Refugee arrivals slow down in Munich

The second day of Munich's sudden refugee influx proved much quieter than the first. Only a few hundred refugees had to be funneled through the small arrivals hall next to Munich's main station - compared to the over 2,000 people who showed up on Tuesday. This represented, according the omnipresent Munich police spokesman Carsten Neubert, a return to "normal operations."

But the police remained on hand all day, and there were federal liaison officers at Budapest station ready to alert them should it be re-opened. "If the station is re-opened, we would have six hours to get ready, which is how long the train takes from Budapest to Munich," Neubert told DW.

The hall was still packed with diapers, clothes, and food from the hectic day before, and volunteers were mainly occupied with sorting the vast piles of supplies, ready to be taken to refugee shelters and other charities in the city. "We could open a supermarket," said Fabi, a particularly cheerful volunteer. "I think we've got five carts just of Pampas." Others were stationed at the police barriers turning away would-be volunteers, but noting down their phone numbers in case they were needed later.

Exhausted, undernourished

Medical care was being provided by the local disaster relief organization MHW, which had set up four tents in the car park. Whole families were being shown in and out of these throughout the morning - more often than not, the children emerged clutching a banana. "Many of the people were undernourished - some haven't eaten for four or five days," MHW President Robert Schmitt told DW. "Especially a lot of the children had stomach aches. Then of course there were cases of scabies and lice, which give you an idea of the hygienic conditions on their journey. We have an isolation tent for those."

There were also some more serious cases of non-specific ailments, and some refugees had to be taken to hospital. "One lady just collapsed here. She was completely exhausted," said Schmitt. "It was a very tough mission - for one thing there was an awful lot of press here, for another an awful lot of asylum seekers who had to be transported out of here very quickly, because otherwise there'd be a jam. I think we pulled it all off very professionally, in coordination with the police. But it took a lot of concentration."

Into government care

Once the refugees made it beyond the car park of the railway station, they passed into the responsibility of the government of Upper Bavaria, and so entered the more prosaic bureaucracy of Germany's migration authorities.

Many of this week's arrivals were bussed to a reception center a half-hour away in northern Munich, where workers are quite different from the volunteers infused with the spirit of spontaneous public generosity at the railway station. This flat grey building in the middle of a business park, with a capacity of up to 600, was opened by the local government in July to cope with rising refugee numbers. The center processes a couple of hundred refugees even on an average day.

Here, the irritable security personnel were much more inclined to demand adherence to regulations, which extended to not allowing Yasser, a Syrian who escaped the war a year ago and is now living in Munich, from accompanying his newly-arrived brother during the procedure.

"They keep sending me out because I don't have the badge," Yasser complained as he stood at the gate, smoking. Every hour or so, he watched another group of tired people get off a bus, hurriedly carry their children through the rain, and take shelter under the corrugated iron porch of the center, where security personnel tried to organize them into a line.

Mainly, of course, Yasser was glad that his brother, a 30-year-old dentist, had made it safely through his 16-day journey from Syria. "Sometimes there was no contact, then we wonder, where is he? Will he make it or not? We see the news, we read on Facebook that people died on the journey, people died in the sea. You're always afraid. But thank God he made it."

"He said he had to sleep rough a few nights, and sometimes there was no food and no water," he said. "He saw a lot of children, old men. It's a disaster." Once he's been registered and fingerprinted, Yasser's brother is to be transferred to a refugee home elsewhere in Germany, while Yasser goes through the process of applying to take him in.

Yasser himself spoke very good German - bureaucracy can be a steep linguistic learning curve. The name of the application he has to fill out so that his brother can move in - "Familienzusammenführung," (bringing the family together) - came particularly easily to him.

Yasser, who is hoping to get a place at university, having already completed an internship in a law firm, also said he was amazed by this week's response from the people of Munich. "Respect - really - respect," he said. "I'm lost for words, honestly. They brought so much food, everything you need. They were thinking as humans. The best is when you think just as a human being."