This showed up on my FB feed. I am trying to imagine an similar scene in America ending without a confrontation or a hail of gunfire from police or “concerned citizens”:

Sitting on my morning ICE out of Frankfurt, and two Middle Eastern-looking guys get on, one with a camouflage backpack. They motion towards a third guy to come sit near them. He’s young, bearded, well-built, has a hoodie over his head, is looking pretty shifty, and has a strange long backpack. He looks for all the world like … the cliche.
One white guy sitting near them gets up and moves away.
I’m thinking two things: (a) shit; (b) don’t be a dick, eat your breakfast.
So I eat my breakfast, the conductor walks past and visibly does a double-take, but carries on. She eventually comes back, takes a deep breath, and asks them for their tickets.
There’s various discussion with the young bloke, who speaks no German but some English, and eventually she agrees to let him buy three tickets with USD.
It seems like it’s taken all his money to do this, so at this point I say hello and ask if I can help. Because I’m starting to think he’s probably simply a refugee with unwise dress sense.
Turns out he’s from Iraq. This is not initially reassuring to me.
But, we talk, and it seems that he is on his way back to Iraq to help the wife and children of his brother, who has recently been killed by Daesh/ISIS, get out and come to Germany. And he intends to stay in Iraq with his mother, and to use his medical training to help the Iraqi army.
He doesn’t like Germany, because almost nobody talks to him. One old man talked to him, and accused him of being a terrorist. Other than that, only a small boy talked to him.
The reason he’s on the train is that he got on in Nuremberg, intending to go to Munich, to catch his flight to Iraq today. But he accidentally got on in the wrong direction, and ended up in Frankfurt.
When he got off in Frankfurt, nobody would help him, and Deutsche Bahn wouldn’t accept USD to pay for his ticket back to Munich. Eventually he met the other two guys, who he didn’t know, and they helped him.
Multiple times during his story he has to stop because his voice starts to break, which makes things doubly hard for him because it’s shameful to him to cry.
But we talk most of the journey. He won’t take any EUR from me, but at least I can help him with his train
connection in Munich to get to the airport, and it looks like he’ll be in time for his flight.
What does one say to a young guy who is about to go help his family escape a war zone, and then stay and quite possibly die?
I have no idea. The best I could come up with was that I hope everything works out OK for his family, and good luck. It doesn’t seem nearly enough.