When he woke up in the hospital, Karim* had no idea what had happened to him. All he remembered was that he had fallen asleep next to his friend, Yousef*, in the back of the car. Days before, in the summer of 2022, they had climbed the border fence between Serbia and Hungary and were heading towards Austria.
Karim, 22, had left his home in northern Syria at the end of 2021. After making his way from Turkey through Bulgaria, he reached Serbia. From there he still had to cross Hungary and then on to Austria. “My dream was to reach Germany,” he says.
