wearing full-face masks and in plain clothes. Two of them entered with us on a boat, two were watching and the other two police officers stayed in their car. My daughter was crying. She was only ten months old at that time and she had stayed without sufficient milk for two days. The police started shouting and beating the men with metal sticks. I asked an officer to help my daughter. She needed milk. But he didn’t care. It was early morning at 5 am when they pushed us back. M. (husband): The second time we came by sea, on a dinghy boat. We were 45 persons. There were also some other families - some were from Syria. We were mainly from Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. (...) My wife, our daughter and my brother-in-law were with me again. It was around one o’clock in the evening when we left the Turkish coast and we were on the sea for three hours. We had covered almost half distance, when the Greek police apprehended us. I don’t know who, but one of us, when they caught us, knifed our boat, which started sinking. The commandos were just watching. They had a big grey boat. I could see 6 officers. When I looked to them they shouted: ‘Don’t look!’ They were wearing full-face masks. F. (wife): When he opened the holes in our boat, we started shouting for help. There was chaos, as one knifed the dinghy in one side of the boat and the rest of us got very afraid. M. (husband): They didn’t want to help. They left. We were shouting: ‘Baby, baby.’ They came back. (…) They then took us all on board. They took our telephones and our SIM cards. They threw our bags in the sea. The commandos called another boat. The other boat took our rubber boat to fix it. It was very cold and we stayed all night on the ship’s bridge. They beat us a lot. F. (wife): They came and started to beat the guys from Syria, Algeria and Afghanistan. M. (husband): They brought our boat in the morning. They took us back into the Turkish waters. They threw our boat into the water, but they hadn’t fixed it well. They took away the paddles and the engine. They then forced all 45 of us back into our dinghy by aiming their guns at us. We had to return back to the Turkish coast, by using our own hands for paddles. Thank God, we arrived in Turkey’. Documented Chain Refoulement M. (16 years old), from Afghanistan171/ pushed back from Evros in August 2012 M.: ‘We came to Greece from Turkey. It was in the beginning of the second month of the summer according to the Iranian calendar.172 (…) When we entered into the Greek territory the police arrested us. (…) They put us in a van. They drove through the mountains and the fields for more than 3-4 hours. We were hungry and thirsty. We had walked a lot before that. We were tired. At a certain point they stopped. It was sunny and very hot. They took us to a place that looked like a camp. We didn’t eat anything. There was only a water pipe. (…) We were very hungry. We begged for food. (…) They kept us there until the evening. We were a lot of people and they treated us very badly. (…) Then the police came with vans, these small ones. First they put the families inside, then the others. Most of the people thought that we would be transferred to a camp. They brought us to the borders. When we arrived there, it was very dark. The police treated the single men and the teenage boys badly. They beat us and shout at us, that we should run to the boat. They were just pointing the way with their hands. We couldn’t understand what was happening. ‘Go, go!’ and ‘go!’ When we arrived at the river, they took some of the people to the other side. When they put us in the boat, one of the police officers told us, that if we come back again to their country, they would send us back again. He took out his gun and pointed it to us. We heard the noise of the gun as he loaded it threatening us that if we would come back they would shoot us. ‘We will beat you. We will torture you.’ We were all afraid at that moment. We didn’t know what to do. Among us, there was one who translated from English. The police spoke to him and he translated for us. When they were about to push us back, the Turkish police appeared on the other side, so the police took us back into the car and drove to another place, from where they could finally push us back. We arrived in the morning and at night we were sent back. If we had stayed longer there, we would have gotten sick from the hunger. 171 | Interviewed in Mytilene (Lesvos island, Greece), December 20, 2012) 172 | The second month of the summer according to the Persian calendar is August. 66 | aNNEX-iNTERVIEWS aNNEX-iNTERVIEWS | 67