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Germany Dispatch

Syrian Children Saved a German Village. And a Village Saved Itself.

Four years after Germany took in over one million migrants, integration is quietly working, one village at a time.

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The family of Bourhan Ahmad, center, was invited to move to Golzow, Germany, in 2015 by the town’s mayor, who was desperate to repopulate the local school.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

GOLZOW, Germany — The invitation was risky, and Mayor Frank Schütz knew it.

Bringing Syrian immigrants to his remote German village, where the anti-immigrant far right is popular and many locals already feel like second-class citizens?

“Madness,” the hairdresser opined.

“Impossible,” a farmer concluded.

But it was the only way to save the village school — the soul and center of Golzow, which like many rural areas of the former communist East Germany lost a third of its population in the disruptive years after the Berlin Wall fell.

In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of migrants made their way to Germany, the number of school-age children in Golzow had fallen to a new low. There was not going to be a first grade. It was the beginning of the end for a school that was once the backdrop for “The Children of Golzow,” an epic Communist-era documentary that followed a cohort of first graders through decades of life behind the Iron Curtain.

SWEDEN

100 Miles

DENMARK

North Sea

POLAND

Golzow

Berlin

NETHerlands

GERMANY

BELGIUM

CZECH

REPUBLIC

Former East/

West border

FRANCE

AUSTRIA

SWITZERLAND

By The New York Times

But then Kamala, Bourhan, Hamza, Nour, Tasnim, Ritaj, Rafeef, Roaa, big Mohammad and little Mohammad arrived with their parents. The new children of Golzow, the mayor called them.

“The Syrians saved our school,” Mr. Schütz said in a recent interview.

And Golzow, in a way, saved itself.

When it comes to welcoming migrants, Golzow is a microcosm of Germany, at least arithmetically. The 16 Syrians that settled in this village of 820 inhabitants represent the same share of the population as the roughly 1.5 million who arrived nationwide after 2015.

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Four years after the Syrians arrived, Golzow has changed — for the better, most here seem to agree.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
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Halima Taha, her husband, Fadi Sayed Ahmad, and their three children are among the Syrians who moved to Golzow.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Their story is a tale about befriending the other even as one in four people in the town voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany in recent elections.

It is also evidence that beneath the fears fanning the populist flame in Europe’s biggest democracy, the integration of hundreds of thousands of migrants is quietly working, one village at a time. Across the country, more than one in three are now employed, government statistics show.

Four years after the Syrians arrived, Golzow has changed — for the better, most seem to agree.

Empty apartments have new life in them. At the annual sunflower fair, Arabic pastries sit next to German apple tarts. When the school caretaker needs help sweeping up leaves, Fadi, Ahmed and Mahmoud, the Syrian fathers, are among the first to volunteer.

One villager, whose own grandchildren live hundreds of miles away, has taken three Syrian children under his wing, teaching them how to fish and swim. The children call him “Opa,” German for grandfather.

It wasn’t always like this.

When Mr. Schütz first gathered villagers to explain his idea to bring in Syrians, there was a lot of skepticism.

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In April 1945, the Soviet Army reduced the town nearly to rubble on its final onslaught toward the Reich’s capital. What remained was later removed by East German planners to make room for three- and four-story residential blocks like the one in the background.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
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A kebab shop in the center of Golzow is the only takeout place in town.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

“I thought, ‘This can’t work, they have a different religion, our children won’t speak proper German anymore,’” said Marco Seidelt, whose 11-year-old son, Davey, suddenly had three Syrians in his class.

Others worried that the newcomers would be noisy or steal, Mr. Schütz recalled.

Halima Taha was skeptical, too.

“East Germany? Are you crazy?” her Syrian friends told her over the phone after her family was bused from Berlin to an asylum center in the east and eventually to Golzow, Ms. Taha recalled. They don’t like foreigners over there, her friends said. It’s dangerous.

But then both sides made an effort — and were surprised by how much they liked each other.

Ms. Taha, a bubbly 32-year-old mother of three who speaks German with a soft regional lilt, recalled the flowers and toys the mayor brought when he first welcomed her family to their new home. Villagers donated things to help the family furnish their apartment, including dishes and a set of antlers.

On the first day of school, the German parents greeted the Syrian families with a cake — unaware that they were fasting because it was Ramadan. There was a moment of awkwardness. Then everyone laughed, and Ms. Taha cut the cake.

Ms. Taha told her children to greet every villager on the street from Day 1 — in German. “I learned with my eyes,” she said of her efforts to blend in.

The family bought a German shepherd and grows vegetables on an allotment, embracing a very German postwar tradition. Ms. Taha’s husband, Fadi, goes fishing, like other local men.

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An old Trabant, a vestige of communist East Germany.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
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“The Syrian children in the village have the same life experience as the oldest people in the village,” said Frank Schütz, left, the mayor of Golzow. “They both know what it sounds like when a grenade explodes.”Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

By now, all six Syrian adults have found work. Ms. Taha, a trained pharmacist whose Syrian diploma is not recognized in Germany, works in a nursing home, filling one of many vacancies in a country with a rapidly aging population.

“They have become important parts of our community,” Gaby Thomas, the local head teacher, said of the Syrian families.

A turning point was the village protest in October 2015, a few months after the Syrians had arrived.

Angry residents shouted down a regional politician who tried to persuade them to also house dozens of young male refugees in the school gymnasium. Suddenly, Ms. Taha took the microphone.

She said she, too, was concerned about young men housed right next to the school and nursery, and about the capacity of the village to digest more refugees. “Me, too, I worry,” she said.

After that, many of the most ardent skeptics were won over.

“I didn’t expect it, but they are really well integrated,” Mr. Seidelt, who was so doubtful four years ago, said one recent afternoon as he was picking up his son from school.

Overcoming prejudice is hard. The people of Golzow know that first hand.

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Bernhard Guderjahn, left, was featured in “The Children of Golzow,” a documentary that chronicled the lives of 18 local children from their first day of school in August 1961 until 2007.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
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The biography of Mr. Guderjahn and archival images from the documentary at the town’s museum.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

When the Berlin Wall came down 30 years ago, East Germans won freedom and democracy. But they lost their jobs, their status and their country almost overnight. Many now see reunification as a western takeover that failed to acknowledge, let alone value, anything that constituted life in the communist East.

“Forty years of our history were reduced to Stasi crimes,” Karina Kafidoff, a local retiree, said bitterly.

That’s why many in Golzow regret how few westerners know “The Children of Golzow,” the documentary that chronicled the lives of 18 children from their first day of school in August 1961 — two weeks after the Berlin Wall was built — until 2007. In intimate profiles, the films paint a more nuanced picture of life under communism than the dominant Western perception.

“We lived, we loved, we celebrated, like people elsewhere, too,” said Bernhard Guderjahn, a retired tractor driver who was one of the children featured in the documentary.

If the original children of Golzow debunked Western myths about easterners, the new children of Golzow have debunked myths about immigrants.

In the process, local residents and their new Syrian neighbors have discovered that they have some things in common. Both feel displaced. East Germans, in a way, had their own migration experience — in their own country.

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Sayed Ahmad helping his son Hamza get dressed for school.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
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The Ahmad children — Burhan, 11; Hamza, 6; and Kamala, 12 — waiting for the school bus with a classmate.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times

Some parallels are strikingly concrete. Several villagers settled in Golzow as children, having fled German territories in Poland at the end of World War II. A former mayor was among them.

“The Syrian children in the village have the same life experience as the oldest people in the village,” said Mr. Schütz, the current mayor. “They both know what it sounds like when a grenade explodes.”

Both, he pointed out, flinch at the sound of fireworks at the sunflower fair.

Ms. Taha does not like to speak about the two-year journey that took her family from the Syrian port city of Latakia to Golzow. She still has nightmares about seeing a stroller and baby bottle floating in the Mediterranean when she crossed in an overloaded boat, a reminder that others had not been as lucky as her family.

They had been well-off in Syria, she said. Now they are simply grateful to be alive. Sometimes, when her daughter complains about having to help clean the house because they used to have a cleaner, Ms. Taha grips her by the shoulders and tells her: “We are refugees now. Refugees.”

But things are mostly good, Ms. Taha said. By now, 12-year-old Kamala and her brothers Bourhan, 11, and Hamza, 6, are so fluent in German that they even swear at one another in German when they fight. (“That’s when you know they have arrived,” said the head teacher, Ms. Thomas.) Their German friends can count to 10 in Arabic.

In four years, the whole family plans to apply for German citizenship.

“The village is like a family,” Ms. Taha said. “And we are now part of that family.”

Victor Homola contributed reporting.

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Golzow is a microcosm of Germany, at least arithmetically. The 16 Syrians that settled in this village of 820 inhabitants represent the same share of the population as the roughly 1.5 million who arrived nationwide after 2015.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
A correction was made on 
Sept. 19, 2019

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified an old car. It is a Trabant, not a Lada.

How we handle corrections

Katrin Bennhold has been an international correspondent for The Times since 2004. Based first in France, then Britain and now Germany, she has written on a range of topics from European politics and terrorism to gender and immigration. More about Katrin Bennhold

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Where Integration Quietly Works, Village by Village. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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