1st of 5,000 Bosnians Ride Refugee Train to Germany : Rescue: Victims of ‘ethnic cleansing,’ many pack all they own in a grocery bag. Five more trips are scheduled.

The old man sat quietly in his wheelchair as the crowd of Bosnian refugees surged past him toward the train that was waiting on the tracks, the train that would take them far away from war.

A German doctor shook his head no. The children would have to come first. If the old man noticed, he gave no sign.

With many of them carrying all their remaining possessions in a single grocery bag or a bulging suitcase, the refugees Friday climbed aboard the first of six trains Germany was sending this week to rescue 5,000 Bosnians who had fled the process that the Serbs call “ethnic cleansing.”

There was no hysteria on the sizzling platform, just tearful goodbys and long embraces as those able or willing to leave began their long, anxious journey into an uncertain future in an unknown land.

The 15-car Red Cross express pulled out of the station with German efficiency, right on time, at 11:30 a.m.

Except for the old man in the wheelchair and the woman who sat on a suitcase beside him, her head in her hands, the platform was empty.

Within an hour, refugees had settled in and were eating the sack lunches that Red Cross workers had packed at 5 a.m. that day, when the train was speeding past fields of tall corn in Austria toward what used to be Yugoslavia.

Ulrich Albl, one of two doctors on board, had too much on his mind to worry about the crippled old man he had ordered left behind.

“One old man like that needs a first aid worker all to himself,” Albl said. “That paramedic could care for 15 children instead. I would rather take the 15 kids. There are many of them with fevers, infections and dehydration. In this heat, if you don’t take care, a child can dehydrate and die in a few hours. You can see how pale they are already. I have to make a decision. It’s unfortunate.

“There will be six doctors on the next train, so maybe they can take the man in the wheelchair.”

Albl’s nurse had already calculated 50 sick or injured, including men with untreated shrapnel wounds and two extremely pregnant women. The doctors would have to rely on intuition for many of their diagnoses on the 30-hour journey to Germany. The Foreign Ministry in Bonn had failed to deliver on a promise of translators.

In one scorching compartment, a Red Cross volunteer mopped his balding head and crunched numbers on a tiny calculator. According to the German government’s plan, 837 refugees were to board this first train, eventually to be divided among the three cities of Osnabrueck, Hamburg and Schwerin. “How can that be?” the man muttered to himself. “No way. OK, try it again.”

He was coming up with an actual count of 853. But in the faces of those 853, most of them Bosnian Muslims, there were so many things he would never be able to calculate--like fear, heartache, hope.

Back in the caboose, a Red Cross official starting the tedious chore of registering all the refugees had struck gold. Deniza Atic, a 32-year-old mother of two from Bosnia, had spent a decade in Germany and spoke the language beautifully. She would spend the next 12 hours writing down names, listening to complaints and translating nonstop until her throat grew raw. Back and forth she ran through the crowded cars to check on her sleeping baby. The 10-month-old had just gotten out of the hospital that morning after losing 20% of her body weight in a bout of diarrhea.

Her 7-year-old, Amela, patiently entertained herself without any toys. There had been no room for such things in the single suitcase her mother brought with them.

At 3 p.m., police in the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia flagged down the train at an unscheduled stop. A nicely dressed Bosnian woman stood on the station platform fighting tears, the rest of her family hanging back. She indicated that they wanted to come aboard. There were four adults, a teen-ager and two little girls. The Croats, unwilling to admit seven new refugees, hadn’t let them cross over from Slovenia that morning to catch up with the German refugee evacuation.

Atic, buried somewhere in a sea of people deep inside the train, was unavailable for translating. Red Cross leader Artur Renz and the other German officials struggled to understand the family through the broken translation of a teen-age girl. These people who wanted so desperately to get to Germany weren’t on any list the Germans had. Renz quickly made a decision:

“Come along.”

Now there were 860. “I can’t leave these people standing there in this heat with those little children,” Renz said. He would deal with the bureaucrats later. Most of those aboard the train were women, children and families without breadwinners. The few men were either too old or too injured to be of any interest to those fighting the bloody war in what used to be Yugoslavia.

Atic sat down for a moment and confirmed what the Red Cross already had pieced together: Croatian police were said to have rounded up at least three busloads of would-be refugees to Germany on Thursday morning and took them away. Atic and the others had heard that they were being sent back to Bosnia-Herzegovina to help fight off the Serbs’ military advances.

Atic recalled one weeping mother, whose son was being taken away, crying, “What can you do with a 14-year-old?” The reply: “He can carry water.”

Atic herself has known such anguish all too well. The last she heard, her husband was fighting at the front; there has been no word for over four months.

“Yesterday I saw some pictures of my village,” she said. “Everything has been burned down to the ground. There are children without legs. I had a beautiful house, a beautiful life.

“What have they done to us?

“I lived just 20 kilometers from Serbia, and I was afraid that they would come in the night and hurt me or my children. We took a hay wagon to the forest,” she said. “We walked for three days. It was June 16 that we left. I knew we had to get away--where didn’t matter.”

The camp where they ended up, at Varazdin, already had some 800 refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. There was just one working shower for everyone, and the eight toilets were usually overflowing. Breakfast consisted of cheese and bread, Atic said, with just potatoes or rice for lunch, and broth for dinner.

“But we had nothing at all at home,” she said. “We made our way to a camp because we thought it would just be better.”

The afternoon was fading by now, but not the heat. At 4:30 p.m., short-tempered mothers were swatting their restless toddlers. Dr. Albl was worried about all the feverish infants. People were stressed out, exhausted, and some were feeling faint. A little boy with a dirty cast on his arm just stared out a window; he had been doing it for hours.

Renz, the Red Cross leader, tucked a Slovenian bank note into his wallet. An elderly man on the platform at the last station had pushed the 200-tolar bill into a Red Cross volunteer’s hand, urging him to spend it on water for children.

A German border patrolman, who had acompanied the train on the mission, popped his head into the compartment where Renz sat to announce, “We picked up another guest at the last stop.” It was a young man who had claimed that his uncle was already on board. It was probably a lie, the Germans thought, but so what?

Just before reaching the Austrian border with Slovenia, around 6 p.m., Atic found herself embroiled in a heated exchange between a middle-aged woman and Dr. Albl. The woman wanted to get off in Austria; her husband worked there. Albl said it was impossible; she must go to one of the three German refugee centers. She had no visa, no money. If she wants to go to Austria, she was told, she should get off in Slovenia and make her way to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, and just apply for an Austrian visa. “Germany or Zagreb,” Albl said in irritation. The woman sat down and chomped fiercely into an apple.

Amid the mayhem, a dark-eyed girl was pulling the string on her plush ladybug toy over and over, playing herself a lullaby. The train swept into a long, cool tunnel, and a hush fell over it. The refugees were used to the pitch-darkness after so many terrifying nights in their basements during Serbian sieges.

Both doctors were running through the train when it came out of the tunnel, their kits and portable EKG in hand. A 59-year-old woman was thought to be having a heart attack. They stabilized her condition, then tried to catch a few minutes of rest for themselves.

While other parents simply gave up and let their youngsters run wild through the narrow aisles, Badena Hamzic, 23, was trying to keep her three young children occupied.

“This is the third time we’ve been forced to flee home in three months,” she said. They spent five days in the basement when their village was shelled. Her youngest was just two months old then.

A few compartments away, Nocic Uma was recalling her own escape from Bosnia four months earlier. The 46-year-old grandmother took her daughter-in-law and two grandchildren into the woods to hide for over a week. Other townspeople were there as well. Some mothers kept their hands clapped over their babies’ mouths all through the night so the Serbs would hear no cries.

By 9 p.m., the Red Cross volunteers were exhausted and annoyed to discover that the key to their private bathroom was missing. They were also alarmed to learn that all their efforts to serve free soda, tea, water and juice may well have been for naught. Unsupervised children had been filling bottles with water in the bathrooms, and entire families had been drinking the non-potable stuff.

The border patrol officer calmly announced that the woman demanding to go to Austria was missing. Other passengers saw her bolt from the train when it stopped at the Slovenian-Austrian frontier. She was on the wrong side, though. Still in Slovenia.

By then, the Red Cross volunteer and his calculator had somehow settled on 876 refugees. The doctors were on alert again, this time with a false labor alarm. The on-board midwife decided the baby could wait a week or two; the mother was simply stressed out.

People were beginning to bunk down for the night. The journey was not even half over, though. At least 17 more hours lay ahead on this uneasy peace train.

Before she went to bed, 7-year-old Amela Atic drew a picture of a cozy little house with three flowers out front. Two of the flowers were dead, and the one still growing thrust its tiny head into a sunless sky.