Mardini and her sister swam for three and a half hours, helping the boat stay on course — even when the two male swimmers gave up and let the dinghy pull them along. It was cold, Mardini said. Her clothes dragged her down, and salt burned her eyes and skin.

“I’m thinking, what? I’m a swimmer, and I’m going to die in the water in the end?” she said.

But she was determined to keep a good attitude — and not just for her own sake.

“The little kid kept looking at me, scared,” she said, “so I was doing all these funny faces.”

A Long Wait

Eventually the boat made it to shore in Lesbos, but the journey was only beginning. The people in the group walked for days at a time, sleeping in fields or churches. Even though they had money, taxis refused to stop for them, and restaurants often refused them service.

“But there were good people, too,” she said. “When I arrived, I didn’t have any shoes, and there was a Greek girl — I think, the same age as me — and she saw us and gave us a pullover for the young kid, and she gave me her shoes.”

The sisters traveled by foot or on buses run by smugglers from Greece through Macedonia up through Serbia and into Hungary. They were in Budapest in September when Hungarian authorities closed the main train station to refugees. Many, including the Mardini sisters, had spent hundreds of euros on train tickets that they were then prohibited from using, prompting hundreds of refugees to protest outside the station.

“I was just watching,” Mardini said. “I was like: ‘Where am I? And what’s going to happen if they take me to jail now?’”

Eventually they made it out of Hungary, traveling through Austria and finally to Germany, where they ended up in a refugee camp in Berlin sharing a tent with six men they had traveled with.