Thousands
of Syrian asylum seekers have been stuck for weeks in Hungary,
prevented by security forces from boarding trains that would take them
to Germany, their final destination. The media has been showing horrible images of families with small children sleeping on the bare concrete outside the Budapest train station
— scenes that inevitably churned up memories of the last time thousands
of unwanted refugees were abused and shunted around Europe. Eventually Austrian and German volunteers drove to Budapest and
transported refugees to Germany in convoys of private cars. One of those
volunteers is an Austrian singer named Hans Breuer, who filled his van
with Syrian-Palestinian refugees. In this unforgettable video clip, Breur sings with them a famous old sentimental Yiddish lullaby, “Oyfn Veg Shteyt a Boym” (“A Tree at the Side of the Road“), and they join him in the wordless chorus (ay bitty bitty boym). It’s difficult to imagine a more historically complex scene than an
Austrian singing in Yiddish as he transports Palestinian refugees out of
a detention camp in Hungary to freedom in Germany.
