In Hungary good Samaritans come to aid of asylum seekers

By Richard Field, with permission of the Budapest Beacon

Responding to an urgent plea for help from Migration Aid and other NGOs, hundreds of Hungarian and Austrian volunteers converged on Herceghalom, Hungary to distribute water, food, blankets, clothes, and even baby strollers to an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Syrian refugees camped out in the open by the side of the M1 motorway.

Under the watchful eye of international film crews and Hungarian police, volunteers moved from family to family, distributing bottled water and sandwiches to the refugees visibly exhausted from the ordeal of the past few days.

Denied permission to board trains to Austria, some 400 hundred asylum seekers departed for Vienna on foot Friday shortly before 1 pm. Within hours the rest had gathered their meager belongings and set out for Vienna on foot, many in bare feet.

By nightfall some 2,500 refugees had reached Herceghalom before bedding down by the side of the M1 motorway for the night, having walked 20 miles without stopping. A number of families with small children or seniors only made it as far as Biatorbagy before bedding down for the night. Many lacked so much as a blanket to protect them from the drizzling rain.

The trek proved to much for one older refugee, one of which had to be taken to hospital.

Refusing to be diverted onto secondary roads, the asylum seekers left Hungarian authorities little choice other than to dispatch hundreds of police cars to keep the outer westbound lane, bringing west bound traffic on the M1 to a virtual standstill. In Budaörs and elsewhere police accompanied the migrants on foot to prevent them being attacked by right-wing extremists aroused by the government’s xenophobic propaganda of late.

And then a miracle happened. Under pressure from European politicians, and with the eyes of the world on Hungary, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán appears to have had a change of heart.

At 10 pm Minister responsible for the Prime Minister’s Office, János Lázár announced that the government of Hungary was dispatching 100 buses to Herceghalom to transport the refugees to the Austrian border some 80 miles away, although he could not guarantee that the government of Austria would allow them to cross the border.

Austria subsequently announced that the asylum seekers would be allowed to enter Austria, and that it would facilitate their passage to Germany.

Among the refugees were two teenage boys who said they had each paid EUR 1,100 to be transported in a 6 m long boat along with 43 other asylum seekers from Turkey to Greece. They said they had walked from Iran to Turkey and then from Greece to Hungary. Their final destination was Sweden, where they have relatives. They were delighted to learn that buses would take them to Vienna whence they would be transported to Germany.

The Budapest Beacon’s Ben Novak and the Financial Times’ Andrew Byrne were among hundreds of volunteers distributing aid late into the night.

(Originally published by The Budapest Beacon, Sept. 5, 2015. Reprinted by permission.)