I have just returned to West Tisbury after a month abroad. With summer over, the Island is peaceful. Life had hardly been peaceful, however, for many in the part of Europe where I was traveling.

Refugees from Syria and Africa were being kept out of Hungary and other parts of eastern Europe. Great Britain and France were saying their economies could not cope with more refugees. The European Union was urging its members to share the burden of accepting them. Germany and Switzerland were more welcoming.

At a refugee camp in a former Army barracks at Altstatten near Buchs, Switzerland, 12 miles from the border with Austria, I talked with two young Eritreans — one still in his teens, the other just 20. They had fled their totalitarian country “full of soldiers and war” by walking for six days across Sudan to Libya. They had spent 22 days crossing Libya in a car meant for five people that was carrying 10.

“Then one man fell out and was left behind by our driver,” the 20-year-old said. “And because we were black and Libyans don’t like black people, and because we had cell phones that they wanted, people kept threatening to shoot us whenever we stopped. But we finally did make it to the sea and were able to get on an inflatable boat. We would pass people on boats that had holes in them and that were sinking, but we couldn’t help them because our boat was full.”

They had finally reached Italy and made their way by train to Austria and across into Switzerland. I was told by a teacher who works with the refugees that gasoline is sometimes mixed in small quantities in the water supplied to immigrants by traffickers. This keeps the immigrants from drinking too much of the traffickers’ water.

In Dortmund, Germany, outside a former gymnasium-turned-camp, a Syrian told of walking 10 days through Turkey after leaving his war-torn country. He was sadly watching Syrian children who had fled and were playing ball in the mini-park outside the gymnasium. But they were not his children. It would cost him $30,000, he said, to get his family of 12 from Syria to Germany and he did not know how he was going to do it.

“There are 254 in this camp — women and children and men. They feed us here, but there are six men to a room and we all have to shower together,” said a Kurdish refugee from the Middle East who had been at the camp for 15 days and at another in Essen, Germany before that. “The people are very nice and they give us 140 euros [about $158] a month. But that is not very much. We want to work, but we must wait for permission to leave the camp before we can find work.”

Three young men from Somalia who had fled their civil war-torn country, were being put up in shipping containers turned into houses in another Dortmund camp. There, they did their own cooking and received 340 euros (about $384) a month to pay for their food and other essentials. Their trip to Germany had taken seven months and cost each of them $8,000. They had gone — often on foot — from Somalia to Ethiopia to Sudan to Libya to Italy, and then finally to Germany by train. Their crossing had taken four days in a small boat laden with 128 people.

To cope with the number of immigrants arriving in Dortmund, the city has constructed 14 new buildings for them and has just purchased three blow-up tents that will house 300. But residents are worried.

“We know we must take care of these people,” an architect said, “but since January we have spent 60 million euros [$67,800,000] for them and our whole annual city budget is only 30 million euros [$33,900,000].”

A cab driver added, “We have to remember too that we have 14 per cent unemployment here in our city. Once we made money from coal here in the Ruhr, but the coal mines are long closed, of course, and nothing has taken their place.”

West Tisbury feels like a world away from so much turmoil.