Questão de Inglês — Verbos (Verbs) — CESPE / CEBRASPE 2025

They are images for the history books. The photos of young men with backpacks and weary faces who set out on foot in September 2015 from Hungary on their way to Austria and Germany. Pictures of fathers with babies on their arms. Of women in headscarves holding their children’s hands. Most of them had fled the war in Syria or were from the war-torn countries of Afghanistan or Iraq.

They came. A lot of them. And they changed Germany.

There was a before and an after, wrote Angela Merkel in her memoirs. During the night of September 4, 2015, Merkel, who was chancellor at the time, decided that the German federal police officers would not block the refugees at the border. In the months that followed, more than a million asylum seekers arrived in the country. Never before since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949 had the country seen such a huge wave of migration.

“We can do it,” Merkel had said just a few days earlier („Wir shaffen das!” in original German). It was an enormous humanitarian challenge. No sentence during her career in politics ever blew up like that one did, she writes in her autobiography. “No sentence was as polarizing.”

Susmita Arp et al. How is Germany doing 10 years after the refugee crisis? Internet: <www.spiegel.de> (adapted).