Refugees – Traumatized by Moria: “Their bodies were places of horror”

When horror comes, very little things happen in a person’s body in the first place. Stress is triggered, which activates the amygdala in the midbrain, also called the almond kernel. From there, an emergency program is started in the body, a system that keeps people in a state of permanent alarm.

That takes away sleep. That allows you to remember and relive what you have experienced over and over again, and it does not allow you to forget any pain.

A program that runs and runs and runs. Until you turn it off.

Andreas Krüger is responsible for this.

Krüger, 55, is a psychiatrist and psychologist, treating traumatized children and adolescents. Girls and boys who witnessed atrocities. Children who had a “click” in the head, as Krüger says. Their bodies have switched to crisis mode.

We met Krüger the day before the first 50 minors from the burning ground of Camp Moria in Hannover. A total of 150 children and youth from the slum camp will come to Germany. Many of them have escaped across the Mediterranean in ships, they come from Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, right in the middle of the war. They were there when their tents caught fire in early September and they spent months and years of their childhood in uncertainty.

What do these children take with them when they get here?

In Hamburg-Eppendorf there are leaves on the sidewalks at the end of September, then turn left and stand in front of a white painted villa. Here is the “Ankerland”, a therapy center for severely traumatized children, it is the workplace of Kruger. The little patients left that day. But there are things everywhere that remind you of her. For example the ceramic elephants on the window sills or the watercolor painting, with the trees and the swing hanging in the entrance area.

Children come here on an outpatient basis, three hours a week (read more about “Ankerland” in the photo series). There are about 60 therapy places, 20 percent of which are reserved for refugee children. Andreas Krüger has experience with how children who have escaped feel. He calls it “fever that measures in the soul.”

Krüger says: “Refugee children who come to Germany are traumatized several times. They have experienced more than one bad thing. That can only be assumed until proven otherwise.”

Then he talks about the children who were lost in the race and were found again or who had to leave important caregivers at home. From the tortured children, from the sexual abuse, from the death of their parents, “almost every psyche collapses,” he says.

There are refugee children of primary school age who hurt themselves or are suicidal. “These are very damaged souls. Their bodies were often places of horror.”

Every time a child saw someone in uniform, they suddenly couldn’t move their legs. Then he collapsed, as if paralyzed. This is called flashback, pictorial memories of a traumatic experience. An endless horror movie. The uniform was his trigger, taking him back to the scene and to the moment when a terrorist attack in his native Afghanistan killed many people. The boy had been saved then. But the consequences of the trauma did not allow him to find peace, not even in Germany. They triggered a physical reaction.

Years later, Krüger says, other children still felt pain in parts of the body where they were once tortured. They then needed high-dose pain relievers, although there was no physical evidence.

Almost all children in war zones have problems of conscience. Moments when girls and boys seem disconnected and unavailable. Moments in which, when they look in the mirror, they no longer know: Is it me?

Or identity disorders. So a fifteen-year-old feels like a five-year-old, thinks like that, acts like that, stuck. Here, Krüger says, it doesn’t really matter whether the children experienced these horrors themselves or whether they witnessed them. The reaction of the psyche can be the same.

What tracks do the horrors of flight leave? In technical terms, the diagnoses are called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and dissociative disorders. To date, there has been little research on the severity of those affected by refugee children. In 2018, an AOK study found that two out of three war refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq suffered repeated injuries.

Dramatic insufficient supply in Germany

The Max Planck Institute in Göttingen recently interviewed 133 young refugees who had arrived in Germany. The result: the more horrors that occurred in the race, the more difficult the verifiable mental disorders were. Four of the interviewees were diagnosed with psychotic symptoms.

The first children from Moria are in the country and 100 more girls and boys will soon follow. Do we have answers for what they need most?

No way, says Andreas Krüger. Germany is already overwhelmed by providing trauma patients in the country with places of therapy and specialized personnel. However, there is a drastic lack of supply in this area. There is also no awareness or resources for the needs of refugees and their need for adequate therapeutic care. Meanwhile, there are also trained staff in the German reception centers who care for particularly traumatized people, but that is not enough.

The Federal Chamber of Psychotherapists estimates that only four percent of refugees with mental illness receive adequate treatment. One reason: the Asylum Seeker Benefits Act. It gives refugees very limited benefits for the first 15 months in Germany, and very rarely psychotherapy.