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 Understanding historical and political contexts to contemporary refugee movements.

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Swimming to safety

Swimming to safety

In 1942, an unnamed Greek man swam the seven kilometers from the island of Chios to the Turkish coast. According to historian Philip Argenti, he started his journey at the promontory of Haghia Heléne, putting his clothes in a watertight tin that also served him as a lifebuoy. He wasn’t alone in escaping the islands during the German occupation, though he is believed to be the only one who swam. Between March and May 1942 alone, nearly nine thousand inhabitants of Chios fled the brutal occupation and famine conditions to neighbouring Turkey. The German military had declared it illegal to leave the island and confiscated most seaworthy boats, so the refugees had to cross the sea on frail skiffs and under the cover of night. It was a dangerous journey, as it is today, and not all the vessels reached the Turkish shore safely: in April 1942 one boat broke on a reef and 207 of the 236 passengers lost their lives, while another similar accident saw eighty-one casualties.

Apparently, the unnamed Greek swimmer was able to stop and rest during his journey on the small rocky lighthouse island of Páspargos (today Fener Adası, or ‘Lighthouse Island’ in Turkish). Perhaps he knew a way onto this steep rock; perhaps there was a jetty back then. The lighthouse on Páspargos has been abandoned since the 1930s and its building is a ruin. The islet had been handed over to Turkey in 1923 as part of the Treaty of Lausanne, connecting its history with yet another massive refugee movement across the Aegean Sea: this treaty, following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, formalized the ‘population exchange’ of Christians and Muslims between Greece and Turkey.

After his rest on the lighthouse island, the unnamed Greek refugee swam on to Turkey. It is not clear where he went from there. Many Greek men joined the Greek Armed Forces in the Middle East and fought with the British against the Axis. Many others came under the care of the British and Greek refugee relief administration, particularly after the Turkish government, which was concerned over the numbers of unregulated Greek arrivals, threatened to repatriate them. Closely connected with the British army, the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration (MERRA) was established to deal with the incoming Greek, Yugoslav and Polish refugees. Refugees arriving in Turkey were first sent by train to a transit camp in the hills near Aleppo, in French mandate Syria (then under Allied occupation after a joint British/Free French invasion ousted the Vichy governor). There all incoming refugees were disinfected, registered, quarantined for fourteen days, interrogated by British intelligence officers and, after some weeks, sent onwards to refugee camps in Egypt or Palestine. Up to one thousand refugees passed through Aleppo every month.

“Tents at Nuseirat, southern Palestine, which is UNRRA's biggest camp for Greek refugees.” United Nations Archives (catalogue link)

“Tents at Nuseirat, southern Palestine, which is UNRRA's biggest camp for Greek refugees.”
United Nations Archives (catalogue link)

In Egypt, the British had the capacity to hold eight hundred refugees in an empty agricultural trade fair exhibition hall on Gezira Island in the middle of Cairo. Later, MERRA established a camp at Moses Wells near Suez. It was a former quarantine station for pilgrims returning from Mecca, and could accommodate five thousand refugees. During the Alamein crisis in June 1942, when the Axis forces were advancing towards Alexandria, the British refugee administrators in Egypt hastily sent some three thousand Greek refugees further south to British colonies in East Africa, much to the dismay of their governors: they had already received some nineteen thousand Polish refugees. And so although five hundred Greeks were sent to a camp in Kigoma, Tanganyika, the East African officials asked the governor of the Belgian Congo if he could take in some of the refugees. Congo was a Belgian colony, but at the time cut off from the colonial metropole, which was controlled by the Germans. The governor agreed, and some 2,700 Greeks were sent to refugee camps in the eastern Congo and the Belgian colony of Ruanda-Urundi (today Rwanda and Burundi).

In Eastern Congo, the Belgian authorities established six refugee camps, administered by Greek and Belgian officials and maintained by thousands of Congolese workers. There were two more in Rwanda. According to an American Red Cross report from 1944, the refugees enjoyed excellent living conditions. The camps consisted of well-built houses, located in rather disease-free regions, had great medical care and were materially well supplied. The reason for this privileged treatment of European refugees in Africa lies in the colonial division of society. Although British and Belgian administrators looked down on the Poles and Greeks, seeing them as peasants and fishermen, they considered it necessary to maintain them to an acceptable ‘European standard’ while they were in the colonies. Thousands of African labourers thus had to do most of the menial work for the refugees. After the war, the colonial governments were fast to press for the refugees’ removal, regarding them as a nuisance in a politically volatile situation. Integration was, apart for a select few, not on the agenda.

“At Port Said, standing in line on the lighter, Greek women and children who will board UNRRA ship that is to take them home to Greece.” United Nations Archives (catalogue link)

“At Port Said, standing in line on the lighter, Greek women and children who will board UNRRA ship that is to take them home to Greece.”
United Nations Archives (catalogue link)

Refugee journeys between Chios and Turkey remain perilous. In Berlin, in 2020, Hashem Moadamani told me the story of his own attempt, in 2015, to swim the waters that unnamed Greek refugee had crossed in the other direction over seventy years earlier. Moadamani and his companion Feras Abukhalil were unable to find a way onto Fener Adası or the other, slightly larger islet lying in the strait, but in Greek waters they were able to signal a coastguard vessel and were brought ashore. Another three refugees tried to swim to Chios in March 2017: the rescue mission sent out with a helicopter did not find them. But the relative comfort that Greek refugees enjoyed in the Middle East and Africa is in strong contrast to the situation of today’s refugees, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, on the Greek islands. People in the Aegean camps fear for their lives as the COVID-19 pandemic hits the overcrowded camps. Earlier this month, the large and overcrowded Moria camp on Lesbos was destroyed by fire.

Every refugee’s story is specific, like that of the unnamed Greek man who swam from Chios to Turkey, or of Hashem Moadamani. But people always flee from persecution, war and misery to safer places, and over time the places of relative danger and safety have often changed. If you could trace all the refugee journeys between Chios and the Turkish coast, you would see a criss-crossing back-and-forth movement. As Greek historian Iakovos Michailidis poignantly wrote, the Aegean has always been a sea of refugees.

Further reading

If you want to learn more about the epic swim of Hesham and Feras watch this CNN clip from 2015. Today Hesham organizes guided tours (highly recommended by the author) about refugees past and present in Berlin with Refugee Voices Tours.

Argenti, Philip P. The Occupation of Chios by the Germans and Their Administration of the Island. London: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Hionidou, Violetta. Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941-1944. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Lederer, André. ‘L ’odyssée Des Réfugiés Grecs Au Congo Pendant La Seconde Guerre Mondiale’. Bulletin Des Séances de l’Académie Royale Des Sciences d’Outre-Mer 3, no. 27 (1981): 315–30.

Lingelbach, Jochen. On the Edges of Whiteness. Polish Refugees in British Colonial Africa during and after the Second World War. New York: Berghahn, 2020.

The header image is from DiscoverChios.gr

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