CRISIS AT THE DOORSTEP

From the May 2016 issue of The Rotarian

More than a million refugees from Syria, Iraq, and
Afghanistan streamed into the European Union
last year. Most entered via Greece after a harrow-
ing raft trip across the Aegean Sea from Turkey.
Once there, they made their way north, often on
foot, traveling more than 1,000 miles through the
rugged mountains of the Balkan countries toward
Germany.

That was the uncertain odyssey facing Muhammad
Mallah Hamza, a 26-year-old ethnic Kurd, in late
2014 when he decided to leave his native Syria.
The trip would lead the recent college graduate to
a picturesque Austrian village – and into the arms
of a local Rotary club that would allow him to begin
a new life while helping others in his situation.

***

I meet with Mallah Hamza in a cafe in his new
hometown of Feldbach in the southeastern Aust-
rian state of Styria. The town of 5,000 people,
best-known for producing white wine and pump-
kinseed oil, is far removed from the chaos of the
Middle East. It’s the kind of place where schools
and churches are well-scrubbed and bank branch-
es and drugstores are shiny, and where the loud-
est sounds on the streets are bicycle bells. It’s
now home to around 150 refugees.

Mallah Hamza is, as they say in Austria, sympa-
thisch – that is, immediately likable, with a calm
demeanor and an easy smile that disappears only
when he speaks about the situation he left in Syria.
As a recent graduate of Damascus University with
a degree in English literature, he explains, he was
about to lose his exemption from serving in the
army of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and being
forced to fight the array of rebel groups, includ-
ing Islamic State (ISIS), that are opposed to
Assad’s rule. “I did not want to die fighting
ISIS,” he says.

Mallah Hamza’s perilous two-month journey
from Syria to Styria was routine for refugees
making their way from the Middle East to
the relative safety of Europe. He first cros-
sed the Syrian border into Turkey, where
human traffickers arranged passage on a
9-foot-long rubber raft bound for Greece.
The tiny vessel held seven others and was
barely fit for the crossing. “It rained so hard
that night,” Mallah Hamza says, describing the
passage. “It was horrible.”

Once in Greece, Mallah Hamza surrendered to
police and was placed in temporary detention
to begin the process of requesting asylum. Here,
he says, he learned that many – perhaps even
most – people in Europe do not want the refu-
gees. “The police treated us like animals,” he
says. “For three days, they did not give us food
or water. They wore masks and touched us with
gloves as if we carried disease.”

From Greece, Mallah Hamza set out on a tortu-
ous, nerve-wracking journey north. It began
with a two-week trek through the woods to the
Albanian frontier, where he and a fellow refugee
befriended a border guard who hid them in an
apartment in the capital, Tirana. From Albania,
more furtive border crossings by night and plen-
ty of bribes paid to police and hotel receptionists
took them through Montenegro, Serbia, Hungary,
and finally Austria, where they wound up at the
Traiskirchen refugee camp, 20 miles south of Vien-
na. In Traiskirchen, Mallah Hamza lodged a for-
mal application for Austrian asylum and was reas-
signed to a shelter in the village of Edelsbach, not
far from Feldbach.

The final stop of Mallah Hamza’s journey proved
particularly fateful, both for him and for the
Rotary Club of Feldbach. On his first morning at
the shelter, he wandered into Edelsbach to get
some bread and found himself face to face with
69-year-old baker Fritz Hummel. The rapport be-
tween the two men was immediate, and they
struck up a close friendship. “Fritz Hummel treat-
ed me like a son,” Mallah Hamza says. Hummel is
just as affectionate: “He’s a great kid,” he says.

Hummel describes himself as “not your typical
Rotary guy.” Most of the 48 members of the Feld-
bach club are doctors or other professionals. Hum-
mel, a Rotarian for more than 20 years, works in
a bakery that was founded by his father in 1953
and is now run by his son. He’s a big man with
an obvious appetite for bread and pastry, but
with perhaps an even bigger heart. “I traveled
to Syria 40 years ago and I was treated very well
there,” Hummel says. “Rotary means helping people, and
that’s what I wanted to do.”

Before the refugee crisis, Feldbach Rotarians were best-
known for sponsoring the town’s annual Christmas con-
cert and raising scholarship money for local students,
but the connection between Mallah Hamza and Hummel
led the club to become more deeply involved in solving
Austria’s most pressing problem in years. The center-
piece of that effort is a program to collect donations of
money and household items to help the refugees adjust.
“We give them clothes, food, computers, and televisions,
as well as used bicycles,” Hummel says. “We also help
them to meet with doctors and lawyers from the club.”

***The sheer number of refugees – as many as t of all,
helping the refugees to learn German,” he says. “Then
we need to identify skills within the refugee population
and to help them to make contacts so that they can find
meaningful work.”

The desire to demonstrate ways to help the new arrivals
sparked an ambitious plan to provide temporary housing
in a former hunting lodge on the grounds of a Renais-
sance chateau near Feldbach. Schloss Kornberg is the
family estate of Andreas von Bardeau, a count and a
member of the Feldbach Rotary Club. (His wife, Anna,
is a great-granddaughter of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
the heir to the Habsburg throne whose assassination in
Sarajevo in 1914 set off World War I.)

Bardeau is an affable man in his 50s with a no-non-
sense business attitude softened by a dose of aristo-
cratic charm. “I was brought up in a house where we
were taught to think ‘European’ and ‘international,’”
he says. “I wanted to show people here that the
situation is calm.” The Kornberg hunting lodge has
a long history of welcoming refugees: The building
housed displaced persons for several years after
both world wars.

Through his connection to the Feldbach club and
his friendship with Hummel, Bardeau got to know
Mallah Hamza and eventually hired him to live in
and manage the shelter, which opened in Novem-
ber. Mallah Hamza’s ties to Rotary have also help-
ed him obtain a long-term residence permit and
a driver’s license, both of which are crucial docu-
ments as he starts a new life.

The Rotary club’s actions may have inspired
other local groups to do more to reach out to
refugees. Back in Feldbach proper, a local high
school has started classes for school-age refu-
gees who would not otherwise have access to
Austrian schools. While the Feldbach club is not
directly involved in the venture, everyone knows
and influences one another in a small town like
this. Edith Kohlmeier, the school’s cheerful, busy
director, provided an hour of her morning to talk
about the difficulties facing schools around the
country as they cope with an influx of refugee
children.

Under Austrian law, pupils must have some
type of legal standing to attend classes. With
thousands of refugees – including many child-
ren without parents – in legal limbo, the law
has created an enormous gap in the support
network. Kohlmeier’s school had recently under-
gone an extensive renovation that left a free
classroom to teach school-age refugees.

Some 20 high school students who came to
Europe without their parents attend classes
taught by volunteers from Caritas Austria, a
Roman Catholic charity that has been assist-
ing refugees since World War I. “We give the
children some structure in their day,” Kohl-
meier says. Most of the kids are picking up
German pretty quickly, she says, but the big-
ger problems are the differences among the
refugee populations, including the pupils’
varying levels of education. “Many of the
Syrian students have had years of second-
ary education, while refugees from Afghan-
istan may have never set foot in a school
before in their lives,” she says.-
 

***

On the last day of my visit, I meet the first
refugee families arriving at Schloss Kornberg,
one from Syria and the other from Afghani-
stan. The lodge has been meticulously fitted
out with the latest in kitchen appliances, wash-
ing machines, beds, and other furnishings and
can house up to eight families. Bardeau paid
the initial costs out of pocket, but he will event-
ually be reimbursed by the state, depending on
the number of refugees and length of their stay.

The newcomers beam as they glimpse their new
home and its grand setting. Mallah Hamza
beams back at them as he s

6,000 a day entering the European Union late
last year – has spurred a powerful backlash in
Austria against the EU’s largely open-door refu-
gee policy. Opinion polls show that Austrians are
deeply divided on the issue of accepting the refu-
gees. A survey by researcher GfK-Austria in
October revealed that 49 percent of Austrians
want the inflow slowed or halted through tough-
er border controls.

Given the amount of apprehension and fear, the
Feldbach club’s role extends beyond providing
material goods and services to trying to inform
the general population, according to Rotarian
Manfred Krasnitzer. “Rotary members are the
town’s opinion-makers,” he says. “When people
here have a more realistic idea of what is happen-
ing, they can correct their impressions.”

In sketching out a role for the Feldbach club,
Krasnitzer says members need to start thinking
further ahead. “This means, firs

hows them where to leave their things and leads
them to the kitchen where they will prepare their
first meal.

Mark Baker is a freelance journalist and travel
writer based in Prague. He writes frequently on
travel, politics, and social issues for publications
and news organizations including National Geo-
graphic Traveler, the BBC, Foreign Policy, and
Lonely Planet.

The Rotarian