Deutsche Welle (English edition)
Coronavirus: Germany loses sight of its refugees
Amid heated debate about the long-term effects of the lockdown on children, business and the arts, Germany’s refugees seem to have been forgotten.
When Samir Al Jubouri arrived in Germany last January, life seemed to be looking up. He was happy and relieved to have made his way from Iraq to Germany and, like most Germans, had not yet heard about the coronavirus.
A year later, the 39-year-old is still housed at a refugee center in Bonn, where he wears a mask to cover his nose and mouth. "I am happy to be in Germany, especially during the Coronavirus pandemic," he says. "Healthcare in Iraq is a disaster."
Al Jubouri has already been tested for the virus twice. Both tests came back negative. There was an outbreak at the center in December. Over the course of the month, there were 50 infections – the crowded conditions are ideal for the virus to spread are ideal for the virus to spread. One floor of the refugee center was quickly declared a quarantine station. Because most of the people affected were young, there were no serious outcomes.
COVID-19 measures getting in way of integration
But the lockdown has had a serious effect on life for the 200 people living here. No sports. No visits to the library. Childcare in groups of eight only. No cozy chats in the tea room.
Al Jubouri, who studied IT at the University of Baghdad, says he cannot make any headway. German courses are taking place online only and his case has made little progress through the bureaucratic machine. A job seems a distant dream. To keep busy and improve his chances when lockdown ends, the Iraqi has taken the initiative. "I volunteered to work in the kitchen and did an apprenticeship with the head cook."
Did Germany perhaps lose sight of its refugees amid the fuss about intensive care units, vaccinations and masks? The answer is yes, says Memet Kilic of the German Council on Immigration and Integration (BZI).
The fear of COVID-19 and of deportation
"Refugees are the group suffering most in the pandemic and the ones who have been, simultaneously, forgotten," says Kilic. "Naturally, they still can't articulate themselves very well and are, above all, happy to have escaped with their lives."
Kilic, a lawyer, has been giving refugees a voice since he cofounded the BZI in 1998. His main preoccupation right now is the case of a police officer who fled from Turkey, where he had been tortured. "We tried to have his asylum case fast-tracked but because of the coronavirus, we haven't even been able to get a date for a hearing."
Refugees face double the burden. Not only do they live in constant fear of deportation, they also have to live with the fear of contracting the virus and the effects of the lockdown on their mental health. Memet Kilic is calling for a meeting of federal and state authorities with nongovernmental organizations to identify challenges and propose solutions.
Kilic is calling to rehouse families with children, in particular, away from refugee centers, and more digital access to schools and language classes for both children and adults.
"And we have to make sure their part-time jobs are protected so that they can't simply be let go,” says Kilic.
Refugees losing their jobs
The increase in joblessness caused by the pandemic has hit non-German citizens disproportionately hard, according to a study recently completed by Yvonne Giesing, a research associate at the Ifo economic research institute in Munich.
"Immigrants and refugees are often the first to lose their jobs since they were frequently in precarious employment situations even before the pandemic, as a result of temporary and part-time jobs," says Giesing. "According to the German Labor Agency, unemployment rose disproportionately among refugees in 2020."
Jobs in harvesting, in slaughterhouses or cleaning hotels were among the first to fall victim to the pandemic. Giesing says the problem is compounded by the fact that refugees cannot start new jobs at the moment either. "Many people would only just be starting out, but now find themselves in a particularly difficult situation."
Deportations continue despite the pandemic
All this affects residence status, explains Wiebke Judith.
A lawyer for the NGO Pro Asyl, she outlines the vicious circle in which refugees find themselves. "If all you have is a temporary permit to stay and are hoping to get what is called a limited work permit, you have to be able to show that you worked for a relatively long time without interruption." No job means no income, which in turn means no prospect of staying.
Judith says it's especially bitter that it's business as usual for the German authorities when it comes to deportations. "We're back to normal in that regard. There are regular group deportations to various countries."
It started with Eastern Europe, then flights resumed to Africa and Pakistan. Since December, deportations to Afghanistan have been taking place as well. Despite the coronavirus pandemic. Wiebke Judith says this is both ludicrous and cynical. "On the one hand, the authorities are asking us to avoid all travel but then these forced deportations are still going ahead, despite the high numbers of personnel required, with several police offic
The German Bundestag commemorated the end of the Holocaust with a ceremony in the Reichstag building and online on Wednesday. The commemoration also celebrates 1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany.
The president of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Schäuble, opened the 25th annual Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism.
He talked of the long and diverse history of Jewish life which began before Germany even came into existence, and of the Roma and Sinti, political prisoners, and homosexual people, among others, who were killed in the Nazi camps.
He also raised a warning of the more recent threats face by new generations. "The past is very much part of the present here," he said, highlighting the threat of anti-Semitism returning to Germany.
The former head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and Holocaust survivor, Charlotte Knobloch, and publicist Marina Weisband were guest speakers during the ceremony, attended by President FrankWalter Steinmeier and Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as other lawmakers.
The annual Bundestag memorial service was launched in 1996 by the then-president, Roman Herzog. The date January 27 was chosen to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. Charlotte Knobloch gives a moving speech
Knobloch, who is 88 years old, is also the current president of the Jewish Community in Munich and Upper Bavaria.
Knobloch talked of her pride of being German, like that of other members of her family. But that pride was not enough to save them from the concentration camps. She retold her and her family's harrowing ordeals during the Nazi regime.
She also criticized coronavirus-skeptics who have compared lockdown measures with Nazi terror, receiving a round of applause from the audience.
"Anyone who compars coronavirus measures with the National Socialist policies towards Jews is trivializing the anti-Semitic state terror and the Shoah. And that is unacceptable."
However, she called presentday Germany a "good country for Jewish people," but urged people to defend what has been created from the increasing instances of conspiracy theories and hatred against minorities.
Knobloch had a few words for the AfD on the "far-right of the plenary," saying: "I cannot pretend it doesn't worry me that you are here." But she held out hope that a few may change their course. Marina Weisband retells her experience
The 33-year-old Weisband, representing the generation born after the Holocaust, is an activist and former politician who moved to Germany as a child from Ukraine.
She told the story of her family's return to Germany and her experience as being Jewish in a country that was dealing with its past, and the dangers Jewish people still face.
She expressed gratitude for the protection, but lamented the invisibility they are forced to uphold for security reasons, while anti-Semitic comments are often repeated in media circuses.
"Being Jewish in Germany means understanding that [the Holocaust] did happen and that it could happen again. It means that anti-Semitism doesn't start when somebody shoots at a synagogue ... it starts with conspiracy narratives."
Weisband countered the notion that we should stop talking about differences and all just be people, pointing out that, "Just being people is the privilege of those who have nothing to fear because of their birth."
She said she receives death threats while far-right extremists are stockpiling weapons and little is done to uncover them in the German police and military.
Weisband described her ambivalent feelings that come from being Jewish in Germany: "A strong sense of community and solidarity, a strong sense of fear and frustration." 1,700 years of Jewish life in Germany
This year's service also marks 1,700 years since the first recorded instance of Jewish life in Germany.
In the year 321, Roman Emperor Constantine made the earliest known mention of Jews in Germany with an edict regarding Jewish people in the western German city of Cologne.
The ceremony will end with the presentation of the Salzbacher Torah scroll which was written in 1793 and has been restored in Israel.
The scroll represents the duty that the German state has taken on to protect Jewish life in the country. Merkel: Remembering is 'everlasting responsibility of Germany'
In a separate, UN-hosted event to remember the victims of the Holocaust on Wednesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was "deeply ashamed" of the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
She added that it is the "everlasting responsibility of Germany" to remember the victims of the Holocaust.
"We must resolutely oppose both open and covert anti-Semitism, the denial as well as the relativization of the Holocaust," Merkel said.
Merkel's video message was part of an event organized by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the United Nations and UNESCO. Auschwitz commemoration
The World Jewish Congress is holding its memorial service under the slogan #WeRemember. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, it will be held online instead of at the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
This year's service is dedicated to the youngest victims. It will include a series of videos from officials and Holocaust survivors.
German President Steinmeier called on citizens to do what they can to protect Jewish life in Germany, in a video recorded for the World Jewish Congress ceremony: "Each of us is called upon to protect Jewish fellow citizens from threats, insults and violence. Not in the future, but here and now, in the country which we live in together."
rs, ab/rt (KNA, dpa, epd)
collective guilt, he told his mostly-German audience, but at the same time he believed there was an issue with drawing a line under the past. "Those who try to obscure the memory of the victims are killing them a second time."
Then in 2001, Johannes Rau, who had replaced Roman Herzog as German president, delivered the commemorative speech. The event came under the shadow of growing rightwing extremist groups in Germany, but also among burgeoning discussions about German guilt and responsibility. More than half a century after the end of World War II, Germany had just agreed to compensate forced laborers under the Third Reich to the tune of almost €5 billion ($6.07 billion). A debate was also raging around the construction of a Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
Increasingly, Germany has seen attacks on people with a migration background and living in refugee shelters, Rau warned. Violent right-wing extremism must be fought politically and legally, he added: "After all, human dignity is not only in danger when houses are set on fire and people are chased through the streets."
Bronislaw Geremek: 'People are always next'
In 2002, when Holocaust survivor and former Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek spoke at the ceremony, the world was still reeling from the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States. Contemporary history had not closed the "chapter of hatred," Geremek said, and he called for "collective, international action."
He drew a clear line from Nazi crimes to genocides after 1945, right up to the present day. The world should not have stood helpless and powerless when books were burned in Germany or cultural monuments were destroyed in Afghanistan. "It is always the people who come next," Geremek said.
Shimon Peres warns of threat of Iran
Every year until 2007, survivors of concentration camps spoke on the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism. The Spanish writer Jorge Semprun and the first president of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, looked optimistically forward to the eastward enlargement of the European Union. For the first time in the long history of wars and conquests, the unification of Europe was not taking place by force, Veil said.
"It is difficult to grasp the scale of the moral victory that is the accession of the new member states from the Eastern Bloc, which is taking place in freedom and peacefully and democratically," Veil said.
In 2010, Shimon Peres became the first president of Israel to deliver the commemorative speech at the Reichstag building in Berlin (Reuven Rivlin became the second in 2020). Peres urgently warned of the threat to his country from weapons of mass destruction that are in the "irresponsible hands" of "people who are insane." There was no doubt whom he was referring to: Israel's enemy Iran.
To prevent a second Shoah, "it is up to us to teach our children to respect human life and to keep peace with other countries," he said. In 1994, Peres had received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the then-head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat.
Sinto Zoni Weisz deplores antiziganism in Europe
In 2011, Zoni Weisz was the guest speaker. Born in 1937 in The Hague in the Netherlands, Weisz is a Sinto Holocaust survivor. He lost most of his family in extermination camps. The genocide of the Sinti and Roma peoples was the "forgotten Holocaust," Weisz said. Half a million men, women and children were killed. But Weisz said society had learned almost nothing from it, "otherwise it would deal with us more responsibly today."
Weisz accused Italy and France, along with eastern European countries like Romania and Bulgaria, of treating their minorities "inhumanely." He claimed that in Hungary, right-wing extremists regularly attack Jews, Sinti and Roma people.
"We are Europeans, after all, and we must have the same rights as all other residents, with equal opportunities as they apply to every other European," he said. One year later, in 2012, Weisz repeated his accusations at the unveiling of the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism— right next to the Reichstag building in Berlin.
Holocaust survivors praise Germany's open-door policy
Since hundreds of thousands of refugees from countries in Africa and Asia ravaged by civil war began to arrive in Europe, this topic has also played a role in the annual commemorative speeches.
In 2016, Ruth Klüger, a literary scholar and Holocaust survivor from Austria, paid tribute to Germany's opening of its borders to around a million refugees. The country that had been responsible for the "worst crimes of the century" had won the "applause of the world," she said. She was one of the many outsiders "who went from astonishment to admiration."
In 2018, German-British cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch echoed these thoughts. For Jews, she says, the borders had been sealed during the Nazi era, rather than opening up as they did in Germany in 2015, "thanks to the incredibly generous, courageous, human gesture that was made here."
The musician was forced to play in the so-called girls' orchestra in Auschwitz, and she had sworn "never again to set my feet on German soil." But she did not regret her change of heart: Hatred is a poison, "and in the end, you poison yourself."
The 25th Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism is due to take place on Wednesday, January 27, 2021. Two guest speakers have been invited to the Bundestag: Charlotte Knobloch and Marina Weisband. One is 88, the other 33. Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany until 2010, was saved from deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Weisband is a Green Party politician and publicist. Both women are united by their Jewish faith — and their commitment to fight anti-Semitism.