Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 1

Historians have often explored what it means to be a refugee. It’s a central question in refugee studies, posed, for example, by Roger Zetter in an influential 1991 article in the Journal of Refugee Studies, which asked ‘how and with what consequences people become labelled as refugees—how an identity is formed, transformed and manipulated within the context of public policy and especially, bureaucratic practices’. But what happens to refugee history when we consider how and with what consequences people do not become labelled as refugees? 

This two-part blog post tells the story of two individuals who might have been refugees: a young Jewish woman who left Romania for Palestine in the early 1940s, and a young Muslim man who left Palestine a few years later. But neither of them did become refugees: they are what I refer to as ‘refugee-adjacent’ individuals. I use this term to refer mainly to people whose families—parents, siblings, spouses, children, or otherwise immediate family members—became refugees or forcibly displaced persons, but who themselves did not. A refugee-adjacent individual has not been labelled by any international institution, or state, regional, national, or local government as a refugee or displaced person. They may also be persons who do not (or are hesitant to) label themselves as such. Nonetheless, these people are deeply affected by what Peter Gatrell has termed refugeedom: the matrix of multiple and multilayered administrative practices, legal norms, and social relations that define refugees’ experiences, and the representation of all of these in cultural terms. Broadening our research scope in refugee history can do more than just uncover the family members and loved ones of refugees, and trace their trajectories. Focusing on ‘refugee-adjacency’ further enlarges the framework of refugeedom. Like refugeedom, refugee-adjacency is a concept that has practical relevance for understanding refugees in history and for refugee history. 

The first of these two refugee-adjacent individuals is Doris, who was twenty when she appeared in a bureaucratic file in 1941. The file is not in a refugee-centred archive: it is in a Palestine mandate secretariat file on destitute and financially-distressed British subjects, now held in the Israel State Archive. Doris’s story shows how the treatment of refugee-adjacent persons at the hands of state or colonial administrators, within shifting systems of imperial power, places such individuals in limbo because of their closeness to refugees. It illustrates the generative effects of loss, as entangled within the structures of refugeedom.  

Doris had arrived in Palestine in early 1941. She was born in Leeds, but grew up in Romania. Her father was a Romanian Jew, her mother was a British subject who had lost her nationality upon marriage, and her younger brother was born in Romania. Doris was therefore the only one in her family with British nationality. She left Romania in 1940, along with other British subjects, after a series of arrests and incidents of mistreatment against British subjects in the country, and went to Istanbul. (I explore her story in a recent article in Immigrants & Minorities.) From there Doris was given permission to enter Palestine on a three-month tourist visa. She moved in with members of her extended paternal family in Haifa to await the arrival of her parents, younger brother, and fiancé. Soon after her departure, Romania suppressed the British Legation, and Romanian leader Ion Antonescu decided to join the Axis powers. Pogroms against Jews there intensified.

In late 1941, Doris’s family and fiancé purchased four places on the MV Struma. The Struma was chartered by the New Zionist Organization to bring its hundreds of Jewish passengers to Palestine, to save them from the threat posed by a larger Nazi alliance in Eastern Europe. It departed the Black Sea port of Constanţa on 12 December. But none of the approximately 800 passengers who would remain aboard the boat had permission to enter Palestine, and the heavily overcrowded vessel could not proceed past Istanbul. In February 1942, having been set adrift some distance from Istanbul, the Struma was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the Black Sea. There was only one survivor. 

Consequently, Doris was left alone in Palestine, having lost her entire family and her fiancé. She had arrived with few belongings: her family likely intended to bring items, and they had also sent clothes, shoes, and personal effects by boat ahead of their own journey from Constanţa. This luggage, sent ahead, disappeared for years after the sinking of the Struma. Already impoverished, Doris now became destitute. Without sufficient income, without permission to remain permanently in Palestine, she was repatriated to Great Britain. Doris’s grief and desperation because of her family’s deaths, and the twin losses of her home in Romania and her future plans for a home in Palestine, were intimately linked to her family’s positions as refugees at the time of their death. But it is her repatriation that demonstrates the uncaring attitude of the British authorities. The government in Britain and the Palestine administration charged Doris for the costs of her repatriation, and the task of finding and shipping the luggage of her family from Turkey to Palestine to northern England. 

What makes the grief in this refugee-adjacent history unsettling is that Doris was mobile. She was able to migrate: first on her own to Palestine and then again solo to the United Kingdom. On the one hand, Doris had the choice to leave Romania by herself ahead of her family and fiancé. Her repatriation to the UK was not entirely voluntary—she contravened immigration regulations by becoming ‘destitute’—but she apparently chose not to make a case to remain in Palestine. On the other hand, Doris’s mobility brought her closer to the social and material circumstances of refugeedom. She had no family left in Romania, and retained none of the communal, local, and social connections that come from maintaining presence in a particular home space. Her grief and destitution, the loss of the material necessities of a home, and the loss of what would have been longer-term and steady income from the potential employment of her parents, brother, and fiancé, were directly connected to her position as a mobile, refugee-adjacent individual.

The second part of this post tells the story of another such person: Ahmad, who left Palestine in 1947.

*

The banner image shows the MV Struma in Istanbul harbour—a grainy photograph of a low-slung steamer, its decks visibly crowded with people.

Source: US Holocaust Memorial Museum