WARM WELCOME

Associated Press

BUDAPEST, Hungary

For weeks while they traveled a punitive road, Europe cast a cold and callous eye on their unwelcome progress. On Saturday, for the first time since fleeing their troubled homelands, they could set foot in their promised land – and it came with a German face so friendly that it brought some newcomers to tears of joy.

More than 7,000 Arab and Asian asylum seekers surged across Hungary’s western border into Austria and Germany after the latest in a string of erratic policy U-turns by Hungary’s immigrant-loathing government. Within hours, travelers predominantly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who had been told for days they could not leave Hungary were scooped from roadsides and Budapest’s central train station and placed on overnight buses, driven to the frontier with Austria and allowed to walk across as a new morning dawned.

They were met with wholly unexpected hospitality featuring free high-speed trains, seemingly bottomless boxes of supplies, and gauntlets of well-wishers offering trays of candy for everyone and cuddly toys for the tots in mothers’ arms. Even adults absorbed the scenes of sudden welcome with a look of childlike wonderment as Germans and Austrians made clear that they had reached a land that just might become a home.

“I’m very glad to be in Germany. I hope that I find here a much better life. I want to work,” said Homam Shehade, a 37-year-old Syrian shopkeeper who spent 25 days on the road. He left behind his parents, a brother, wife, a 7-year-old boy and a 21/2-year-old girl. He hopes to bring them all to Germany. Until then, he said: “I hope that God protects them from the planes and bombs. My shop was bombed, and my house was bombed.”

As the migrants departed Hungary, leaders took a few final swipes at their departing guests and those considered foolish enough to host them.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban told reporters that Hungary collected and drove the migrants to the border only because they were posing a public menace, particularly by snarling traffic and rail lines west of Budapest when they mounted a series of surprise breakouts from police-controlled positions Friday and headed for Austria in large groups on foot.

Orban said the people being taken by Germany mostly come “from regions that are not ravaged by war. They just want to live the kind of life that we have. And I understand that, but this is impossible. If we let everybody in, it’s going to destroy Europe.”