NICKELSDORF, Austria — Thousands of migrants who have been bottled up in Hungary, demanding passage to the West, will be allowed into Austria and Germany, the Austrian chancellor said late Friday. Early Saturday, the first buses carrying them arrived at the Hungary-Austria border.
In a chaotic scene here at the main border crossing on the road to Vienna, local volunteers handed out water and bananas to the first busloads of exhausted but happy migrants. As they began passing from Hungarian territory through the border checkpoint, a few shouted, “Thank you, Austria!”
Earlier, after several days of chaos and civil disobedience by the migrants, Hungarian officials threw in the towel and allowed the people living in a squalid encampment in a below-ground plaza outside the city’s main train station onto more than 40 buses headed for the Austrian border, as they had been demanding.“On the basis of the current situation of need, Austria and Germany agree to allow in this case the onward journey of these refugees into their countries,” Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria wrote on his Facebook page.