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 5
The Decision to Flee and Experiences of Flight 69
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 105
Support Networks 81
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 92
Experiences of Discrimination and Exclusion 45
Archive 181
“Unfortunately, the beginning of Lithuanian rule was bitter for Jews.”
Mendel Balberyszski: Pogrom in Vilnius, October 1939
Mendel Balberyszski (1894-1966) was born in Vilnius but had been living in Łódź for over a decade at the outbreak of the Second World…
“We have never been ‘refugees’ as we are now.”
Mascha Kaléko about serious material concerns as a refugee in New York, 1941
In a diary entry in New York on June 20, 1941, the poet Mascha Kaléko (1907-1975) describes the many, mainly material, worries as a…
Bulletin N 2 of the JDC in Vilnius, 15 March 1940
Bulletin No. 2 of the Joint in Vilnius, 15 March 1940
Internal communications between the Vilnius delegation of the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the New York Headquarters.
“We were the first of the lot which had been expelled by the Germans”
Statement No. 7: Interview with Owsiej Bułkin about his forced migration from Berlin to Vilnius, 16 November 1939
On November 16, 1939, Owsiej Bułkin was the seventh refugee stranded in Vilnius who gave a report to the Komitet tsu zamlen materialn vegn…