Did they handle it?

摘要

ASKED WHAT he makes of his new home, Safwan Daher, a Syrian refugee, chuckles: Duderstadt, a town near Goettingen that few Germans could find on a map, is "boring". No matter. Mr Daher has an enjoyable computer-programming job that pays for a flat with three bedrooms. He keeps one empty, hoping his parents will leave Syria and join him. In his spare time he hangs out with his brother, a student at Gottingen University. The next step is German citizenship, for which he has just applied.Karam Kabbani, an activist who fled Aleppo after Bashar al-Assad's thugs tortured him, has had a rougher time. Nervously chain-smoking, he describes an anguished five years bouncing from one agency to another, forced to take dead-end jobs, with no help offered for his psychological scars. He plans to leave Germany when he can. "Germans are very closed people," he says. "No one wants to help."