A Chinese tourist who was sent to a refugee camp in Germany after failing to communicate with authorities could have spent months there if it hadn’t been for a simple translation app, a member of the German Red Cross who helped free the man told Sixth Tone on Monday.

“For this ‘refugee,’ without the app, we wouldn’t have been able to communicate with him,” said Christoph Schlutermann, an official with the German Red Cross, in a phone call with Sixth Tone. “And if he hadn’t said anything, it could have taken half a year for him to have his first interview [to review his asylum claim]. That would have been the worst case.”

The 31-year-old man from northeastern Jilin province, who had travelled to Europe as a backpacker, tried to file a complaint over his stolen wallet in the southern German city of Stuttgart, where he had stopped on his way to France. 

Because the man was unable to read signs, which are generally only in German, or to ask for directions, it’s likely that he never made it to the local police station, but walked into another municipal building instead, said Schlutermann.

“All he spoke was Mandarin, and nobody there understood him,” said Schlutermann. “So they sent him to a refugee camp, where he was quickly processed and registered.” Schlutermann added that this also meant the man’s passport was taken — a common procedure to prevent asylum-seekers from registering in multiple countries.

From the camp in Heidelberg, the man was sent 300 kilometers north to Dortmund, where authorities put him on a bus with 50 refugees from the Middle East and Africa en route to Dulmen, a town of 45,000 people in Germany’s rural northeast.

“When he arrived here, he stood out immediately,” Schlutermann said. “It was clear that he had an urgent need to communicate something. Besides, he looked relatively wealthy, with a cool look and nice clothes — somebody one would associate with the modern China.”

The Red Cross works with translators for languages most commonly spoken by refugees, including Farsi and Pashto, but there are few translators for languages like Mandarin. A voice translation app that Schlutermann downloaded for about 10 euros ($11) enabled the two to start a conversation.

After an hour-long talk, Schluterman realized that the man was a tourist. “The app literally translated: ‘I want to go for a walk in foreign countries. I want to see the beach in Italy,’ so it was pretty apparent that he was not a refugee,” Schlutermann said.

Although the young man was free to leave at any time, he chose to stay at the camp, where he received meals and a free place to sleep, while authorities worked on retrieving his documents.

After about 16 days as a refugee, the man left the camp last month with his passport and is presumed to be back in China. The Red Cross did not reveal his identity for privacy reasons, but said that every newspaper, radio station, and TV network in Germany had picked up his story.

“I think the young man had no idea what happened to him here, but it’s been an extraordinary story,” Schlutermann said.

(Header image: A migrant poses for an identification photo at the registration office of the Patrick-Henry Village refugee center in Heidelberg, Germany, Sept. 29, 2015. Ralph Orlowski/Reuters/VCG)