In this touching account, veteran New York Times reporter Joseph Berger describes how his own family of Polish Jews -- with one son born at the close of World War II and the other in a "displaced persons" camp outside Berlin -- managed against all odds to make a life for themselves in the utterly foreign landscape of post-World War II America. Paying eloquent homage to his parents' extraordinary courage, luck, and hard work while illuminating as never before the experience of 140,000 refugees who came to the United States between 1947 and 1953, Joseph Berger has captured a defining moment in history in a riveting and deeply personal chronicle.
Having survived the Nazi regime of World War II, thousands of Jewish refugees faced further struggles as they tried to find a new and welcoming homeland, despite continued anti-Semitism on the continent and strict immigration issues abroad.
In this unique "history from below," Destination Elsewhere chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee. As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old. Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons' camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.
From bestselling author David Nasaw, a sweeping new history of the one million refugees left behind in Germany after WWII In May 1945, after German forces surrendered to the Allied powers, millions of concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators were left behind in Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers attempted to repatriate the refugees, but more than a million displaced persons remained in Germany: Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans who refused to go home or had no homes to return to. Most would eventually be resettled in lands suffering from postwar labor shortages, but no nation, including the United States, was willing to accept more than a handful of the 200,000 to 250,000 Jewish men, women, and children who remained trapped in Germany. When in June, 1948, the United States Congress passed legislation permitting the immigration of displaced persons, visas were granted to sizable numbers of war criminals and Nazi collaborators, but denied to 90% of the Jewish displaced persons. A masterwork from acclaimed historian David Nasaw, The Last Million tells the gripping but until now hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness and of the Last Million, as they crossed from a broken past into an unknowable future, carrying with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. Here for the first time, Nasaw illuminates their incredible history and shows us how it is our history as well.
In May 1945, Pavel Mandl, a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp, finds himself among similarly displaced persons gathered in the Allied occupation zones of a defeated Germany. Possessing little besides a map, a few tins of food, and a talent for black-market trading, he must scrape together a new life in a chaotic community of refugees, civilians, and soldiers. With fellow refugees Fela, a young widow, and Chaim, a resourceful teenager with impressive smuggling skills, Pavel establishes a makeshift family, as together they face an uncertain future. Eventually the trio immigrates to the United States, where they grapple with past traumas that arise again in the everyday moments of lives no longer dominated by the need to endure, fight, hide, or escape. Ghita Schwarz’s Displaced Persons is an astonishing novel of grief, anger, and survival that examines the landscape of liberation and reveals the interior despairs and joys of immigrants shaped by war and trauma.
By 2017, it was estimated that over 40 million people were displaced within their own countries by conflict and violence across at least 56 countries worldwide. Solutions to the epidemic of forced internal displacement are frequently premised on the return of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Indeed, as a characteristic need of IDPs, such returns benefit from a special protection framework developed by IDP protection instruments such as the Guiding Principles. However, the legal status of those instruments remains ambiguous, generating attendant questions about the congruity of the IDP return framework with existing international law. Moreover, limited knowledge exists on its practical implementation. As a result, both inter-national agencies and individual scholars have repeatedly issued urgent calls for comprehensive and grounded theoretical investigation into this topic. This book answers those long-standing calls for research by presenting a detailed study of the return of conflict-afffected IDPs under international law.
Interdisciplinary perspectives on the role of new information technologies, including mobile phones, wireless networks, and biometric identification, in the global refugee crisis. Today's global refugee crisis has mobilized humanitarian efforts to help those fleeing persecution and armed conflict at all stages of their journey. Aid organizations are increasingly employing new information technologies in their mission, taking advantage of proliferating mobile phones, remote sensors, wireless networks, and biometric identification systems. Digital Lifeline? examines the use of these technological innovations by the humanitarian community, exploring operations and systems that range from forecasting refugee flows to providing cellular and Internet connectivity to displaced persons. The contributors, from disciplines as diverse as international law and computer science, offer a variety of perspectives on forced migration, technical development, and user behavior, drawing on field work in countries including Jordan, Lebanon, Rwanda, Germany, Greece, the United States, and Canada. The chapters consider such topics as the use of information technology in refugee status determination; ethical and legal issues surrounding biometric technologies; information technology within organizational hierarchies; the use of technology by refugees; access issues in refugee camps; the scalability and sustainability of information technology innovations in humanitarian work; geographic information systems and spatial thinking; and the use of “big data” analytic techniques. Finally, the book identifies policy research directions, develops a unified research agenda, and offers practical suggestions for conducting displacement research. Contributors Elizabeth Belding, Karen E. Fisher, Daniel Iland, Lindsey N. Kingston, Carleen F. Maitland, Susan F. Martin, Galya Ben-Arieh Ruffer, Paul Schmitt, Lisa Singh, Brian Tomaszewski, Mariya Zheleva
While the plight of persons displaced within the borders of states has emerged as a global concern, not much attention has been given to this specific category of persons in international legal scholarship. Unlike refugees, internally displaced persons remain within the states in which they are displaced. Current statistics indicate that there are more people displaced within state borders than persons displaced outside states. Romola Adeola examines the protection of the internally displaced person under international law, considering existing legal regimes at various levels of governance and institutional mechanisms for internally displaced persons.
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are persons who have been forced to leave their places of residence as a result of armed conflict, violence, human rights violations, or natural or human-made disasters, but who have not crossed an international border. There are about 55 million IDPs in the world today, outnumbering refugees by roughly 2:1. Although IDPs and refugees have similar wants, needs and fears, IDPs have traditionally been seen as a domestic issue, and the international legal and institutional framework of IDP protection is still in its relative infancy. This book explores to what extent the protection of IDPs complements or conflicts with international refugee law. Three questions form the core of the book's analysis: What is the legal and normative relationship between IDPs and refugees? To what extent is an individual's real risk of internal displacement in their country of origin relevant to the qualification and cessation of refugee status? And to what extent is the availability of IDP protection measures an alternative to asylum? It argues that the IDP protection framework does not, as a matter of law, undermine refugee protection. The availability of protection within a country of origin cannot be a substitute for granting refugee status unless it constitutes effective protection from persecution and there is no real risk of refoulement. The book concludes by identifying current and future challenges in the relationship between IDPs and refugees, illustrating the overall impact and importance of the findings of the research, and setting out questions for future research.
