Hungary’s leader railed on Thursday at Germany and EU leaders for lacking urgency in dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis as chaos reigned back home, where migrants by the thousands surged into Budapest’s main train station after police ended their two-day blockade of its entrance.
In a swirl of confusion, excited migrants piled into a newly arrived train at Keleti station in Hungary’s capital despite announcements in Hungarian and English that all services from the station to Western Europe had been canceled. A statement on the main departures board said no more trains to Austria or Germany would depart “due to safety reasons until further notice!”
Many migrants, who couldn’t understand either language and were receiving no advice from Hungarian officials, scrambled aboard in a standing-room-only crush and hoped for the best. Instead, the train soon stopped northwest of Budapest in the town of Bicske, where dozens of riot police stood waiting to escort the human cargo to one of the country’s major camps for asylum seekers — an overcrowded, open-door facility that many of the migrants already had left days before.
Disappointed migrants started chanting “No camp!” in Arabic, some tried to flee on foot down the tracks, and one family sat down beside the tracks and appealed to journalists for help. When police told the media to move off the tracks and the family to move inside, the husband in apparent desperation lost emotional control. He threw his own wife and infant child onto the tracks, lay down beside them and started striking himself in the head as he shouted repeatedly, “We won’t move from here!”