the individual experiences of refugees — it’s hard to empathize with numbers
by Carey Dunne on January 27, 2016
