The forms, which is all they really were, were used to collect data on young people who had been rescued or rescued themselves from the households into which they had been sold during the genocide and during which, usually, most of their family had been murdered. I had been working on collection from the Aleppo Rescue Home of intake surveys of trafficked Armenian Genocide survivors stored in the League of Nations archive in Geneva. I’ve had that experience, but it wasn’t after pulling someone from the sea. I kept seeing repeated pictures of the same incidents as nightmares. The worst thing is the drowned people, drowned mothers, drowned children … The pictures I saw during those incidents which I was seeing almost on a daily basis would come back to me while I was trying to sleep in bed at night. When I see someone in urgent need when I’m out fishing, I drop everything and go to help, because my work is not as important as saving human lives. The financial and emotional toll on those rescuing is immense: A burly Greek fisherman Costas Pinteris, who owns a small inshore trawler he sails from the tiny Levos port city of Skala Sykamias told PBS Newshour’s Malcolm Brabant Yet the horror and inherently unnecessary nature of that crossing was brought home by news reports that many of the most recently drowned had done soon because they had been sold PFDs (life jackets) that didn’t float by a Turkish firm. The Mediterranean took a terrible toll this year, over a million crossed it and about 4,000 are missing or drowned, a number that would have been much higher had it not been for private and military assistance pulling so many to safety. They also knew that they possess the unique ability to effect rescue, by dint of training and location. These are men (mostly) who had grown up on the sea and knew not only its immense beauty and generosity, but also its fearful and deadly power. I argued that it had less to do with largely-unenforceable international maritime law, which requires rescues at sea, than with the humanity of the sailors themselves. Come back for new posts every day between now and JanuĮarlier this year I wrote a blog post on the movement of refugees and others across the waters of the Mediterranean on unseaworthy vessels and why when they take on water or begin to sink fishermen and captains of great seafaring container ships risk their own lives and livelihoods in an effort to save those who had gone overboard. UC Press authors share insight into their research and stories that reflect this year’s conference theme, “Global Migrations: Empires, Nations, and Neighbors.” We hope these personal glimpses into their scholarship will inspire a broad community of readers. This guest post is part of a series published in conjunction with the meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta.
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