This may be one of the most heartbreaking pictures to show up on news media: a little girl screams in pain as her hair is caught in barbed wire intended to keep her and others like her from crossing the border.

This is not the United States-Mexico border, and the little girl and her family are not from Mexico or South America. They are not crossing the border with the hope of jobs and government handouts. They are part of a massive wave of Syrian refugees fleeing for their lives from war zones and persecution in the Middle East. They’re entering Hungary from Syria, Afghanistan, and some Middle East nations, even as Budapest is attempting the clamp down on the flow of refugees, which has numbered as many as 3200+ on one day just this past week, including some 700 children.

The barbed wire fence put up in between the Hungarian and Serbian border is not deterring the refugees.

https://youtu.be/E41vdb9GYjg

Some meet tragic ends, such as the 71 found dead in an abandoned truck in Austria.

Others, if they make it to Germany, may find kindness and medical care from Father Oliver at the St. Peter Catholic Church (Petershof) in Duisburg-Marxloh. As many as 90 every day show up at his makeshift clinic in the church.

This migrant crisis is one of the worst in Europe since the end of World War II, when millions of Germans fled the invading Russian army in the wake of Germany’s fall. Cousins of my late mother were among those numbers, fleeing their homes in East Prussia as the Soviets advanced. Stories were told of them consuming rats along their way into western Germany. Desperate people do desperate things when their lives are at stake. The migrants from Syria are no different.

Here in America, some activists are asking the Obama administration to aid the thousands of Middle East Christians who are fleeing the Middle East, and in particular ISIS, who force them to convert to Islam or die. Some activists, like Mark Arabo, are arranging for private extractions for Christian refugees and are reuniting them with families in countries that accept them. Arabo says, “We’ve always said these folks that we rescue — they won’t take any social assistance, they’ll get a job. They’ll make sure we have a home for them, they get language training. They don’t want any special treatment. They just want a chance to live.”

In the meantime, more little girls fleeing their war-ravaged homelands will get their hair trapped in barbed wire in frenzied attempts for a mere chance to live.