“I thought things were going to be easier,” she said later at a park in Milan. “But no. Our dreams have begun to fade.”

Rescue at Sea

The storm hit on the second day. Rain battered the refugee boat as heavy winds spun it up and down the lines of high, rolling waves. Land was nowhere to be seen. People retched from seasickness.

“We began to believe we would be dead,” Abeer said.

Her family had left Syria on Sept. 13, shattered by the war. Her husband’s company had been destroyed in a bombing raid. Her teenage son, confronted on the street by a security officer, narrowly escaped being shot. Violence kept creeping closer. A man was killed in a car parked in front of their home. On another day, Abeer found a head on the street.

She started selling things — rings, a necklace, a laptop computer, her cellphone. Her relatives and friends sent money until she had raised $11,000. Traveling to Europe by land is very difficult, so most Syrians pay smugglers to take them by boat. Abeer’s family flew to Egypt and spent 15 days shuttling between safe houses in the port city of Alexandria, until they were rushed onto a tiny boat in the early morning darkness, as the smugglers cursed them.

“They were threatening us all the time,” Abeer said.

Smuggling operations have long flourished in northern Africa, often along the coasts of Libya or Tunisia, only 70 miles or so from the Italian island of Lampedusa. Critics of Europe’s immigration policies say smugglers thrive because Europe has created too few legal channels for migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, especially for poor refugees seeking to escape countries such as Eritrea or Somalia.

For reasons of proximity, most Syrians travel through Egypt rather than Libya, and many of those coming to Europe are from the middle class, including pharmacists, engineers and shop owners. In interviews with dozens of Syrians now in Italy, several said they had ruled out Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey, because Europe offers the potential of professional opportunities and lifestyles similar to what they left behind.