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 80
New Beginnings and Visions for the Future 131
Support Networks 95
Questions of Identity: Continuities and Ruptures 120
Experiences of Discrimination and Exclusion 65
Archive 217
“If I will go back, I will be also foreigner. I will be foreigner in my city.”
Dina: To Live Without a Home
Dina is 27 years old and comes from Aleppo. She lost her home because of the war and does not know if she will…
“In the midst of the terrible days of cold, they came.”
Benshalom on terrible flight and living conditions
Benzion Benshalom tells of the harsh winter of 1939/40, which made life even harder for refugees in Vilnius and led to tragedies at the…
“For the trip, my father had recommended that if we were addressed in French, we should answer: ‘No compro pan.’ Literally: ‘I don’t buy bread,’ which sounds like: ‘I don’t understand.'”
An epic journey to France
Isabel Alonso Martin tells of her arduous journey to France – transit into a new life.
“There is life after the flight. But the flight acts upon
oneself for a lifetime.”
oneself for a lifetime.”
“There is life after the flight. But the flight acts upon oneself for a lifetime.”
Ilija Trojanow, who fled with his parents from Bulgaria to Germany in 1971 and whose life is marked by experiences of migration, deals in…