Searching and
remembering
This section follows the everyday people who recover bodies, organize burials, and tend the graves, as well as the families that come to mourn, and politicians and citizens who advocate for change.
Illustration by Antoine Bouraly.
Nihad Suljić, a 35-year-old office administrator from Bosnia, runs the Facebook page “Dead and Missing in the Balkans.”
He is often the first point of contact for families, writing messages back and forth through Google Translate to coordinate visits to police stations, funerals, and more.
He walks us through the cemetery in Zvornik, a stone’s throw away from the River Drina, where many drown crossing from Serbia.
Katarzyna Mazurkiewicz-Bylok moved to the small Polish border town Krynki to raise her children close to the idyllic forests. She never thought she would find dead bodies in the woods behind her home.
A volunteer at Podlaskie Voluntary Humanitarian Rescue Service (POPH), she responds to distress calls from people traversing the forests on the Poland-Belarus border, and participates in patrols that search for the missing.
She tells us what it is like to search for the dead.
The body of Abdi Biratu Fite was lowered into the earth in a wooden casket on June 10, 2023. His elder brother Deri, who traveled from Ethiopia, kneeled to the grass and wailed. The rest of the family were not able to travel.
Abdi was born on March 15, 1999, and his lifeless body was found in the Białowieża Forest on February 16, 2023. He was 24 years old. His friends recounted solemnly that he was a "kind and empathetic guy" with "many friends around" who had graduated with a degree in computer science with a 3.5 GPA. At home, he sang for years in the church choir. At his funeral, a Polish band sang Amazing Grace as Deri scattered a fistful of soil into his brother's final resting place.
Abdi's body was discovered by a patrol organized by local volunteers from the Podlaskie Humanitarian Emergency Service (POPH). They were searching for another migrant who had disappeared in January, and found Abdi instead. They contacted his family in Ethiopia and arranged for Deri to come to Poland to provide DNA for forensic identification. POPH maintains a database of over 300 people reported missing in the forest between Poland and Belarus. Many are never found.
Tareke Brhane says that ever since he was young, he’s hated graveyards. Yet these days, he finds himself in them all too often.
He is the President of Comitato 3 Ottobre, an Italy-based NGO that was born in the aftermath of a deadly shipwreck off the coast of Lampedusa in which 368 people perished in 2013.
Having arrived in Italy himself as a young man from a perilous boat journey from Eritrea around two decades ago, he now accompanies families in search of their missing loved ones in the dozens of cemeteries scattered across southern Italy.
Journalist Barbara Matejčić has arrived in Donja Bebrina, a Croatian town on the border with Bosnia, to visit a cemetery where the mayor has informed her that two young men are buried.
She is part of the Border Graves Investigation, a team of journalists across Europe who are counting the graves of unidentified migrants across the continent, and who produced this story. The team has traveled to graves in ten countries to confirm 1,015 such unmarked graves.
Member of European Parliament Pietro Bartolo spent 25 years providing medical care for migrants disembarking from the pier of Lampedusa, Italy, caring for 250,000 migrants on the small island in the Mediterranean Sea over his medical career.
He tells us of his medical examination of the deceased: "This was important for me, also for those who then came to look for them to give these people an identity, to give dignity to these people that there were not only a number left, but also all these clues in order to eventually arrive at an identity."
Frustrated by Europe's response to migration, he joined the European Parliament in 2019, where he now works to shape European migration policy. At 68 years old, he laments that he must spend time away from his grandchildren, but declares, "They will ask me, but grandpa, what did you do? What should I answer them? That I became a parliamentarian."
Protestors gather outside of the Palacio de las Cortes Españolas, home to the Spanish parliament, leading up to the one-year anniversary of the mass deaths of migrants in Melilla, Spain.
On June 24, 2022, around 2,000 migrants were caught between Moroccan and Spanish security forces at the border fence between the two countries. By the end of the day, 24 people were killed, and 77 were missing, though some rights groups estimate these numbers are low. Those gathered call for justice for the families of the missing and deceased.
Each year, the Caravana Abriendo Fronteras, a migrant rights group based in Spain, travels the borders campaigning for justice for migrants. In the second video, they stand on Spain's "Highway of Death," where thousands of displaced Spanish evacuated the city of Málaga during the Spanish Civil War. Here, they read the poem "Traveler, There is No Road" by Antonio Machado.
