STEPHEN Griffith was in Berlin once when some Germans he met volunteered a comment that made him proud to be British.

"They said 'do you know why we like the British? It's because you had food rationing after the war so that the Germans could have food'," he recalls.

He found that very moving. And it is that potential for generosity in a crisis that he believes is one of our very best qualities as a nation. "That's the Britain I'm proud of."

He brings this up in the context of discussing refugees - and specifically, refugees from Syria.

York has already taken in its first two Syrian refugee families - ten people all told, who are now settling into their new homes. Over the next five years, the city will take in about 50 more.

Given the extent of the tragedy unfolding in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, it seems a comparatively small gesture. Yet not everyone in York is happy.

When The Press reported the news a couple of days ago, there were scores of comments on our website. Many people welcomed the refugee families.

Others, however, argued that York had a duty to look after its own first.

For Stephen, a retired Anglican priest who worked in Jordan and then Syria for eight years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the issue is simple.

It is a matter of common humanity that we should offer succour to people - many of them children - who are in desperate need: whose families have been brutalised, whose lives and homes have been destroyed.

We need to remember, he says, just what a hell these people have fled from. They have been brutalised by their own government; brutalised by ISIS. Their homes and cities have been bombed; their menfolk murdered; their womenfolk raped; their children orphaned.

In a visit earlier this year to a refugee camp in Lebanon, just across the border from Syria - the kind of camp from which the refugees now in York have come - Stephen met people with nothing.

York Press:

Syrian children in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan

They were living in tent-like structures made of plastic sheeting flung across a frame. Boys as young as eight were working to try to earn a few scraps. Sexual abuse was rampant - including the rape of boys - as was prostitution. And these, don't forget, were people who had fled something even worse.

"I met a woman whose husband had died, probably killed," says Stephen, a one-time chaplain of St Peters School who is now retired and living in Bootham. "She had three children, and no income. She was entirely dependant on the kindness of strangers for food and clothing. They lived in a plastic tent in what was essentially a warehouse."

Yet even here, he says, the essential dignity of these traumatised people shone through.

There was resilience. The woman and others living in the warehouse kept it spotlessly clean. "Arabs are spotlessly clean. So everything was very tidy, everything in its right place."

Syrian women who don't work traditionally spend their time gathering together to produce delicious food, he says: and that's what the women in this warehouse were doing.

The children were going to a school set up for them by Christian charity Embrace The Middle East. The mothers, meanwhile, would congregate in the warehouse, preparing food for their families. "They would sit together, rolling, cooking, sharing, chatting together. Gossiping, just like other people."

But make no bones about it, he says. Beneath that resilience, that determination, their lives were hell. He uses another word. "Their lives were s***. Awful. Nobody deserves that."

York Press:

A Syrian woman cries after her luggage got lost disembarking from a Greek coastguard vessel

The tragedy of Syria, Stephen says, is that is it a beautiful, cultured country steeped in history. Unfortunately, it is a country of cultured people with a barbaric government.

He went to live there in 1997 as an Anglican chaplain and the Archbishop of Canterbury's representative. He lived in the capital Damascus, an ancient trading city at an oasis between mountains and desert - and also regularly visited Aleppo, another ancient trading centre.

His friends included musicians, sculptors, opera singers, businessmen, silversmiths - and the young men who lived in a building across the street from him in an ordinary quarter of Damascus.

He loved the spice souk in Damascus, teeming with merchants selling spices, nuts and everything imaginable; he loved the old-fashioned houses in the older quarters of the city, with their north-facing courtyards that would remain cool in the summer's heat; he loved the great mosque in Aleppo, and that city's covered bazaar the size of the whole of central York. "You could buy everything from gold, silver and precious stones to bread and wonderful sweets."

York Press:

Stephen Griffith's 1990s photo of a spice souk in Damascus

That Syria - the Syria of cultured, educated people that he knew - has gone. In the wake of the Arab Spring, during which countless ordinary Syrians took to the streets to demand democracy and the rule of law, the country's president, Bashar al-Assad, launched a vicious, brutal war of oppression against his own people, Stephen says.

Assad had at first tolerated Islamist Jihadis - allowing them to pass through Syria to fight against the west in Iraq; then imprisoned them; then, after the Arab Spring, released them again to foment trouble and make the world think his war against his people was actually a war against an extreme Islamist revolution.

But for the vast majority of Syrians - who are more relaxed about religion than, for example, their neighbours in Turkey - it wasn't an Islamist revolution at all, he says. "It was people just wanting the rule of law and democracy."

In the years since, Assad has used the excuse of Islamist extremism to terrorise his own people.

He has bombed his own cities, murdered and tortured his own people.

Half of Aleppo has been destroyed, the bazaar burned, the city's great mosque badly damaged. "That's a bit like knocking down York Minster," Stephen says.

York Press:

Syrians inspect the damage following a Syrian government air strike in Aleppo in 2014 in which at least 17 people were killed

The old city of Damascus itself has largely survived intact, and life there goes on after a fashion. But the areas around, which were in rebellion against Assad, have been destroyed, Stephen says - like large swathes of the rest of the country, including the ancient city of Homs, which has been reduced to ruins.

And what of the friends he had? Some have been kidnapped and possibly murdered, he says - like Father Paolo Dall'Oglio, a Jesuit priest based at Mar Musa, a 6th-century monastery 50 miles north of Damascus. He was openly critical of Assad, was exiled from Syria, then subsequently kidnapped by ISIS. "I'm pretty sure that he has been killed," Stephen says.

Other, Syrian friends have joined the great diaspora, fleeing a country which no longer functions.

One young man he knows, Omar, had just completed an MBA in the UK. A businessman to his fingertips, he returned to Aleppo - only to find there was nothing to return to. "You cannot do business there," Stephen says. "It's just war and siege."

Abed, a silversmith who had a stall in the Aleppo bazaar, lost a fortune in the fire that destroyed it and fled to Italy, where he's now trying to set up a business.

Another friend, a Syrian Christian named Bassel from Homs, was a musician who had studied the harp in St Petersburg. He taught the instrument in Damascus, but when the war broke out he fled to the mountains. He could no longer work, because the roads were death traps. "One group of Christians were driving in the mountains and a group just stopped them and killed them all," Stephen says.

York Press:

Children play football on a ruined street in Homs

At one point, Bassel returned to his home city of Homs. The block of houses where he had grown up had been destroyed, the walls gaping open. Through one of those empty walls, he could still see his old piano, Stephen says.

Bassel eventually fled across the border to Turkey, paid a people smuggler to carry him to Greece, and is now living in Sweden. "But no matter how nice Sweden is, he's traumatised," Stephen says. "He just wants to be a harpist."

It is people like these - ordinary, cultured, educated people whose lives have been destroyed - who we are being asked to take in and make welcome.

Yes, he admits, among any large group of people, there will be a few crooks, a few bad apples. But the vast majority of Syrian refugees just want the chance to rebuilt their lives.

It is very easy to be selfish, Stephen says - to put ourselves first. But as a Christian, he believes that the good life is about doing something different.

"It is about being willing to give things up for others. These are people who have come through hell. They have children in need. What better thing can we do than welcome them?"

Refugee week in York

Next week is Refugee Week. Here are some of the events that will be happening in York:

  • Saturday June 18, York Festival of Ideas, Ron Cooke Hub, University of York, 11.30 - 7.30pm. Four talks on refugees during the curse of the day - Refugees and Migrants: An Escalating Crisis; Migration, Migrants and the Media; Creating a Tolerant Society; and Building a Secure World for the Future. Admission free but booking required: www.yorkfestivalofideas.com
  • Monday June 20, 6.15pm, City Screen cinema. Three films: Precarious Trajectories: Voices From The Mediterranean; Migration Crisis, Seeking Asylum and Blue Moment. Admission: £7
  • Tuesday June 21, 8pm, The Winning Post, Bishopthorpe Road, York. Pub quiz in aid of Refugee Action York. Just turn up.
  • Saturday June 25, 11am – 2pm, stall in Exhibition Square, outside the Art Gallery.