An Afghanistan refugee camp that's state-of-the-art
| Traiskirchen, Austria
鈥� A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.
A teenager lounges on the lawn surrounded by four new friends, all Afghans living at the Traiskirchen refugee camp, located about 15 miles outside Vienna. 鈥淚鈥檓 waiting to find out what will happen to me,鈥� he says.
Traiskirchen is one of Europe鈥檚 primary asylum centers. During the past six decades, more than 1 million refugees have crossed through its gates. 鈥淚t started with the Hungarian Revolution in 1956,鈥� says Franz Schaubhuettl, a spokesman. 鈥淢ore than 200,000 Hungarian refugees flooded into Austria. [The government] didn鈥檛 know where to put everyone, so many of them were housed here.鈥�
Traiskirchen is a sprawling, multi-acre facility that looks a lot more like an Ivy League campus than a refugee camp, complete with a state-of-the-art fitness center and health- and child-care staff. It began as a military academy, 脿 la West Point. The Nazis made it a boarding school, and Russian soldiers billeted here throughout their 10-year postwar occupation. They hadn鈥檛 been gone more than a few months before the fleeing Hungarians arrived en masse.
During the Soviet era, some 10,000 asylum seekers showed up at Traiskirchen each year. Currently, the number hovers at just under 400.
The Bosnian war brought a new flow of refugees. 鈥淭hey sometimes knew each other from before; their kids played together. It was very tightknit,鈥� says Mr. Schaubhuttl. 鈥淭hese days, it鈥檚 different. We have a lot of young, single Afghan men, and also Chechens, with too much time on their hands and no families.鈥�
Skirmishes at Traiskirchen have made headlines in the past few years, and residents in the town of 16,000 blame rising crime rates on the refugees. The far-right Freedom Party wants it shut down.
For now, Traiskirchen remains a refuge. As James Michener wrote in 鈥淭he Bridge at Andau,鈥� about the Hungarian Revolution: 鈥淚f I am ever required to be a refugee, I hope to make it to Austria.鈥�
