Small Problem

The judge narrowed his eyes. “Madam, did anyone pay or ask you to be in this courtroom today?” He spoke in Greek, but a mumbling interpreter turned his question into English.

“Absolutely not, your Honor,” I replied as firmly as I could, gripping the railing of the witness stand.

I had gone to Greece a few months earlier to research a novel, and now here I was, being questioned in a Greek courtroom as a witness for a Syrian refugee, a circumstance I never would have predicted. But all I could think about at that moment was how easily the legal system might take away the future for which he had risked so much—and I was terrified for him.

***

This all began when I went to the island of Samos in June of 2018 to research a novel I am writing about the refugee camp there, now the most overcrowded and inhumane such camp in Greece.

Samos lies in the Northern Aegean, less than a mile and a half from Turkey, and is one of the islands designated as a “hot spot”—that is, a holding pen for the thousands of human beings fleeing war and persecution in the Middle East and Africa in the hope of finding safety and a future in Europe. The camp is built on a former military base designed to hold 650 beds, but by last summer, it was packed