NOTE #9 A DINGHY IN THE NIGHT

My adoptive brother Ngoc and I are standing on the rocky shore of the small Greek island, looking out over the foaming sea towards the lights of the Turkish village, which seems close enough to touch. It is February and bitterly cold. I wonder what the view must be like for the refugees who are now over there, hidden in the woods, waiting for their only chance. For them, Europe must seem so close now, and yet appearances are deceptive. Because death lurks in the narrow strip of sea. The Spanish rescuers next to me nervously track the position of a small rubber dinghy on their mobile phones, which has dared to make the crossing despite storm warnings and high waves. Hours pass, but the dinghy is hardly getting any closer. We light a fire on the shore to show the small boat the way. Only a ray of light in the middle of the black sea signals that there is still life there. Something must have happened. The crossing is taking too long and tonight is too inhospitable. How cold must it be out there on the open sea? Are there children on board?

I watch my brother, whose gaze is fixed on the sea, and I sense that he sees a distant, much larger sea. A sea that almost became his grave 40 years ago. Back then, when he, too, was a little boy hidden in the bamboo forests of the Vietnamese coast, waiting for his chance. The story of my brother Ngoc can be found in the history books. He belongs to the generation of Vietnamese boat people who fled poverty and repression by the communist regime after the Vietnam War, but also the war with the Khmer Rouge. His journey to Malaysia took two days and two nights. He had no idea that this was only the beginning of a long odyssey. Soldiers from the Malaysian coast guard intercepted the refugees, threw their compass into the sea and pulled them back out to the open sea. When a storm came, the ropes were cut and the people were left to their fate. The sea would do the final dirty work. After a short time, the last supplies were used up and the engine was empty. A merciful fog of oblivion has settled over everything that came after that. The crying of the younger children, the growing lethargy on board and the silence that eventually set in. For days, they drifted lost at sea, waiting for a miracle. The miracle came, not a moment too soon, in the form of a Malaysian fisherman who gave the people water, rice and petrol and showed them the direction of a refugee island where my brother had to survive for a whole year before finding asylum in Austria as an unaccompanied child and becoming an irreplaceable part of my family.

The wind has changed direction and wakes me from my strange memories with a downpour of rain. I try to spot the small dinghy somewhere between the waves. But the wind is now blowing eastwards, back towards Turkey. If the dinghy's engine stops working, there is little chance of survival for the people on board in these rough seas. Eventually, contact with the boat is lost. We pray that it is only the battery of the mobile phone that previously sent the signals. The alarm has long since been raised, but no ship comes to the rescue. After minutes that seem like hours, the white silhouette of the Seawatch appears on the horizon and the tension visibly falls from all of us. A boat that will make it. People whose stories will not be swallowed by the sea. I look happily at the Seawatch and my thoughts return to the Malaysian fisherman, infinitely grateful that he saved my brother's life back then. A Jewish proverb comes to mind: ‘Whoever saves a human life saves the whole world,’ and I think to myself that there is so much truth in this sentence.