Consider the case of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese career diplomat stationed in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1939. Together with the honorary Dutch consul, Jan Zwartendijk, he issued documentation to Jewish refugees from Poland and Lithuania to travel via the Soviet Union to Vladivostok and then to Kobe, or, in Zwartendijk’s case, to the Dutch Caribbean islands. Sugihara’s masters ordered him to stop, but even as he prepared to leave for his next posting in Berlin in 1940, he continued to issue some ten thousand visas. Ho Feng-Shan, Chinese consul in Vienna, is also thought to have issued some four thousand visas. Sugihara, Zwartendijk, and Ho, bless them, were people smugglers.

In 1950, British and Australian intelligence informed Australian immigration officials that ‘a Jewish refugee racket’ was operating out of Vienna and Sydney. These Jewish people smugglers, assisted by Jewish welfare agencies, helped Holocaust survivors to travel to Australia by means of landing permits that were intended to sponsor friends or relatives. One intelligence officer reported that these Jews were most likely communists and ‘café inhabitants’. That these undesirables were also concentration camp survivors whose countries had disappeared in the postwar turmoil was not considered. Australian officials were cautioned not to accept Jews. According to one officer, Harold Grant, suitable migrants were the kinds of people Australians could ‘consort with on Bondi Beach’.

Hungarian-born sports journalist Les Murray, originally László Ürge and later known as ‘Mr Football’, arrived in Australia in 1956 after a torturous journey with his family that involved the services of people traffickers. Murray, who died in 2017, didn’t like the latter term or ‘people smugglers’. He maintained that his family could not have survived without having paid people to lead them to safety in Austria. In 2011, Murray returned to Hungary to seek out the man who, he believed, had saved his life. He wanted to have a beer with him and acknowledge his heroism. Sadly, the gentleman had died, but Murray spent happy hours with the man’s son, who knew nothing of his father’s activities in 1956–57.

The stories of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ are compelling and awful. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the one million Vietnamese who had been employed by the former South Vietnamese Government in a civil or military capacity during the period 1962–72 – especially ethnic Chinese and Amerasians – were targeted by the incoming communist government. They were re-educated, de-urbanised, and displaced to New Economic Zones, or summarily executed. Some two million Vietnamese took to the seas in boats often no bigger than bathtubs. Estimates of those who died doing so range from a hundred thousand to one million. The new government was an efficient people smuggling organisation, that collaborated with crime syndicates to charge former South Vietnamese citizens many thousands for government-sponsored escapes/expulsions, which often ended in a watery grave.

Carina Hoang’s father, a former chief of a military police department in the South Vietnamese government, was imprisoned by the new regime for thirteen years without trial or sentence. The people smugglers who helped Carina and her family to escape on the fourth attempt were ethnic-Chinese targeted by the communists for ethnic cleansing. Carina calls her smuggler ‘my saviour’. Fifteen years later, Hoang was finally reunited with her parents in the United States. She now lives in Australia and is still in loving contact with ‘Uncle Dao’.

In 2001, a boat called the Olong or SIEV IV sank in the Timor Sea. The vessel became pivotal in the Howard government’s ‘Children Overboard Affair’, a spectacularly successful strategy in the ongoing effort to demonise asylum seekers. Nahar Sobbi, a Mandaean escaping persecution in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and her four children survived this journey and were interned on Manus Island, where they were only ever referred to by number. The family were eventually recognised as genuine asylum seekers and now live in Australia pursuing successful, productive lives.

Throughout Smuggled, Balint and Kalman allow these stories to be told by distinctive, compelling voices. Disturbingly, we can only hear from people who survived. Those who were ‘turned back’ or deported simply disappear. In a concluding chapter to this book, Behrouz Boochani points out that there are no studies to determine what happened to this cohort.

The common thread that unites all these accounts is that of the asylum seeker fleeing their country in fear for their life and those of their relations. At the time of writing, according to the UN Refugee Agency, 82.4 million forcibly displaced people are currently in desperate need of a Moses and a land, any land, in which to reside in safety. The people smuggler they employ may be unscrupulous, part of an organised crime gang, a saviour, or more likely an entity that combines all of these attributes; like the refugee, there is no tidy description that fits all.