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 an interview with the We Refugees Archive Team, Iranian Political Exilee and Coordinator of the Committee on Forced Migration at Columbia University Kian…
Berlin-born Romance philologist, literary and cultural scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), now considered the founder of the discipline of comparative literature thanks to Palestinian postcolonial…
Social Democratic politician Elsbeth Weichmann (1900-1988) describes the network of refugees in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s.
