In 2015, none of the restaurants or cafes around Hungary’s Budapest train station allowed refugees inside. When a stranger says, “It’s OK, you are safe now, what can I do for you?” Īgain, I flash back to what happens when refugees are not welcome. When security forces of the host nation facilitate movement, provide information and shelter. When hundreds of volunteers wait for bus after bus with signs offering free rides and warm places to stay. When kindness and compassion is what greets those on the run for their lives. Today in Poland I see the beauty of what can happen when refugees are welcomed. The ugly truth is our humanity is skin deep.

Refugee tells CNN he was told they were 'not allowing Blacks' to board train How do you tell someone their life is not part of a geopolitical calculus, that in the grand scheme of the puppet masters their life is not worth all that much? At the time, they asked me, “why doesn’t the world care about us?” But I could never answer the question without crushing them even more. As if countless Syrian voices were not begging the world to help them. As if for years Syrians were not dying under the same Russian bombs. Today it feels like the world has woken up and finally realized how ruthless and murderous the Russian government is. A mother cradled her baby under a plastic tarp in the pouring rain, a father held up his listless feverish little girl saying, “look at her, look at her state, in Syria she was a princess.” Back then, crowds crushed against concertina wire on the Greece-Macedonia border. The other image has superimposed itself in my psyche, created by the torrent of memories from covering the 2015 refugee crisis. Their eyes glazed over in sheer disbelief, minds unable to comprehend the lives they have left behind. I see faces frozen in shock, etched with lines of trauma that will never fully fade. One is happening in front of my eyes on the Ukraine-Poland border large hands clutching little ones, tiny heads resting on weary shoulders, the constant hum of rolling suitcases. I see parallel images in the floods of humanity coming toward me.

Attack of the puppet people torrent