Patrick Kingsley: Before the Hungarian border closed, refugees faced days of limbo in Hungary, often trapped by police in chilly fields or caged in camps like animals. By picking them up as soon as they cross the Hungarian border, Breuer gave refugees a chance to avoid this humiliation, without having to place their lives in the hands of smugglers. It was this endeavour that brought Breuer and three Kurds to a dark field near the Serbo-Hungarian border, late on a Sunday night. They survived the first challenge: evading the Hungarian border police. Now they face another 190 miles of bumpy back roads before they reach the relative safety of Austria, where Breuer lives in a remote woodland, in a cabin without running water. Should they get caught on the way there, Breuer faces years in jail. But it is an outcome Breuer felt was worth the risk, since the fight is so personal. His father, a Jewish dissident, fled Austria for Britain shortly before the second world war. On his way to pick up the Hussein family, Breuer’s eyes redden when he compares the two eras. “It makes me cry again and again if I think of my father, of his situation, and of other immigrants – and I put it together with these people. Friends of my parents, Jewish people, tried to emigrate to Switzerland [before the second world war], but the Swiss put them back to the Nazis at the frontier. There is too much similarity between these two situations – one 70 years ago, and one now.” […] Breuer drives on through the night, relying on his 40 years as a shepherd to guide him. Breuer describes himself as Austria’s last wandering shepherd; with his family, he herds hundreds of Jura sheep across public land in Austria. It’s a vocation that has given him not just an unshakeable belief in the right of man to cross the earth unobstructed – but also a rich knowledge of how farmland is parcelled up, and how paths weave within it. More here.