photo story end of a long journey is finally in sight. They wave and sometimes cheer. Often asking if they are now, in fact, in Hungary. Some migrants who wish not to be fingerprinted or registered in Hungary choose to sneak under the fence. But that is becoming harder and harder and has now been declared illegal. The majority are Syrian. But I have also met Africans, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis and people from Bangladesh and Afghanistan. But the stories are the same. To get to Germany, to Sweden or Holland. To start a new life. To be safe, free and to build a better future. In the past couple of weeks I have seen old men being pushed in wheelchairs, a pal carrying his mate’s prosthetic leg, even a young Syrian walking across the Serbian border with her little dog Poopy. There are small groups, large mixed nationality groups, family groups and groups of young men. Most have formed intense bonds having travelled thousands of kilometres together. The arrival at the police checkpoint is where the sheer scale of the daily exodus
becomes apparent. As dawn breaks, the over-stretched police make the overnight arriving migrants sit and wait, some all day, for buses to take them to a reception and registration centre. Here tempers can become frayed as exhausted migrants queue for inadequate numbers of buses. And as the day goes on, so do the arrivals. After a few days their journey brings them to Budapest and most likely Keleti
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PRIMOLIFE | october 2015
HUMAN TIDE The sheer weight of numbers flowing into the country initially all but overwhelmed Hungary's border forces.
Railway Station with the promise of onward trains to Austria and Germany. The large increases in numbers recently led to the authorities closing the station to all non-migrant travellers and cancelling all international trains. A two-day stand-off ensued and with the thousands of migrants being joined by ever more and more new arrivals, the atmosphere changed to despair and
desperation. Although keen not to make any trouble, nonetheless the migrants’ frustration was clear to see. Then an extraordinary couple of days followed. The authorities suddenly reopened the station. The scenes inside were chaotic and at times ugly. Desperate migrants filled the platforms boarding any train there until a train arriving with the German flag adorned on its side caused a near mini-riot. It was meant to go to the border, however as it pulled away from platform 8 rumours quickly spread that the migrants on board would be going to a refugee camp further down the line. So it was to the town of Bicske that the world’s media turned its attention and we all fixed our camera lenses on the train that had arrived in the station. But when the migrants realised their plight, they refused to leave it. A tense stand-off ensued which looked only able to be resolved with tear gas. But with the migrants’ chants of “Germany! Germany!” the train’s wider political significance was clear. In the end the situation rapidly deflated when a large group of the fit and the young decided to simply make a run for it, leaving the tragically ironic sight of fully adorned riot police helping young mothers lift their pushchairs up the platform steps from the now-abandoned train. But just as that story began to close primolife.com.au