The truck is empty and waiting near the little city of Kecskemét, Hungary, in a parking lot that is quiet and dark because the waxing moon already has set and the sun won’t rise for hours. It is a Volvo, with a white cab, six wheels, and a rectangular cargo box on the back that is big enough to haul freight but small enough not to draw attention on the road to Austria.

On the front of the cargo box, mounted above the cab, is a refrigeration unit, which looks like a large air conditioner: The truck used to haul chicken processed by a Slovak company called Hyza. The name is still on the side in brown, the Y replaced by a silhouette of a hen, even though Hyza had sold the truck a year before, in 2014. The new owner, a Hungarian company that exists only on paper and doesn’t pay its taxes, was supposed to remove the logo, as well as the slogan on the rear doors: “I taste so good because they feed me so well.”

People are waiting to get into the empty truck. They have traveled for weeks from Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, either directly or from a swollen, festering camp in Turkey, part of the largest human migration since World War II. Most of them have come very recently across the border with Serbia, where the Hungarian government is building a fence of barbed wire and chain link. A few of them had made it as far as Budapest, but they’d been stranded in a railway station with thousands of other refugees, so they’ve backtracked to Kecskemét to get in the truck that will get them to Austria and maybe beyond.

Fifty-nine of those waiting are men. Eight are women and four are children, one just a toddler. Each of those 71 people has paid hundreds of euros for a ride, but none of them are eager to get into the chicken truck. The size of the cargo box—eight feet wide and less than 20 feet long—and the number of bodies both are obvious, even in the dark, and the former is not reasonably large enough to accommodate the latter. There might be enough room for everyone to stand, but not to move.

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They’ve been swindled. They paid smugglers thousands of dollars to get them from where they began to where they want to go, mostly Germany. They hoped for taxis or Sprinter vans or plain sedans. Or they’ve come segment by miserable segment: huddled in an overloaded dinghy from Turkey to Greece, a long walk across Serbia, a longer wait in a detention camp in one country or another. They slept on cement at Budapest’s Keleti train station until a young man in sunglasses and slicked hair sold them a ride to Vienna. Maybe they’ve been told their ride would be in the back of the truck. Surely none of them were told they’d be pushed in with 70 others, because none of them would have agreed.

But what is their other option, right now, in the morning in a parking lot in a little city in a strange country? Get out and walk away? Wait for the police to grab them?

They are 200 miles from Vienna. The M5 to the M0 bypass around Budapest to the M1. Three hours and one minute if there’s no traffic, and there won’t be at this hour. Three hours and one minute until a new life.

They get in the truck.

August had been unusually warm in Hungary, but the heat finally broke ten days ago. In the early morning of August 26, the air outside is in the mid-60s. But inside the truck, in an insulated box when the doors are closed and all their bodies press together, the temperature immediately begins to rise.

The refrigeration unit is broken, and it wouldn’t matter if it worked, anyway. The box is airtight.

The truck turns onto the highway as the first glow of dawn blushes the eastern sky. Already it is hard to breathe.

There is no pleasant way, generally speaking, to migrate from a bad place to someplace you hope will be better. For one, it almost always is illegal: A perverse oddity of the modern world is that fleeing a war zone—Syria, Afghanistan, ISIS-occupied Iraq, for example—beyond a refugee camp involves breaking one or many sovereign laws. An Afghan shopkeeper cannot simply move to Copenhagen even if he has the financial means, just as a Syrian dentist cannot easily relocate her practice to Colorado. There are exceptions, a stingy few visas for the exceptionally skilled and lucky, scattered resettlement programs, asylum if one can get to a country that will grant it. But try to escape a kleptocratic authoritarian so you can feed your family and there’s not even the option of a camp. There’s nothing but roadblocks.

Because such journeys are illegal, they also require an unreasonable outlay of cash and an enormous assumption of risk—both of which tend to rise with how far you’re going, how awful a place you left, and how treacherous the obstacles in between. A Syrian refugee escaping a civil war that’s destroyed her country has to first get into and then across Turkey to the western coast. Then the Aegean Sea gets in the way. A safe and seaworthy ferry to Greece, as Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch has repeatedly pointed out, costs an EU citizen 20 euros, but the Syrian refugees last fall paid 1,400 U.S. dollars—about 66 times as much—to make the same crossing in an overloaded and flimsy dinghy, dozens of which putter away from the Turkish coast every day. Those boats, such as they are, also tend to capsize or sink: In the first ten months of 2015, more than 3,000 refugees drowned before they reached a Greek island.

The risk can be mitigated with even more money, of course. A refugee trying to take the most direct route out of Afghanistan, for instance, can buy a counterfeit passport respectable enough to get through most European airports for $25,000. A visa into Turkey—rarely a final destination, but one avoids going overland through Iran—can be bought for $5,000. An Afghan in Budapest named Ali told me his uncle, who lived in a province currently being overrun by the Taliban, paid $60,000 to get himself, his wife, and his three children to Europe. Ali told him it was too much and too dangerous. “At least I will be living,” his uncle said. He signed away all his land, 15 fertile acres, to cover part of the cost. “The person who is middle-class,” Ali told me, “who isn’t armed, who doesn’t want to kill people, he has only one choice. Leave.”