Paris
Capitale de Refuge
“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
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.
Cities 4
Paris
Berlin
Exile, Transit, Emergency Shelter
“Berlin is not just a city. It is a political laboratory that enforces a new beginning.”
Amro Ali, 2019
Palermo
City of Accommodation?
“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
Vilnius
A Garden of Eden in Times of War?
“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
Topics 4
The Decision to Flee and Experiences of Flight 66
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 94
Support Networks 71
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 84
Archive 1
“I would describe myself as a strong person”
Mahdi on Life Experience and Making Friends in Berlin
Mahdi talks in an interview about the initial difficulties in meeting his classmates in Berlin and how he dealt with the experience of marginalization.…
“I don’t want to fit in any of these boxes.”
Nazeeha Saeed about the attribution “refugee”, “asylum” and “exile”
Nazeeha Saeed, a journalist from Bahrain who lives in Paris and Berlin since 2016, talks about how she came to call herself a “journalist…
“How many times have I wept for my home town since I left it in my exile?”
Herman Kruk about Warsaw
Herman Kruk writes about his pain facing the catastrophic war situation in his chosen hometown Warsaw.
“Those who return are truly lost”
Mustapha F. on staying or moving on
Mustapha F. tells of the difficult situation in which refugees in Italy find themselves.