From the UNCHR a report on what immigrant Syrian children have brought to a German village.
In 2015, a group of Syrian refugee children saved a famous German school from disaster and breathed new life into a shrinking village. Nearly two years later, they’ve become an indispensable part of community life.
“It was no life there in Syria, we were all so scared all of the time. I just wanted peace, nothing else,” says Syrian refugee Halima Taha, 30, who fled the war at home four years ago with her husband and three children. Arriving in Germany, they volunteered to move to Golzow, a tiny village on the German-Polish border.
At the time, Halima had no idea what her family’s arrival meant to the villagers. Back then, the village’s shrinking population was bad news for Golzow’s primary school, known by film fans the world over as the setting for ‘The Children of Golzow’, an epic 42-hour documentary filmed over five decades.
Yet the school’s fame wasn’t enough to save it from the effects of a creeping decline. Over the space of eight years, Golzow’s population shrank by 12 per cent, to just 835 people. Then, in March 2015, the unthinkable happened. For the first time since it opened in 1961, the school failed to make up the pupil numbers required for a reception class.
Continue reading @ the UNCHR.
