Wherever we go in the camps children flock to Georgina. She smiles at them, and they cluster around her, cling to her legs, hold her hands. “She’s like the Pied Piper,” says Harvey. We watch how, in Zaatari camp, people make lives, build a new normality as best they can. There are even shops: we eat the best baklava I have ever tasted in a bakery jerry-rigged from a container and a tent, rolled out on a metal table with a broom handle. Harvey wanders off, and I find him outside, talking with an old woman who lost her sons in the conflict, but made it to Jordan with her pregnant daughter. We ask who killed her sons, and she tells us she doesn’t know.

It is a refrain we hear over and over, but we keep asking the questions, as people tell us how they came to the camps: Who bombed your house? Who shot you in the back as you drove on your motorbike to dig your children out of the rubble? Who cut off your cousin’s head? Who killed your family? Who shot your son? Who cut off the food supplies? Who shot at you if you went out of your house? Who beat you up? Who broke your hand?

People shrug. They don’t know. There are, as Yalda told me, so many.

Back in the improvised baklava bakery, the baker’s sister is telling Georgina about her miscarriages in Syria—they would move to escape the fighting, and she would get pregnant, but each time the shelling started she would lose the baby. She is twenty-six, she wears a pink headscarf, she is very beautiful. Her husband has left her for a new wife in the camp, one who can give him children. There are so many weddings in the camp. There are people who will rent you wedding dresses, although you have to buy the wedding-night lingerie.

Everyone I talk to in the camps has a nightmare story: they stayed in Syria, going through hell, until they could take no more, and then the journey to the border, with whatever they could carry, normally just a change of clothes for the children, would be a journey across hell. They put their lives at risk, and if they arrived at the border alive, it was worth it.

I look at Azraq camp, with room for another 126,000 people, all of whom will come, most of whom will risk death to get there, and I know that is another 126,000 nightmares.

I realize I have stopped thinking about political divides, about freedom fighters or terrorists, about dictators and armies. I am thinking only of the fragility of civilization. The lives the refugees had were our lives: they owned corner shops and sold cars, they farmed or worked in factories or owned factories or sold insurance. None of them expected to be running for their lives, leaving everything they had because they had nothing to come back to, making smuggled border crossings, walking past the dismembered corpses of other people who had tried to make the crossing but had been caught or been betrayed.