Trapped, broke and scared in Budapest
BUDAPEST -- An estimated 3,000 increasingly frustrated refugees and migrants remained stuck Wednesday morning at the main train station in Budapest, as officials refused to let them board trains to wealthier European countries to the west.
As CBS News correspondent Charlie D'Agata reports, after long, dangerous journeys from Syria and other places where they saw no future, they're so close; it's just a short walk into the station to board trains to Germany, Austria -- anywhere but Hungary.
While they run out of food, money and patience, all they can do is wait, and protest.
But as thousands of migrants continue to pour across the border by the day, D'Agata says something is going to have to give, and soon.
If they're not herded into "holding camps," in the Hungarian city, they end up in the masses of humanity surrounding the train station. It's not a dusty tent-filled refugee camp across the border from a country torn apart by war, but a major European capital city.
In the crowd, D'Agata and his team saw a familiar face; Mohammed Basav, whom they met at the country's border after he got past Hungary's razor wire fence and then managed to evade police by cutting through cornfields.
Basav told D'Agata that after he slipped into the corn field, he could only do one thing: "Just run, just run."
Basav and a few others managed to get a taxi to the train station, and that is where they've remained stuck now for two days, sleeping on the ground outside.
The border they snuck across is 110 miles away from Budapest, and rides from unscrupulous taxi drivers don't come cheap. Basav and the other passengers coughed up about $230 each for the ride.
Many at the station, like Basav, have nothing left.
Some spent the last of what they did have on non-refundable train tickets to Germany or Austria.
Amar and Najeen, a young married couple from the embattled Syrian city of Homs, are now flat broke. Najeen told D'Agata she was now scared, exhausted, and hadn't eaten in two days.
Meanwhile on the other side of Europe, at the French port of Calais where thousands of migrants and refugees have camped out in hopes of jumping onto a train or a truck headed across the English Channel to the U.K., recent troubles rekindled Wednesday.
Several cross-Channel trains suffered long delays Wednesday after a group of migrants tried to climb aboard trains. There were reported sitings of people climbing on the tops of other trains, and on the tracks.