COLUMN ONE : Germany: Fear in the Night : As violent attacks against refugees escalate, some citizens are fighting back. With a glance back at history, they’re turning out to watch over the asylum-seekers.

It is nearly 2 a.m., another Saturday night slipping away, and a young German couple stand determinedly in the cold drizzle outside a row of converted cargo containers where 20 refugee families live.

Sleepy children and worried mothers hover in the doorways; the men stand outside with the Germans, silently pulling at a bottle of schnapps. Foreboding pulses through the night, flickering on and off like the fluorescent bulbs that light the scene.

A taxi pulls up, and Angelika Wolf squints through her thick glasses to watch a man climb out. “Just coming home from the disco. It’s all right,” she mutters to her boyfriend, Michael Gienow. Then she turns to the refugees.

“Try to get some sleep,” she implores. “It’s OK. We’ll stay and watch.”

As violent attacks by gangs of skinheads, neo-Nazis and hooligans escalate in Germany, a growing number of Germans such as Wolf are quietly fighting back, spending nights and weekends watching and waiting outside the dreary shelters where foreign asylum-seekers are housed.

The refugees worry through the night, wondering if “they” will attack, if “they” will try to burn them out. Wolf worries with them. It is not just the punks she is ready to confront, but the past.

And of the two, it is history that scares her the most.

The cargo containers on the junk-strewn lot are among six such shelters in Muelheim, just north of Duesseldorf. Pushed together, they resemble mobile homes, which the German government leases for the refugees while their applications for asylum are pending, a process that can take several years.

The containers are subdivided into 45-square-foot rooms, each holding at least two people. The families share a kitchen, communal bathrooms and a single washing machine, usually broken. Laundry hangs drying on a low metal fence surrounding the lot.

About 1,500 asylum-seekers are housed in Muelheim--Yugoslavs, Albanians, Romanians, Serbs, Turks, Kurds, Africans, Sri Lankans--all fleeing ethnic violence, civil war or political persecution in their homelands.

“I left my land because of trouble there; now there is trouble here,” said Balasingham Segar, a 26-year-old Sri Lankan whose asylum application has been pending for seven years.

“My wife won’t sleep here anymore. She is with friends in a trailer,” he said. “Where are we supposed to go now? We don’t know why they’re doing this. Why? Why? We think about it all the time.

“The women all cry, and there is lots of fear. It’s an impossible situation. The men stay awake all night in case they come.”

“They” have come twice already.

On the night of Oct. 2, several men on motorcycles roared up and circled the containers, shouting, “Foreigners out!” and “We’ll burn you out!” The terrified people inside had no telephone to call for help. They had heard of other attacks, about foreigners being beaten, about a gasoline bomb thrown into another shelter a few miles away.

The motorcyclists went away.

The next night--on the first anniversary of German unification--the refugees heard something else. It was a convoy of five or six cars slowly driving past, with Nazi flags fluttering.

After that, the vigil began.

Ingrid Just, whose nonprofit Refugee Council offers free advice to asylum-seekers, organized supporters and placed an ad in the local newspaper seeking volunteers to watch over the Muelheim shelters. Similar community-watch efforts seemed to be proving effective deterrents elsewhere in Germany.

Twenty people had signed up by the end of the first week, and the group is hoping to muster enough volunteers to offer help on weeknights as well as weekends, when the volunteers, usually working in shifts of two people, patrol the shelters until 3 a.m.

The volunteers are not armed and have no radios. Their job is simply to be alert and to summon the police at the first sign of trouble. They keep notes on strangers passing by, jotting down license numbers even if they have no reason to be suspicious.

“We had a security firm call and volunteer to go by the containers four times a night, and the police patrol every two hours,” Just said. “Lots of people are shocked by the brutality and the attacks on innocent people.”

Other European countries, such as Britain and France, are plagued by similar gang attacks on foreigners. But in Germany, the trend is more chilling, carrying with it the obvious weight of history.

“The difference is that people in other countries didn’t gas 6 million Jews,” Just said. “We, as Germans, must be much more sensitive.”

Just is welcomed warmly by the refugees when she drops by two of the Muelheim shelters on this rainy Saturday night. The women compete among themselves for the honor of serving her a cup of thick, sweet coffee.

“We’re worried about the stadium,” one nervous man tells her. The sports field is just through the woods from his shelter, and the families know that soccer games often attract violent youths. Just promises to organize a special patrol on game days.

“We’re scared,” the man continued. Many of the male refugees at this site have found jobs as dishwashers or busboys, and they are reluctant to leave their women and children behind in the current atmosphere.

“We’re afraid to send our kids to school,” the man says. “I can walk them there and pick them up, but then they’re outside for recess for half an hour, and something might happen. Someone might come.”

Just frowns and pushes aside her gray bangs. “Has anything happened at school? We must report anything that happens to the police,” she says gently. Nothing has happened yet, the man replies.

“We know it’s coming,” he says of the arson attacks, “but we just don’t know when. That’s why we don’t sleep.”

Another man complains that the window shades in his family’s single room are broken. He has placed two cheap wardrobes in front of the windows as barricades. His wife, pregnant with their third child, hovers over their 1-year-old as he coughs harshly in his sleep.

Two German volunteers just finishing their watch shift stop in for coffee, sipping it gratefully.

Helmut Giebkes is a 38-year-old bus driver who responded to Just’s newspaper ad “out of humanity and because of the past,” he says. “It is repeating itself. We have to show people who are fearful that there are other Germans, that they have friends here, not just enemies.”

He considers the attackers to be young hooligans “letting their aggressions out. They search out the weakest ones, the ones who can’t speak out.

“It’s like with the Nazis. It started then with a few throwing stones and breaking windows. I wonder how I would have reacted that time. If more people had stood fast and said no, maybe so much wouldn’t have happened.

“I wasn’t born in Hitler’s time, and I can’t do anything about it. But I am alive now, and I can do something against it, and that’s why I’m here.”

Just walks around the compound before leaving, worrying aloud about the dark woods that surround the containers. There have been rumors that neo-Nazis hold secret meetings in the forest.

By the time she reaches the next shelter site, Wolf and her boyfriend have begun their graveyard shift.

A Kurdish man in a blue bathrobe offers Just his folding chair, but she declines. A woman hands her a cup of coffee and beams as she proclaims it delicious. The man wants to know how long the vigil will last.

“As long as there are crazy people out there,” Just vows. “Until it is quiet.”

Someone mentions that a 10-year-old Yugoslav boy was knocked off his bicycle by youths on motorbikes. Just carefully picks her way through the refugee’s broken German to find out what happened. The boy’s glasses were broken, she is told, but he was not hurt. A sister fetches the boy, who is too shy to speak.

“Did you report it to the police?” Just asks. The refugees did not. Many come from countries where the police were their tormentors. “We must tell the police whenever something like this happens,” Just insists. “The more they know, the more they will look after you. Otherwise, they think everything is fine and don’t bother.”

Wolf, a nurse, decided to give up her Saturday nights to keep vigil after violent racists hurled a gasoline bomb into a refugee shelter in southern Germany, critically burning two Lebanese children.

“I am so angry and so sad for what is happening,” Wolf said. “As a human being, I have to ask myself what I can do. That’s why I’m here.”

Gienow, a 32-year-old hospital nurse, has joined his girlfriend because “most people in this country don’t care about others. They sit in front of the TV and see the reports and say how terrible it all is.”

He does not think he can change anything in the grand scheme of things by standing here in the rain all Saturday night. Still, he stays.

“I don’t believe history is repeating itself,” he says. “It’s groups of people who want to terrorize others, but they don’t want to claim political power like the Nazis.”

Wolf jumped in with vehemence.

“How can you say that?” she demands. “Hitler only became big because. . . .”

“You’re being too political again,” Gienow interrupts.

“No, I’m not. Many people in my generation have not worked through our history. I’ve never worked it through,” Wolf says angrily. “I went to school for 12 years and heard all about the Middle Ages, but not the Nazis. Not how it happened. My father was 17 years old when the Nazis sent him to the front, and he still has the scars from a grenade running down his leg. But he never said a word to me about it. My own father!”

“This is a totally different society,” Gienow argues. “What happened is 50 years ago already.”

“But certain values are still around,” Wolf replies. “I’d like to understand history. I want to know what happened. I don’t want to forget.”

“I don’t want to forget, either,” says Gienow. “But I deal with today.”

They stand angrily in the cold night, their hearts in the same place, their German souls far apart. Gienow wanders off to accept a drink of schnapps.

“We came last week, and some of the refugees from Africa and Turkey invited us in and fed us tea and plums,” Wolf remembers. “We ran out of things to say to each other. What are we supposed to talk about? It was tough.”

What would she say to a neo-Nazi, to a skinhead or some other extremist, if they showed up, if she could talk to them?

“I’d ask if they had a happy childhood, if they have any dreams left at all,” she says, then breaks off with a violent shake of her head. “No. I couldn’t talk to them at all. I’d tell them to get lost, piss off. I’d tell them to leave these children alone.”

She stops to urge a 17-year-old Kurdish girl to go to bed. It is nearly 2 a.m. and cold outside. The girl says her 7-year-old brother is also still awake. “He says he is waiting for the gunman to come.”

Wolf checks to make sure that the single telephone installed the previous night is working. She walks the perimeter of the lot, then tries again in vain to persuade the fatigued men to get some rest.

Standing there in the rain, with strangers who cannot understand what she is saying, Wolf vows to come back, and keep coming back, until “they” go away.