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 74
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 117
Support Networks 83
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 110
Experiences of Discrimination and Exclusion 59
Archive 199
“These people want to silence me and that will not happen.”
Nazeeha Saeed about how her journalistic activism changed after coming to Europe
Nazeeha Saeed, a journalist from Bahrain who lives in Paris and Berlin in exile since 2016, speaks about her journalistic work in Bahrain and…
5
Self-help by Polish-Jewish refugees in Vilnius
Photo collection by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
“With that Leica and the small enlarger we had bought in Paris, we had the audacity to open in our room ‘Studio Stein’.”
Fred Stein’s letter to friends and relatives
In a letter from 1946, Fred Stein describes the flight story of his family in detail to his friends and relatives. After Fred and…
6
Max Diamant in Emigration
The pictures from his daughter’s private archive show Max Diamant (1906-1992) with family and friends in Paris, Mexico and Germany.