The sea was full of people shouting for help. And lifeless bodies. There was no sign whatsoever of a boat.
The migrants’ barge had gone down right by the entrance to the harbor. More than five hundred people were panicking just yards from the shore. Some had attempted to swim toward land; some had drowned instantly; others had been trapped in the hold, never to escape. The current had swept both the living and the dead in the direction of Isola Dei Conigli. That was where Vito and his guests found them.
On the Gamar, there was chaos. The passengers leaned out of the boat, trying to haul in as many of the survivors as possible. One of them had thrown himself into the water, and was towing struggling refugees back to the Gamar, before handing them safely to the others on board. In three hours, they saved forty-nine people. But they could not rescue any more. If they took on any more weight, the Gamar would sink too.
When the survivors reached the pier, they were all drenched and covered in diesel. Some of them could be treated immediately; others had to be sent to the emergency room.
Grazia would not stop sobbing. “The sea was full of corpses, full of corpses,” she said, unable to believe what she had seen.
We began to grasp the magnitude of the disaster.
Minutes passed. Another fishing boat arrived. Its captain, Domenico, blundered and his boat collided with the pier. We helped the crew to moor it, and went aboard. Domenico was trembling. I knew him to be an expert sailor who had faced death many times, and I had never seen him in such a state before.
“Pietro,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me.” He had twenty survivors with him, all of them extremely unwell. Unlike the Gamar, his boat did not have a ladder to make it easier for survivors to climb aboard. To get the survivors onto the boat, he’d had the crew grip his legs while he leaned out to heave them up by the arms. “Many of them slipped through my fingers because of all the diesel – they might as well have been covered in grease,” he said. “They went underwater, and they never came back up. Pietro, I tried to save them, but I couldn’t. It was dreadful …”
In Domenico’s fishing net, there were four corpses.
I checked them one by one. Three had been dead for several hours. The fourth was a young girl. Domenico could not stop talking about what he had seen. “Pietro, the sea was full of bodies,” he said, weeping. “Dead bodies floating everywhere. And the ones who were still alive were all clutching at me. I tell you, it was horrific.”
As he spoke, I held the young woman’s wrist between my fingers. Rigor mortis had not yet set in, which could mean that she had died very recently. Then I felt a pulse. “Shut up,” I said to Domenico. “Be quiet.” I concentrated hard. That was definitely a heartbeat – it was almost imperceptible, but I had felt it.
Then another one. She was not dead. I took her in my arms and, with a superhuman burst of energy, Domenico heaved us both over the side of the boat and onto the pier. We had to hurry.
At the clinic, twenty minutes of delirious activity ensued. We undressed her, and inserted tubes to suction out the salt water and diesel from her mouth and lungs. The anesthetist and I began to perform CPR. Compress, breathe, ventilate. Compress, breathe, ventilate. We performed one set of compressions after another, adrenaline coursing through our veins.
At last, there was a little spike on the monitor: her heart had started beating again. It began slowly, then grew more regular. It was impossible. It was a miracle. We wept for joy.
Kebrat – that was her name – had been successfully resuscitated. We took her to the landing pad in an ambulance. From there, a helicopter took her to Palermo.
I had experienced the greatest surge of emotion in my twenty-five years of first aid work. But there was no time to celebrate.
All the uniformed forces on the island had sent motorboats out to the scene of the disaster. Every available piece of equipment and every man on duty was there.
I returned to the pier, ready to pick up other survivors. But by now, only dead bodies were being dropped off. Within just a few hours, we counted 111.
Green and black body bags were lined up all along Favaloro Pier.
I hovered by the first sack for a while, and finally opened it. It was a young boy. He was wearing a pair of striking red shorts, as if he had dressed up smartly for his first day of a new life. Instead, the coast guard had fished him out of the water with a boat hook. A simple tool, usually used to latch onto other boats or to retrieve objects that had dropped into the sea. That day, its sole use would be to catch corpses.
The boy was so perfect that he looked alive. I held him in my arms, shook him gently to wake him, and felt for a pulse. This time, however, there would be no miracle.
I began the rest of the inspections, opening the bags one after another. At least twenty of them were clenching crucifixes on chains between their teeth, as if their final act were to entrust themselves to God. Since then, I have often dreamed of those lips clamped shut around the cross.
One woman had given birth. Her umbilical cord was still attached. We put her and her baby in the same coffin, together with a teddy bear.
Where would we find that many coffins? And where could we put them? Mayor Giusy Nicolini was with me on the pier. We ordered freezer trucks and caskets, and put them all in the airport hangar. We had no other option.
Fifteen days and nights passed this way.
The rescue boats went out and brought back corpses. Submarines surveyed the seabed and scoured the wreckage for the bodies of men, women, and children. On the pier and then in the hangar, we tested body parts and bone fragments in order to identify the 368 victims. Forensic scientists were brought in as reinforcements, and they helped us to arrange them in the coffins. There was no way we could have dealt with this distressing task on our own, especially after all we had been through.
A team of psychiatrists arrived to work with the survivors and the emergency workers who had been involved in the rescue. They began with the divers, who were suffering the greatest trauma. They’d had to cope with finding the people who had been trapped inside the barge, coming face to face with scores of lifeless little boys and girls.
I, too, would have benefited from some psychological support, but it was not available to me. I was hurting and felt alone, but I could not allow myself to fall apart. There was still too much to do.
The sight of the 368 body bags lined up in the hangar was heart-wrenching, but having to put the bodies in coffins and seal them was even worse. Afterward, the mayor, the parish priest, and I made an unanticipated decision. We sent several buses to the reception center to pick up survivors, so that they could say goodbye to the friends and relatives they had lost.
When they arrived, they sobbed quietly. Each one of them mourned in front of a coffin; it did not matter to them which one. Then someone began to wail.
For just one moment, tragedy echoed in that enormous makeshift cemetery. We all woke from a kind of slumber then. The world we were living in was far too real, and only now were we beginning to see it clearly.
In the days that followed, the torment continued. Many Lampedusans made the decision to allow the bodies of the victims to rest alongside those of their loved ones in the cemetery. At the pier, refugees prostrated themselves on the coffins of their mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, trying to stop the cranes from lifting them onto boats that would ship them off for burial in Sicily. Relatives arrived from all over Europe, begging to be allowed to take a photograph by the numbered labels of the coffins in which their family members’ bodies lay.
Faced with this unprecedented emergency, Lampedusa needed every ounce of energy it had. The island responded with a marathon outburst of solidarity. An extraordinary number of families opened their homes to the survivors and took care of them. But we were also dealing with an unresponsive bureaucracy. At the Comune, the mayor kept calling for greater public awareness of the situation on the island and requesting more help, as did I at the clinic.
&nbs
p; For months, I could think of little else. We all knew that October 3 had changed our lives.
The following year, the anniversary of the disaster was observed, not without public debate and controversy. It was a deeply emotional occasion. Many of the survivors, who had since made their way to join relatives and friends all over Europe, flew back to Lampedusa to attend. The locals who had hosted and taken care of them welcomed them at the airport. There was hugging and crying: it was a liberating moment.
But not for everyone.
I stood in a corner, watching the automatic door of the arrivals hall open and close. I watched the migrants run to the families who had briefly adopted them in the days following the shipwreck.
Every time the door opened, my hope ebbed a little. When the last of the survivors left the terminal, I knew that my wish had not been granted. Kebrat had not come back. I would not be able to hold in my arms the girl we had plucked from the jaws of death. Perhaps she had not wanted to relive her suffering, and had preferred to stay in Sweden.
I felt a wave of sadness. Then I made my way through the dozens of film crews and reporters’ microphones, and went home alone.
Children of the same sea
A wheelhouse is all I have left of the Kennedy, the fishing boat that fed my family for forty years. My father maintained her lovingly until he died. He was already dying of cancer when he decided that his boat had to move with the times. So he had her renovated, put in new electrical equipment, and constructed a larger cabin.
The Kennedy was his home. On her, he had spent countless calm and tempestuous days, and innumerable nights, both nerve-racking and rewarding. She was his world and he would never abandon her. He had made great sacrifices and taken serious risks to build and maintain this boat. It was everything to him.
We had to sell her after he died. When the fishermen from Anzio who had bought her came to Lampedusa and picked her up, I wept on the pier like a child.
It was on the Kennedy that I learned to be a seaman and a fisherman, and trained myself to grow a strong stomach. That was where I discovered the meaning of exhaustion, and of self-denial. And where my best moments with my father took place. He had wanted me to be tough and fearless. My worst moments, in which I had been frightened for my life, were also on the Kennedy. There I had felt real hunger, and known how to celebrate a good catch.
Above all, on the Kennedy I had learned to love the sea. I developed an intrinsic need for it: I could not live without it.
For my father, too, the sea was everything. When his illness got the better of him, he stopped going out on the Kennedy and returned to our old Pilacchiera, which was smaller and easier to control. Since he could not do it alone anymore, he often asked me to go down to the pier with him and help him aboard. But he never asked me to accompany him out to sea – not that I would have been able to go anyway, since I was needed back to the clinic.
Invariably, he returned with the Pilacchiera full of fish. People called him obstinate, saying he should not be going out in his condition. I asked him why he kept fishing even though he barely had the strength for it. “Because it is the only weapon I have against this monster that is devouring me,” he said. “Because it is my life.”
And so I continued to help him. When he came back to port with his catch, his face was always white with salt. The water would splash onto his face and then dry in the burning sun, leaving behind a layer of salt, like a mask of sorts. It was a mask that revealed the authenticity of his being instead of hiding it, a mask that permitted no falsehoods.
I see the same masks on the faces of the despairing migrants who have spent days at sea, tossed by the waves. Every time I see them, I think of my father. They are children of the same sea.
My father would come home exhausted, but never defeated. The stabbing pains he experienced were growing worse, and tears would sometimes roll down his cheeks, dissolving the salt on his skin. They were tears of salt.
Eventually, he stopped asking me to go down to the pier. The cancer had won. And one morning he asked for me. “Pietro, I have to ask one last thing of you,” he said. His voice was feeble by then. “Take a garland of flowers and throw it into the sea for me.”
He kissed me, and closed his eyes.
On the day of the funeral, I went to the florist’s and had them make a colorful garland, with three simple words on the ribbon: “For you, Papà.”
I boarded the Pilacchiera and revved up the motor. I went far out onto the open sea. Then I took the garland and tossed it into the water. My father’s wish had been granted.
Acknowledgments
The idea of recounting the past twenty-five years of my life and work arose from an interview with Lidia Tilotta at the clinic of Lampedusa, as we looked at Nino Randazzo’s photographs of the tragedy of October 3, 2013.
Those photographs started a conversation that continues to this day. It has been amplified by Gianfranco Rosi and his magnificent film Fire at Sea.
I would especially like to thank the members of the uniformed forces with whom I have worked for all these years: the port authority’s coast guard, the guardia di finanza, the police, the carabinieri, and the fire brigade. Those young men are the guardian angels of the sea. With courage, dedication, and humanity, they rescue men, women and children, in good weather and bad. And they dive into the depths to bring back their bodies.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the clinic, who help me, support me, and put up with me every day, as well as the volunteers who welcome refugees arriving by sea on Favoloro Pier, and the many interpreters. I would also like to thank the Lampedusans, who are an ever generous and welcoming people.
Thanks to Paola Masella; she knows why.
Thanks to my family: to Rita, my life companion, and to Grazia, Rosanna, and Giacomo, my children, who encourage and uphold me in my work and the choices I have made.
Thanks to the public health authorities in Palermo, on whom we depend and who constantly provide us with what we need, in the form of both equipment and manpower.
Finally, I would like to thank my dear friend Don Mimmo, who labors through the silence.
Pietro Bartolo
My thanks are due, first of all, to Pietro Bartolo, for entrusting his story to me and confiding in me the memories he has accumulated over the course of a lifetime. Every anecdote was recounted to me in a voice rich with unfiltered emotion – Pietro’s voice. His testimony is both genuine and powerful. The process of collating and recording these recollections was challenging, and we revisited them together with Rita, who was forever at his side.
Next, my thanks go to our editor Nicoletta Lazzari, who guided me expertly through a complicated process with innumerable obstacles, going above and beyond the responsibilities of her role.
I want to thank my whole “big family,” who have supported, inspired, and encouraged me to keep going over the past months. Thanks to my life partner Salvo and my son Giuseppe, whose criticisms are always helpful. Thanks to my second father and brother Nino. My sister Carmela and my friend Silvana were involved in the beginning of this journey – they know how.
I must thank my broadcaster, the RAI, and my news station, TGR, for allowing me to cover the stories of people fleeing war, dictatorship, and misery, over years spent on both sides of the Mediterranean’s shores. They have made it possible for me to meet special people like Pietro Bartolo.
Thanks to Ezio Bosso, whose music was the soundtrack to the writing of these pages.
This book is an eyewitness account, put down on paper just as it is, black and white, without filters or embellishment. It has not been easy.
Lidia Tilotta
Letters to Pietro Bartolo
Dear Dottore Bartolo, what you said on television touched and wounded me. I was a child during the Second World War, and the Resistance was strong in my village. My brother and I had to watch the executions of eighteen young men. I waited to send this because I was not convinced I should, but now I am sure. I have enclosed fi
fty euros for a box of biscuits for a little one who has been rescued, from a very old Italian granny. Please forgive me for writing directly to you. God bless you and thank you for everything. C.
Looking into your eyes on television moved me, as I thought of how much pain and desperation they must have witnessed. I wish I could take your hands in mine and give you a great big hug. As long as there are people like you on earth, there is hope for us. I would love to meet you in person, but even though we are far apart, I am with you in spirit. Love, M.
I listened attentively to your heartfelt words about people like us, with hands, legs, eyes, mouths, and hearts like ours. They are less fortunate than we are, but otherwise akin to us in every way. You spoke of children, women, and men who suffer agonies inflicted not by God but by subhuman monsters. I am envious of your generosity, and only too aware of my own uselessness. You have shown so much understanding, solidarity, and sensitivity. I am proud of you and profoundly grateful for your selfless love toward these unloved people. A.
PIETRO BARTOLO, a doctor on Lampedusa, has been responsible for the island’s clinic since 1991. In recognition of his work providing emergency medical care to refugees, he was decorated as Knight of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2016, and has received the Sergio Vieira de Mello Prize (Krakow, 2015), the Don Peppe Diana Prize, and the Special Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Italy Award. In 2017 he was appointed as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. He is featured in the Gianfranco Rosi film Fire at Sea, which won the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival and was a finalist for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017.
LIDIA TILOTTA is a journalist at “Tgr RAI,” Italian public broadcasting’s regional news program. She has reported from Lampedusa on the stories of migrants who arrive there as well as those who lose their lives at sea. From Palermo she runs the program Mediterraneo on the channel RAI3, providing news and reportage from countries on both sides of the Mediterranean.
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