The three ‘Lesvos grandmas’
“What did I do? I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to help the girl, who was wet and tired.” That is how Militsa (Emilia) Kamvisi had described her spontaneous decision to bottle-feeding the baby of a young Syrian woman who had just landed on the shores of Lesvos in the eastern Aegean after making the treacherous crossing from Turkey in October 2015.
The baby was crying. “Bring it here, my girl. Let me feed it,” Militsa, 83 years old at the time, told its mother who was struggling to warm up. While she fed the baby, her friends sitting next to her on the bench, 89-year-old Efstratia Mavrapidou and her 85-year-old cousin Maritsa Mavrapidou, started humming a song to calm the little boy down. All three were children of Asia Minor refugees, they all knew what refugees felt like. The last of this “trinity,” Militsa, died on March 12, at the age of 93, and was buried on Monday.
We came to call them “everyone’s grandmothers.” Their photo, taken by Greek photographer Lefteris Partsalis, remained in the memory of those who found in this snapshot a great reason to continue to trust mankind. But they weren’t really “everyone’s grandmothers.” Many people, and mostly those who decide the fate of migrants and refugees in Athens, Brussels, Ankara, Rome and London (the latest example is the row between the BBC and star soccer host Gary Lineker over the latter’s criticism of the British government’s asylum policy), do not spare half a thought and don’t take a single look at photographs of kindness, like the one we witnessed at seaside village of Skala Sykamnias, or at photos of suffering, like that of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian boy who was found dead on a Turkish beach in 2015. They haughtily ignore them, continuing undisturbed to deal with the refugee issue through conspiracy theories (“They want to Islamize our Europe”) and the politics of death: “The more people drown in the Mediterranean, the more Asians and Africans will be afraid and stay where they are.”
And drown they do. Five people drowned on Sunday near the small island of Farmakonisi, 30 in the waters off Libya, about a hundred drowned just a few meters off the coast of Calabria, due to the criminal indifference of the authorities in an Italy that acquired a far-right government “to get rid of the annoying uninvited people.” And yet, migrants keep coming, and will continue to do so. That is because, for a Syrian, a Palestinian, an Afghan etc, the fear of a possible shipwreck is insignificant compared their daily terror: the terror of war, of absolute poverty, of a nightmarish lack of freedom.
