Refugees

Students, their families and teachers in Radnor Township, to bring the city and suburbs closer together, will hold a Thanksgiving Day dinner tonight for more than 50 refugees living in West Philadelphia. The holiday dinner will be held in the high school cafeteria for people from Angola, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Hungary and Vietnam. The school district will provide a bus to transport the refugees. "This will be the first Thanksgiving for some of the refugees," said Lois Wysocki, a teacher and an organizer of the dinner.

The fate of hundreds of Kampuchean refugees who fled a camp controlled by communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas remained in doubt yesterday. The Thai military said that the 600 refugees would be taken from a camp run by the non-communist Khmer People's National Liberation Front and returned to the Khmer Rouge. But U.S. State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said the Thai government had confirmed to U.S. officials that the refugees would be allowed to remain in non-communist resistance camps.

Tomorrow, a four-day celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty will begin. A mile away 250 illegal immigrants will languish in the Varick Street detention facility. Throughout the country about 5,000 illegal immigrants, in addition to another 2,000 Cubans, will be imprisoned in detention centers and penitentiaries throughout the United States. A large proportion of these people are political asylum applicants who have fled repressive regimes in Haiti, Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Poland, Guatemala, South African, Ethiopia and elsewhere.

The trucks with forlorn passengers huddled in back lumber through the darkness to the ominous camp. When they arrive, loudspeakers above the fences blare orders in strident German. It is a scene made familiar by films devoted to the Holocaust, and the knowledge of the fate that awaits the prisoners when they reached the camp always makes it profoundly moving. But in Silver City we are dealing with survivors who somehow managed to endure the unspeakable and live to become refugees.

In 1945, Elena Santora, her brother and parents, refugees from the civil war in Spain, reached Texas. Their flight had taken them through France, Venezuela, Mexico and, finally, to New York, where Elena, then 13, looked about in bewilderment. "It was a whole new culture, new ways," Santora said last week. "My most vivid recollection was starting school without being able to communicate. There were no ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes back then. " Today, Santora, of Drexel Hill, uses her experiences as an immigrant to help new waves of refugees fleeing other bloody civil wars.

The patient wanderer looking for shelter hopes that if the door slams in her face, perhaps a window will open. Such was the case in 1938 when Jews eager to escape the Nazi threat in Europe found virtually all the world's ports closed to them after the Evian Conference. There, the United States joined Britain, Canada and dozens of other democracies in refusing to amend immigration laws to accommodate political refugees. While there was no available safe harbor in the West, one remained open in Shanghai, the Chinese port city where an estimated 20,000 refugees of sufficient means booked passage on the eve of Japanese occupation.

About 10 men and women sat in lawn chairs on the grass outside their homes near Phoenixville recently, talking and joking among themselves. They smiled and waved as a car slowly passed. Behind them, clothes lay draped over a line hanging between two buildings. Children played nearby, chasing each other on rusty, single-speed bicycles. It could have been a scene from any neighborhood. But this neighborhood was the Valley Forge Christian College, the language was Ukrainian and the neighbors were refugees who have found a temporary home at the college.

"Christmas cookies!" Helena Sedinova said with a burst of laughter, showing off her expanding English vocabulary - in a heavy Czech accent. Her crescent-shaped goodies coated with powdered sugar were piled high in a ceramic bowl, awaiting nibblers. Her handmade silvery angels and feathery birds twirled from the branches of a 7-foot tree near the foyer. A simple wreath hung above the fireplace in the brick, ranch-style home in Mount Laurel. For weeks, the 34-year-old Czech refugee has baked and crafted and planned for today.

YAYLADAGI, Turkey - Facing one of the world's largest refugee crises in decades, Turkish officials are urgently appealing for international financial assistance and calling on wealthy nations to start accepting large numbers of Syrian refugees. The stance marks a shift for the Turkish government, which had long insisted that Ankara would manage and pay for the refugee crisis on its own as a matter of national pride. But with the cost to Turkey hitting $1.5 billion, an estimated 400,000 refugees in the country, and a total of one million expected by the end of the year, pressure is building.

YAYLADAGI, Turkey - Facing one of the world's largest refugee crises in decades, Turkish officials are urgently appealing for international financial assistance and calling on wealthy nations to start accepting large numbers of Syrian refugees. The stance marks a shift for the Turkish government, which had long insisted that Ankara would manage and pay for the refugee crisis on its own as a matter of national pride. But with the cost to Turkey hitting $1.5 billion, an estimated 400,000 refugees in the country, and a total of one million expected by the end of the year, pressure is building.

IN A WAY, they'd been on the run their whole lives. The family of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the brothers suspected of the Boston Marathon bombings, is from war-torn Chechnya but had moved to Kyrgyzstan and to Makhachkala, Russia, before coming to the United States as refugees in 2002. Tamerlan, 26, who was killed by police in a shootout early Friday, was about 15 when the family began their new life in Cambridge, Mass. Dzhokhar, who was arrested late Friday after hiding for hours in a covered boat in a suburban Boston back yard, was only 8. Dzhokhar played volleyball and wrestled and later studied at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

EZEKIEL Tomboyeke had fled his native Sierra Leone during a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives, including family members. He was able to come to the United States, where he found work, lived among relatives, and felt safe. But Saturday night, police say, a driver struck Tomboyeke on Pump Branch Road in Winslow Township, Camden County, as he was walking home after work. He was hit about 11:20 p.m. Township police said the vehicle went partly off the road, struck Tomboyeke and kept going.

ZAATARI, Jordan - Walk among the plastic tents in one corner of this sprawling, dust-swept desert camp packed with Syrian refugees, and a young woman in a white headscarf signals. "Come in, you'll have a good time," suggests Nada, 19, who escaped from the southern border town of Daraa into Jordan several months ago. Her father, sporting a salt-and-pepper beard and a traditional red-checkered headscarf, sits outside under the scorching sun, watching silently. Nada prices her body at $7, negotiable.

GAZIANTEP, Turkey - Syrian rebels abducted 21 U.N. observers from the Golan Heights on Wednesday and threatened to hold them until the Syrian government withdraws its troops from the area, marking the most serious escalation of the conflict yet along Syria's southern border with Israel. The abductions came amid word of another grim milestone in Syria's humanitarian crisis: The number of U.N.-registered refugees now exceeds one million - half of them children - described by an aid worker as a "human river" of thousands spilling out of the war-ravaged country every day. Nearly four million of Syria's 22 million people have been driven from their homes by war. Of the displaced, two million have sought cover in camps and makeshift shelters across Syria, one million have registered as refugees in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt, and several hundred thousand fled the country but have not signed up with the U.N. refugee agency.

ZAATARI, Jordan - A winter storm is magnifying the misery for tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing the country's civil war, turning a refugee camp into a muddy swamp where howling winds tore down tents and exposed the displaced residents to freezing temperatures. Some frustrated refugees at a camp in Zaatari, where about 50,000 are sheltered, attacked aid workers with sticks and stones after the tents collapsed in 35-m.p.h. winds, said Ghazi Sarhan, spokesman for the Jordanian charity that helps run the camp.

By the time Ikhlas AbdulRazak arrived in the United States three years ago, she and her family had been on the move for nine years, fleeing from famine and genocide in Darfur, Sudan, with stops in refugee camps in Iraq and Romania. Every step has been dogged with hardship and poverty - even here in Philadelphia. AbdulRazak, her husband, and their six children live on the $9 an hour he earns as a hotel housekeeper. "It's not enough," she said. AbdulRazak decided to start her own business - operating a family day care out of her Northeast Philadelphia home.

BEIRUT - A bomb blast in a Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus killed four people and seriously wounded a member of a faction that has backed Syrian President Bashar Assad in the country's bitter civil war, activists said Friday. Syria's foreign ministry, meanwhile, lashed out at Turkey, which has sheltered anti-Assad fighters. The ministry denounced Turkey's request for NATO Patriot surface-to-air missiles along its border with Syria as "a new provocative step. " Turkey made the request this week to bolster its defenses and prevent a spillover of the Syrian civil war onto its territory.

It began as a holiday buffet for about 80 new refugee families, many of whose members had never tasted turkey, let alone attended an early celebration of Thanksgiving. Two hours later, as the brightly dressed Nepalese, Burmese, and Sudanese pushed back from banquet tables inside Old Pine Community Center in Society Hill, the scene last Sunday looked more like a spirited pilot for "New Americans Got Talent. " As an African guitarist sang and the crowd clapped in unison, several Sudanese men squatted deeply, then launched themselves high with the repetitive, two-foot hops characteristic of massalite dance.

It's been stressful. Eleven-year-old Lucy, 9-year-old Tippy, and 6-year-old Gizmo should be at their Normandy Beach home, playing in the backyard or curled up in the house, warm and comfy. But when Sandy blew in last month, the beagles were evacuated from the Ocean County property with their owners, Richard and Ellen Miranda. All of them have been living at a shelter at the Life Center, a sprawling education and sports/fitness complex behind the Fountain of Life Center, a church in Burlington.