(MENAFN- Arab Times) It was pitch-dark by the time the Syrian refugee family arrived in the eastern German town that was to be their new home. As they prepared to get off the train, a drunken skinhead stumbled past with a glare that made 11-year-old Raghad huddle closer to her mom. The five members of the Habashieh family took a taxi to the asylum center assigned to them by a computer in Berlin. It was a former army barracks used by the Soviets and by the Nazis before them, surrounded by towering fences topped with barbed wire.
That's when Raghad lost it and began to cry. "I'm scared, I hate this," she burst out, staring at the forbidding gates. For the Habashiehs € mother Khawla Kareem, 19-year-old daughter Reem, sons Mohammed, 17, and Yaman, 15, and little Raghad € it was the end of a draining day, the latest in a string of draining days in a terrifying journey to a new life. It has taken them from bombed-out Damascus; over the choppy Mediterranean on a rubber dinghy; across the Balkans at the mercy of human traffickers; and finally through Austria by minibus and into the promised land of Germany.
Beyond the gates, young migrant men lined up in the gloom, dimly illuminated by floodlights, waiting to get plastic bags stuffed with rolls and wrapped cheese, a late dinner. A police officer with a gun in his belt stood nearby, surveying the scene. The sinister barracks, in a depressed part of Germany that's a far cry from the vibrancy of Berlin, gave the Habashiehs their first inkling that the land of dreams may not be all that they had hoped for. The latest leg of the Habashiehs' odyssey began in the afternoon in the German capital. Having received their papers € stamped with passport photos € a new address and train tickets, they boarded a red doubledecker train Wednesday that wound its way south to Chemnitz, through endless pine tree forests, past green lawns and countless wind turbines with red lights blinking into the gathering gloom.
Inside the train, the Habashiehs sat together in a compartment with their three huge black suitcases, plastic bags stuffed with shoes, winter coats and toys, as well as two umbrellas € all the new belongings they have amassed since arrival in Germany. After two weeks in Berlin, the family was being uprooted again and heading back into the unknown. Unlike Berlin, with its immigrant neighborhoods, dozens of mosques and Arabic and Turkish stores dotted over the city, Chemnitz € known as Karl-Marx-Stadt during Communist times € has only three mosques and fewer than 500 Syrians among the city's 14,000 foreign inhabitants.
The family wondered what it was getting into. "I heard from people that the place where we are going to in eastern Germany is not good," Khawla Kareem said, "and the people there do not accept foreigners." Another grim surprise awaited the exhausted Habashieh family at the asylum center. When Khawla Kareem handed their papers to a guard, he ushered them into the compound through a revolving door. There, another guard told them through gestures that the center was full, and they had to be relocated again. None of the officials spoke much English or Arabic, so they couldn't find out where they were being sent.
The family sat on the lawn in front of two white tents with all of their belongings, until six in the morning. Finally, a bus picked them up and drove them about an hour away, to a cavernous hall filled with hundreds of asylum seekers. Inside, black cots had been set up behind white sheets, a hopeless effort to grant some privacy. Nobody told them where in Germany they were. It was only with the help of the GPS on her smartphone that Reem, the oldest daughter, finally found out they were somewhere on the outskirts of Dresden.
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