Orphans’ Funeral Shelled in Bosnia : Conflict: Grandmother is seriously wounded. Surviving children reach Germany, four days after terrifying journey began.

A busload of dazed orphans who survived a hellish odyssey from war-ravaged Sarajevo arrived Tuesday in Germany, while back home, mortar shells rained down on the funeral for two youngsters shot to death during the harrowing escape from the Bosnian capital.

A fleet of ambulances rushed the 38 children to hospitals and orphanages after a chartered Russian plane brought them from the Croatian city of Split to the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt four terrifying days after their journey began.

Five of the children were hospitalized for treatment of exhaustion, dehydration and pneumonia, relief workers said, but the others appeared to be in good condition despite their ordeal.

A 2-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy were killed when the bus came under fire as it left Sarajevo on Saturday, speeding through the city’s notorious “Sniper Alley.”

After the bus set out again the next day, Serbian militiamen stopped and boarded it and herded off five children they identified as of Serbian heritage, according to adults on the bus.

Even as German caretakers greeted their new charges with stuffed animals and hot lunches, mourners, including children from the Bosnian orphanage the others had left behind, scrambled for cover behind tombstones when a mortar attack disrupted the Sarajevo funeral for the two children killed aboard the bus.

The grandmother of one of the slain children--the child’s mother had given her up for adoption--was seriously wounded in the attack, which was broadcast on German television. The footage showed one round exploding directly in the path of weeping relatives. Their ragged sobs quickly turned to shrieks of terror that have become familiar in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Meanwhile, controversy simmered around the daring mission to rescue the orphans, who had been reported trapped without adequate food or medicine in the basement of an orphanage caught in the violence in the suburbs of Sarajevo.

The two German politicians who organized the operation denied that disorganization or derring-do on their part was responsible for endangering the children and the eight adults who accompanied them on the bus.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has criticized the private rescue mission as “almost criminal” because the bus left the orphanage at a particularly dangerous time of day and without waiting for U.N. troop protection.

The politicians, Juergen Angelbeck and Karsten Knolle, both members of the state Landtag, or Parliament, in Saxony-Anhalt, had said they would try to bring the orphans to safety because the United Nations and other organizations were doing too little.

“We took along a number of adults who were far more familiar than we are with the security conditions in Sarajevo,” Angelbeck told a news conference after the chartered plane arrived at the old Soviet airstrip, 55 miles southwest of Berlin, on Tuesday morning.

“And they got on board the bus and were overjoyed to be brought out of that caldron, even without U.N. protection--the so-called U.N. escort that’s being played up so much now,” Angelbeck said. “That means they factored in the risks, as every Sarajevo resident must to go anywhere at all, that they could be shot by a sniper.”

Both the state and federal governments distanced themselves from the rescue operation, which underscored more than a year of frustration that many Europeans have felt as they watched the bloody war in what used to be Yugoslavia unfold nightly on their television screens.

Germany has taken in more than 200,000 refugees in the last year alone, including 5,000 Bosnians who arrived last week. Trains carrying another 5,000 from Bosnia-Herzegovina are due in Saturday.

Other members of the European Community have taken in relatively few war refugees, causing German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government to condemn what it considers a shirking of responsibility.

But just how far good Samaritans should go when bureaucrats seem to be doing too little is a question no one feels comfortable answering.

“If this mission were 100% successful and the two babies hadn’t been killed, Mr. Knolle and Mr. Angelbeck would be considered heroes,” said Steve Stehli, director of the Johanniter emergency relief organization in the region.

“We were told the children had hardly a chance to survive otherwise,” Stehli added. An unknown number of youngsters remain behind in the orphanage. This trip focused on children from ages 6 months to 6 years.

A young orphanage worker who accompanied the children, Natasha Zoric, shook her head sadly as she struggled for words in English to describe the ordeal.

“It was terrible. Awful,” she said, stroking the matted hair of a toddler who stared dully at the television cameras and clamoring reporters in the courtyard of the Marienheim orphanage in Schoenebeck, just outside Magdeburg.

“Someone just started shooting at us, and we all lie down. Two children were killed. We were supposed to go the following morning at 8, but they said we must go today at 4.

“That was the mistake,” she said. She did not know whether the decision to leave was made by the orphanage’s administrators, the Germans or the Bosnian aid organization, Children’s Embassy, which was helping to coordinate.

“That was the first time these babies had ever been on a bus,” Zoric said, adding that the ride in the van-like ambulances to the orphanage Tuesday had frightened some of the children, reminding them too much of the blood-spattered bus they left behind.

Stehli said there were no further plans to “go down and get children out in this type of singular action” again, but he said a convoy from the eastern German town of Weimar was en route to Bosnia to pick up 10 more children and bring them back for medical treatment.

Offers have been pouring in from German families eager to adopt the Bosnian children or provide foster care, but the youngsters will apparently stay in orphanages.

“We’re able to provide round-the-clock care, and a doctor visits regularly,” said Waltraud Kasperczyk, the Marienheim director who interrupted her vacation to greet the 18 Bosnian refugees brought to her orphanage.