A story in The Washington Post in 2018 described an almost unbearably moving scene in Tunisia.

“Chamseddine Marzoug placed a red toy car atop an unmarked grave. Under the small mound of yellow dirt lay the sea-battered bones of a child migrant. Next to it was the grave of a woman,” Post journalist Sudarsan Raghavan wrote.

Marzoug is then quoted: “I found their bodies washed up on the beach, the child next to the woman. Perhaps, she was his mother. So out of consideration for her, I decided to bury them next to each other.”

He told the journalist that before he started caring for the refugee dead, the bodies were put in trucks and taken away to be dumped.

Marzoug is now a crucial character in Three Marys, a 75-minute chamber opera by composer Andrée Greenwell and librettist Christine Evans. He grounds a work that takes as its starting point a medieval legend about three women said to be present at key moments in the life of Christ and then exiled by being pushed out to sea.