How many Syrian refugees have you met?

I met two Syrian refugees last week, quite by chance, on a train from Dusseldorf  to Aachen. The man had gone to the airport to collect his daughter - she looked 5 or 6 years old  and had just flown in. He explained to me in German far better than mine that they were from Aleppo and had fled from the carnage across the border to Turkey. They had no proper housing there and the man had somehow managed to get to Germany. He'd been struggling with the German bureaucracy for six months to reassemble his family  - a wife and 4 kids. Finally he had got residence papers that would allow them to stay. 

He was a quietly spoken dignified man and wanted nothing except the right to live in peace, something that was denied him in his home country. His little girl slept on his knee. She'd been traveling overnight to be reunited with her father. They got off the train at a small nondescript town and  walked off in the grey winter half-light. I wondered what their new life would be like. For the father perhaps not so great, though still better than waiting for a bomb to fall on your head. For the daughter, a chance of a new start, to put behind her the horror she must have endured. I thought of my own daughter, just a couple of years older, and was grateful that we have been immensely lucky in the lottery of life.

I wonder how many Syrian refugees you have met? Probably not very many if you are British. According to today's Guardian, 90 have been given asylum in the UK. Germany has made a commitment to accept up to 30,000.