Time Asia — October 10, 2017

Berlin’s Tempelhof refugee

shelter, on the site of a former

airport south of the city center,

is Germany’s largest, with room

to accommodate as many as

7,000 people

Euroskeptic party Alternative for Ger-

many (AfD) did better than anticipated,

coming in third place with 12.6% of the

vote. For the first time since World War II,

the shrill voices of far-right nationalism

will be heard in Parliament. Merkel’s

Christian Democratic Union still came

in first, with 32.9% of the vote, but it was

down from 41.5% in the previous election.

Georg Pazderski, leader of the AfD Ber-

lin city chapter, credits his party’s success

with voter dissatisfaction over Merkel’s

refugee policies. “I think the refugee cri-

sis is certainly one of the reasons that our

popularity rose,” he told TIME before the

election. Merkel may still be in charge, but

the culture in Germany is becoming far

less welcoming.

THE GERMAN DREAMof Taimaa Abazli

didn’t turn out as she expected. By the

time her family reached Greece, in March

2016, the borders to northern Europe had

been closed under the pressure of so many

would-be German asylum seekers. For

more than a year, the family was trapped

in Greek refugee camps while European

leaders devised a plan to more fairly dis-

tribute the burden of asylum seekers

across the Continent.

For the past year, TIME has been

following Taimaa and her family as they

navigate the bewildering maze of the

European asylum system in search of

a home. When her daughter Heln was

born, on Sept. 13, 2016, Taimaa was still

living in a tent. The only thing that got her

through that experience, she says, was the

dream of going to Germany. She imagined

that by her daughter’s first birthday the

family would be settled in a home there.

Instead, in April 2017, they were sent to

Estonia, along with four other Syrian

families, including Yehiya Mohammad’s.

Being sent to Estonia, says Taimaa, was “a

punch to the stomach.”

So they left after only a few weeks,

capitalizing on cheap bus fares and

Europe’s open borders to try their luck

in Germany. They were not alone. Yehiya’s

family, along with the three others, left

too. In tearing up their Estonian residency

papers, the refugees gave up free housing,
generous welfare benefits, language
lessons, schooling, job training and a fast
track to citizenship—all that to go back
to square one in Germany. To Taimaa,
the chance was worth the risk. “I lived in
a tent, I gave birth, and then I returned
to the tent,” she says. “It was dirty and
disgusting. I suffered all this in order to
get to Germany. That was my goal.”
Now the Abazli family is in Germany
and once again in a refugee camp, this
one about two hours from Frankfurt.
Because they were granted refugee status
in a European safe haven, Germany has
denied their claims for asylum. So they
spend their minuscule camp stipends on
lawyers’ fees to appeal the rejections, in
the hope of finding a sympathetic judge
and staving off deportation back to
Estonia. Despite the discomfort of camp
life and the constant uncertainty, Taimaa
says she made the right decision, even if it
meant giving up her baby daughter’s first
chance to live in a real home.
It wasn’t until I spent the Muslim hol-
iday of ‘Id al-Adha with Nour Altallaa,
another new Syrian mother whose story
I’d been following as part of the Finding
LYNSEY ADDARIO—VERBATIM FOR TIME Home project, that I began to understand