Over the coming week, USA TODAY reporter Kim Hjelmgaard will follow migrants as they make the arduous 1,500-mile journey from Greece’s Lesbos island off the coast of Turkey to the German capital of Berlin. Here are his reports on the challenges facing both migrants and European authorities trying to cope with the biggest flood of refugees since World War II.

Follow along Kim Hjelmgaard's journey.
(Photo: James Sergent, USA TODAY)

11 p.m.

ATHENS — This is my first post in what will be a series of diary-form entries, stories, observations, interviews, audio, video, tweets and more that we will be running over the next 10 days or so as I make my way from Lesbos, Greece, back to Berlin. This is the route that hundreds of thousands of displaced migrants and refugees — many of them fleeing war and persecution in Syria and other conflict zones around the world — have been taking for months.

This page will serve as the landing spot for many of my thoughts and stories. You can also keep up with my journey on Facebook, Twitter and other social media spots. If you send me an This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., I will do my best to reply.

6:30 a.m.

LESBOS, Greece — I arrived just before sunrise on this island about 6 miles off the coast of Turkey where 4,500 people a day have been washing up in life jackets and rubber dinghies. It's their first port of call on European territory as they go in search of a new life on a more peaceful continent. I'll be filing more from Lesbos later today, but wanted to drop some reflections on the picture of the crisis now.

Images define every conflict. They depict intense difficulty, tough decisions, suffering, confusion and more. Already, Europe's refugee and migrant crisis has yielded many.

The Turkish mainland is visible from Lesbos, Greece, as the sun rises on Sept. 19, 2015.
(Photo: Kim Hjelmgaard, USA TODAY)

There was Laith Majid, the weeping Iraqi father who almost drowned with his wife and children on the way to the Greek island Kos. (Majid and his family are now safe in Berlin.)

We recoiled at the delicate, lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian child whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey. For many, Kurdi gave a face and a name to the unfolding humanitarian tragedy.

Back in April, an off-duty Greek military officer singlehandedly saved 20 migrants whose ship was breaking up off the coast of Rhodes, Greece. Sgt. Antonis Deligiorgis was a hero that day even if the awkwardly framed photos of his actions didn't fully capture it.

But to Deligiorgis' moral zenith we have also witnessed Petra Laszlo's ethical nadir. The Hungarian journalist was caught on video sticking her leg out to trip and kick people fleeing authorities.

For me, the picture that caught my attention more than any other was taken by Andrew Byrne, a Financial Times journalist.

It shows a group of about a dozen young Syrian refugees sitting cross-legged on the floor absolutely beaming with pleasure as they watch Tom and Jerry cartoons outside Budapest's main train station in Hungary. Volunteers had set up the cartoon on a projector, perhaps sensing that these children needed to be children again.

It's a simple, domestic snapshot that many of us who are parents can relate to. Byrne probably took it on his phone.

In those faces there is exuberance and joy, mixed with the misery of dislocation and terror as well as some boredom held briefly at bay. When I think of the migrant crisis I often think of this photo because of the drama it shows. It's neither tragedy nor comedy but something else.

Migrants and refugees arrive at the railway station in Szentgotthard, Hungary, near the Austrian border, on Sept. 19, 2015.
(Photo: Gyorgy Varga, AP)

1:30 p.m.

"Mamma, mamma, younan!"

Two sisters, in their early 20s at most, borrowed my phone and shouted into it. Their giddy voices were filled with a mixture of happiness, excitement and fear.

"Greece!" they told their mother waiting nervously back home in Syria. "We made it to Greece!"

Then they abruptly hung up and vanished into a throng of new arrivals, joining the several thousand dislocated, persecuted and impoverished migrants who landed on beaches here Saturday and were marching off to an unknown future.

Moments earlier, the sisters had half-crashed ashore this Greek island in a mostly deflated dinghy after setting off from Turkey.

There was a boy with them, too. He smiled. Safe for now.

On the way down to the beach, from high up on Lesbos' parched, olive-tree-rich hills, I could see the boats dotting the horizon like a small disorderly pearl necklace, only deep orange instead of white.

Lifejackets.

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