Syrian Children Saved a German Village. And a Village Saved Itself.

GOLZOW, Germany — The invitation was risky, and Mayor Frank Schütz knew it.Bringing Syrian immigrants to his remote German village, where the anti-immigrant far right is popular and many locals already feel like second-class citizens?

“Madness,” the hairdresser opined.

“Impossible,” a farmer concluded.But it was the only way to save the village school — the soul and center of Golzow, which like many rural areas of the former communist East Germany lost a third of its population in the disruptive years after the Berlin Wall fell. In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of migrants made their way to Germany, the number of school-age children in Golzow had fallen to a new low. There was not going to be a first grade. It was the beginning of the end for a school that was once the backdrop for “The Children of Golzow,” an epic Communist-era documentary that followed a cohort of first graders through decades of life behind the Iron Curtain.

But then Kamala, Bourhan, Hamza, Nour, Tasnim, Ritaj, Rafeef, Roaa, big Mohammad and little Mohammad arrived with their parents. The new children of Golzow, the mayor called them.