Generation Next: Sara Mardini

At twenty-six, Sara Mardini has already lived several lives. Growing up in Damascus, she and her younger sister Yusra were competitive swimmers, living a childhood she recalls as "very normal." In 2015, the sisters fled Syria for safety across the Mediterranean, a journey that made international headlines. Far from shore, their boat began sinking and Mardini and her sister jumped in the water and pushed it for over three hours, saving eighteen lives. "This story got so famous because we are two young sisters, female, Arab, Muslim—we checked all the problematic boxes in a very positive way," she muses. "We weren't doing anything special. Any swimmer would have done exactly the same."

The swim turned out to be Mardini's last—she suffered several injuries, ending her professional career. "It wasn't easy," she recalls. "I got into a depression. I didn't know what to do." But it was another beginning. Fluent in English and Arabic, she began speaking publicly about her experiences, taking the international attention as an opportunity to tell others' unseen stories.

Mardini then moved to Lesbos to volunteer with migrants full-time. "I went for two weeks and it turned into three years," she says of the Greek island from her home in Berlin. "I just fell in love with it. Being someone who just left home and being a refugee and so many titles, it just felt like I have no place in society. Then you just feel like you have a lot to give. I decided to leave everything behind."

In 2018, Mardini was arrested for her humanitarian work, spending over a hundred days in an Athens prison. "I was locked up for the crimes of money laundering, espionage, trafficking, smuggling, and recently they added fraud," she explains. Fellow refugees and activists spoke out, and Amnesty International intervened to get her released on bail. Her trial, alongside her colleagues Seán Binder and Nassos Karakitsos, is scheduled to begin next week, with the threat of up to twenty-five years in prison.

Of course, this biography offers only a faint outline, one often sketched for her, of who Mardini is. Until recently, she was studying political science at Bard College in Berlin. She loves fashion, the arts, raising plants, and dancing. She speaks frankly about mental health and how drained she felt in prison after years as an overworked volunteer without resources. How the silence of Europe, the quietness without air strikes, was terrifying when she arrived. And she talks about the necessity of fighting for human rights. "I always get in trouble because I speak up for others even if they didn't ask me to, ever since I was very young," she says. "I know that I put myself in so many more troubles—I ended up in prison, for fuck's sake—but when you find what you actually believe in, you just do not care. You just go ahead and do it. I just feel like I'm blessed that I can actually speak up. I tell others' stories through myself. I am ready to lose myself, my position, my life for what I believe in, which is the truth, my truth and others'."

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