An Austrian man, shown in a video leading a car-load of refugees in a rendition of a traditional Yiddish folk song, has said that the thought of his father fleeing the Nazis has inspired him to help present-day migrants in a “similar” predicament.
Hans Breuer, a 61-year-old Jewish ‘wandering shepherd’ from Vienna, has been helping to secretly ferry migrants from southern Europe to Austria.
A video of Mr Breuer, which has gone viral online, shows him singing Oyfn Veg, Shteyt a Boym – On the Road Stands a Tree – with his passengers, a Palestinian-Syrian family travelling from Vámosszabadi refugee camp in Hungary to a train station en route to Vienna.
The YouTube video has been viewed more than 40,000 times online.
Because Hungary has now closed its southern border, Mr Breuer has been helping a much smaller number of migrants covertly cross into the country from Serbia – though most are now attempting to go through Croatia and Slovenia.
Mr Breuer told the Guardian: “Friends of my mother escaped the Nazis by pretending to be members of the SS. Hearing this story all my life is what has prepared me for this situation.”
His father, a Jewish dissident, fled Austria for Britain just before the Second World War Broke out in 1939, and Mr Breuer said he sees the parallels with the huge numbers of migrants heading across Europe today.
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He added: “Friends of my parents, Jewish people, tried to emigrate to Switzerland, but the Swiss put them back to the Nazis at the frontier. There is too much similarity between these two situations – one 70 years ago, and one now.”
In this context, the words of Oyfn Veg, Shteyt a Boym carry, perhaps, an added poignancy.
Hungary and Croatia have traded threats over the fate of the thousands of exhausted people crossing whatever borders they can (Getty)
“On the road stands a tree,
it stands bent and deserted,
All the birds of that tree
have flown away.
Turn toward the west, turn toward the east,
And the rest - turn toward the south,
And the tree is left alone
abandoned to the storm.”
European leaders will meet on Wednesday to discuss the crisis once more, after another weekend where tens of thousands of people poured through the EU’s eastern frontier, prompting a war of words between governments.
