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
IIn excerpts from the diary Berlin-New York Aufzeichnungen 1933 bis 1945, Hertha Nathorff vividly describes the expulsion from her homeland, which was incomprehensible to…
Dina is 27 years old and comes from Aleppo. She lost her home because of the war and does not know if she will…
From October to November 1940, writer Hertha Pauli published a three-part account of her escape through German-occupied France via Spain and Portugal to the…
The Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO), the largest international charitable women’s organization in the world, in cooperation with other organizations and under the leadership…
