Giving Compass' Take:

• This News Deeply post reports on a hotel in Augsburg, Germany, which houses refugees and also has developed a cultural integration initiative for these displaced people.

• The author writes of a connection to her grandfather, who endured the Nazi regime in Germany. There is an uneasiness to the current political climate and a hotel where tourists mingle with people fleeing for their lives. 

• But there is still a note of hope. Here's a glimpse into the work of HIAS, resettling refugees and new immigrants.

At the Grand Hotel Cosmopolis, an African teenager served cappuccinos to European travelers below clocks telling the time in Kabul, Damascus, Grozny and other global centers of crisis.

Lamin Saidy — sporting a style he described as “American proper” with tight jeans, lots of earrings and a big smile — was 13 when he fled violence in the Gambia. After he arrived in Germany as a refugee, he was told about this place, where tourists, asylum seekers and artists all share one building. The hotel is run by staff composed of a core group of resident German artists and a diverse team that includes volunteers who may be refugees like Saidy or local college students who want to join the experiment.

“My first impression was that I felt like I was in a new world,” Saidy told me to the beat of Afro Pop on the jukebox. “The hotel is kind of incomparable.”

The Grand Hotel is located in Augsburg, an ancient German city on Bavaria’s tourist-trod Romantic Road. It is also the place where my mother’s father was born. He was one of the first boys to have a bar mitzvah in the ornate, domed synagogue in Augsburg — just a few years before the Jews were forced to flee or perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Read the full article about the hotel in Germany where refugees are integrated into society by Daniella Gerson at News Deeply.