Photo

Volunteers guided asylum seekers in Dortmund, Germany, on Friday after the migrants' early-morning arrival by train.Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times

DORTMUND, Germany — The ramps and slopes of the skateboard hall are stacked with thousands of donated garments, all sorted into boxes by type and size. The bowling lanes are dormant. The concerts and dance classes are postponed. Nothing ordinary has been happening at the Dietrich Keuning Haus, a community center behind the main railway station, since Sept. 6.

For 11 frenzied days, the building’s main hall served instead as a makeshift processing center for 8,000 asylum seekers in dire need of food, clothes and refuge.

Even before Germany opened its borders to a new wave of migrants this month, Dortmund’s main processing facility was overwhelmed. Intended to accommodate up to 350 people staying a week or two, the facility was swamped with as many as 1,500 refugees a day, and repeatedly had to suspend the reception of new arrivals.

So the community center has picked up the burden, staffed with a rotating supply of 1,100 volunteers and interpreters.

A reporter and a photographer for The New York Times spent 24 hours at the two centers, chronicling how this gritty Ruhr city — a linchpin of the country’s refugee effort — is coping with the influx.

Girding for New Arrivals

Around noon last Thursday, volunteers at the community center were preparing for the overnight arrival of a train with almost 500 people looking for new homes and new lives.

Lara Christiansen, 27, helped pack clothes in the skate hall. “We got a lot of suits, shirts and ties,” she said. “We kept them — for when they have job interviews.”

Another volunteer, Sandra Beckmann, 34, was unpacking baby supplies for the expected arrival of new mothers and their children. Ms. Beckmann said her reward has been “the magic smiles and shining eyes” of children who arrive and suddenly feel secure.

North Rhine-Westphalia, which expects about 40,000 refugee children in its schools this year, is hiring more than 3,600 new teachers and is creating extra kindergarten places. The education minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Sylvia Lohrmann, is confident that a state with 2.5 million pupils can make this work, though others are not so sure.

Continue reading the main story

Ask Us Your Questions About the Refugee Crisis in Europe

By submitting to us, you are promising that the content is original, doesn’t plagiarize from anyone or infringe a copyright or trademark, doesn’t violate anybody’s rights and isn’t libelous or otherwise unlawful or misleading. You are agreeing that we can use your submission in all manner and media of The New York Times and that we shall have the right to authorize third parties to do so. And you agree to the rules of our Member Agreement, found online at our website.

Thank you for your submission.

Continue reading the main story

Related Coverage

• 

Opposition to Refugee Quotas Softens in Europe’s Old Communist BlocSEPT. 23, 2015

E.U. Leaders Say Common Ground Reached on Migrant CrisisSEPT. 23, 2015

Q. and A.: Migrant Crisis Raises Issues of Refugees’ Rights and Nations’ ObligationsSEPT. 23, 2015

Plan on Migrants Strains the Limits of Europe’s UnitySEPT. 22, 2015

U.S. Will Accept More Refugees as Crisis GrowsSEPT. 20, 2015

Thousands of Migrants Flood Into AustriaSEPT. 19, 2015

Europe Lacks Strategy to Tackle Crisis, but Migrants March OnSEPT. 17, 2015

Austria, Slovakia and the Netherlands Introduce Border ControlsSEPT. 14, 2015

First Contact

“If this flow keeps up, this system will collapse,” said Murat Sivri, a 41-year-old sociologist who runs the hopelessly overcrowded official refugee facility here, which had to shut its doors many times this summer.

The volunteers at the community center have helped ease the burden on Mr. Sivri’s facility to feed, clothe, heal and register new asylum seekers with the German bureaucracy — “the first contact between person and official authority.”

Graphic The Scale of the Migrant Crisis, From 160 to Millions The latest E.U. proposal addresses just a fraction of a human crisis numbering in the millions. OPEN Graphic

But new refugees keep coming, and they, too, must be absorbed into the system. Though streams of people pass through other countries on their arduous journey across Europe, Germany is where most want to stay.

Old schools and sports halls have been repurposed to house refugees, and the city has turned to the German Army for help, said Michael Meinders, a city spokesman. “It works — just — but under immense pressure,” he said. “Dortmund really can’t go on like this.”

Overnight Surprises

Graphic Seeking a Fair Distribution of Migrants in Europe German and European Union leaders have called for European countries to share the burden of absorbing the hundreds of thousands of migrants who have poured into the continent this summer. OPEN Graphic

After midnight, the community center’s deputy director, Levend Arslan, was working with about 200 volunteers and 50 police officers and soldiers for the 3:44 a.m. arrival of a train carrying refugees.

Someone tracking events on a large screen at an operations center in the nearby fire command station noticed that the train was near Cologne, ahead of schedule. Deutsche Bahn, the German rail service, which has run hundreds of trains just for migrants all over the nation, confirmed that it would arrive much earlier than expected.

An urgent text message from Mr. Arslan, who keeps in touch with volunteers via Facebook and WhatsApp, alerted all who needed to know: The train was coming in 10 minutes.

At 2:41 a.m., eight worn carriages full of hundreds of weary refugees — young men, but also many families — got off on Platform 20. They were swiftly marshaled for the five-minute walk to the cultural center with instructions shouted in German and Arabic — “stop,” “start,” “gently, gently.”

There, they were greeted by loud applause from the volunteers, whose clapping was amplified by the blue latex gloves they wear to cook, clean and otherwise help.

Welcome to Germany

Marina Mohamadi, 18, used her tablet to record the enthusiastic welcome that she and her family received. Ms. Mohamadi and her parents and five younger siblings — ages 11, 7, 5, 2 and 4 months — left Parwaz, Afghanistan, two months ago.

As other new arrivals have, she would send the recorded images to family and friends back home, where the message that Germany is welcoming will further spread through social media. Will that encourage more asylum seekers to head this way, despite the cost and peril?

Two men from Syria who worked together in Damascus and arrived in Dortmund aboard the same train agreed that coming here was worth the risk. “The children are getting bigger, and we are very afraid of the military,” said one of the men, Basil, 40.

His sons are 16 and 14, and would soon be required to serve in the Syrian military. His colleague, Firaz, 42, has two daughters, 16 and 11. Both men wanted to know if Germany would allow those who are given asylum to bring over relatives.

Conditions for asylum seekers vary from country to country. Germany is widely recognized as generous.

But proposals to cut cash allowances and other benefits are under consideration.

All These People

German soldiers have been deployed to help shepherd the asylum seekers who arrived overnight into buses.

“A bit of a change from life in the barracks,” a gray-haired officer said. The refugees are needed, he said, with the confidence of someone used to assessing new recruits.

“Many of them are young, they will learn German quickly. They are probably also good with their hands,” he added. “What is it we have — 60,000 empty places for apprentices?”

In fact, North Rhine-Westphalia, home to 37 of Germany’s 100 biggest companies, had 96,000 open apprenticeships.

Competition for these entry-level jobs will be intense: About 123,000 people are entering the work force. The state’s unemployment rate was 8 percent in August, compared with around 5 percent nationwide.

Image Makeover

Germany expects to take in 800,000 asylum seekers this year. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia, which includes Dortmund, has already received 144,000 this year.

“We are really proud of this because we have a bad reputation,” said Markus Sulk, the Fire Department officer overseeing operations at the community center. He was alluding to the fact that Dortmund has been the home of a few vocal neo-Nazis, but he was heartened by the volunteers working with him to welcome refugees. “We still have people who can show what the German soul really is,” he said.

Building on the Past

Five subway stops from the railway station, the city plans temporary housing — large halls for up to 1,000 people, including medical facilities and offices.

But first, officials had to hastily remove World War II bombs still buried here.

During the war, the Allies tried to destroy the engine of German industry in the Ruhr, but missed enough to leave the land littered with munitions, some more explosive now than they were 70 years ago.

Workers used heavy equipment to dig 21 feet deep into landfill dating to 1945 — “basically the bombed remains of Dortmund city center after World War II,” said Rainer Woitschek, a bomb disposal expert.

“This stuff doesn’t get less dangerous, but more dangerous,” he said. (Five bombs were defused Monday and construction can proceed.)

On Standby

After 24 hours when Dortmund took in some 500 people, word came from city officials that Cologne would take responsibility in the coming days for the inbound migrant trains. The community center, Mr. Meinders said, remains on “standby.”

Read more http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640350/s/4a1d7235/sc/28/l/0L0Snytimes0N0C20A150C0A90C240Cworld0Ceurope0Cwhere0Ethe0Erefugees0Epour0Einto0Egermany0Ea0E240Ehour0Ewindow0Bhtml0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm