We Refugees Archive is a digital archive on refugeedom, past and present. It focuses on individual micro-histories and the city as a microcosm of refuge and new beginnings.
“It’s an amazingly beautiful and devastatingly hard place to live.”
Alaa Hassan, 2021
“We have never been so ‘refugees’ as now.”
Mascha Kaléko, 1941
“We will always stand up for our immigrant and refugee neighbors. No one can change that.”
Bill di Blasio, 2019
“There I stood, a ‘Réfugié’ disregarded in the German homeland as a Jew, chased out of his offices because of his ‘inferior’ race, emigrated under abandonment of home and hearth into the foreign exile […] as a German professor counted among the upper thousand!”
Ernst E. Hirsch
“The foreigner feels at home in Paris, because you can live in this city as you would otherwise only live in your own four walls.”
Hannah Arendt
“Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new beginning.”
Amro Ali, 2019
“I don’t have any places to go, I am not going anywhere. My place is Palermo … I am now a Palermitanian.”
Kadija J., 2019
“The writers heard about the Garden of Eden in Vilnius … They moved there when Warsaw was not able to protect them any longer in the same way.”
Emanuel Ringelblum, 1940
In her work “A Jewish Refugee in New York” Kadya Molodowsky presents the life of the twenty-year-old refugee from Lublin Rivke Zilberg in New…
In the excerpt from his work “Schicksalsreise” (Journey of Destiny), Alfred Döblin tells of his continued flight from Paris as soon as news of…
In an audio contribution from 1983, Max Diamant tells how he organized escape aid from Lisbon in cooperation with the Emergency Rescue Committee led…
In her essay, Kseniia Tsybulska describes her escape from Kyiv and reflects on her feelings of homesickness after her arrival. How can she live…
