Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 2
What does it mean to be ‘refugee adjacent’? The first part of this post told the story of Doris, a young Jewish woman who came to Palestine from Romania in 1941. Her family and fiancé died before they could join her when the vessel they were travelling on, the MV Struma, was torpedoed off Istanbul in February 1942. Doris was left destitute. Unlike her family, Doris was never a refugee: a British subject by birth, she had come to Palestine on a tourist visa and was eventually repatriated to Britain. But her proximity to refugeedom is obvious, in the loss of her home in Romania and the possibility of a home in Palestine, in the loss of her material possessions, and in the loss of her family, all refugees when they died. This second post tell the story of Ahmad, another refugee-adjacent individual, who left Palestine a few years after Doris.
Ahmad was twenty-two when an appeal he had written was placed in a file in December 1949. But that file is not in the archives of an agency dealing with Palestinian refugees, such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Ahmad’s letter was written from Italy, and sent to the International Refugee Organisation (IRO), which was then responsible for assisting refugees in Europe. It is now held at the Arolsen Archives.
Born in Lifta, Palestine, Ahmad had worked as a clerk in Jerusalem within the office of the waqf. In 1947, he was offered an opportunity to travel to Czechoslovakia as a delegate to a student congress. In possession of a British mandate–issued Palestinian passport, Ahmad went to Prague where he also had a girlfriend. While there, he ran out of money. He decided to stay in Czechoslovakia, taking up work as a coal miner to save money both for the home he shared with his girlfriend and to return to Lifta. But the intense and violent war for Palestine between Arab and Palestinian fighters with Zionist militias prevented his return. His home village was ethnically cleansed between December 1947 and early 1948. Ahmad remained outside of Palestine when the mandate ended and subsequent creation of Israel resulted in the displacement of 750,000 Palestinian Arab refugees. In 1949, he received instructions from the Czechoslovakian authorities expelling him from the country as ‘dangerous to the state’. Ahmad first went to the Israeli Legation in Prague, asking for help to return to his home in Lifta or help to go to Jordan: both requests were denied. The legation refused to grant him the travel documents necessary to enter the state of Israel.
Because Ahmad had not left Palestine as a refugee, he did not qualify for assistance as one after 1948, despite being stranded in Eastern Europe with a passport issued by an authority that no longer existed. Furthermore, Ahmad could not receive any type of assistance from UNRWA after its creation in late 1949 because he did not live in a Palestinian refugee camp. Undeterred, after the Czechoslovakian expulsion order he made a convincing claim to being a refugee displaced from Europe under the IRO mandate: he registered as a refugee in Prague with the IRO office. The office paid for and arranged for his journey to Italy in early 1950, where he was sent to Cinecittà refugee centre in Rome. But immediately after Ahmad’s arrival, IRO officials in Geneva deemed him ineligible for further assistance. Yet, because Ahmad had come to Cinecittà without any money, identity documents, or even a suitcase, and since he no longer held Palestinian citizenship, the camp had little choice but to keep him.
Throughout this time Ahmad had no information as to whether his parents were alive or dead. By 1951 he had received no communication from them through any international body, nor did he know where they might have fled if they had survived the Zionist offensive in Lifta. Ahmad’s grief and desperation at the unknown status of his parents, home, and legal identity were directly related to the refugee-creating events of 1947 through 1948. He was closely connected to the structures of refugeedom. But the unyielding attitudes of the Israeli authorities and international agencies to recognise him as either a European or Palestinian refugee compounded his emotional turmoil.
Like Doris, Ahmad was mobile, but not displaced: his liminal position came entirely because of his ability to leave Palestine in 1947, by choice and with valid documentation. His story, like hers, demonstrates how the treatment of refugee-adjacent persons at the hands of state, settler-colonial, and international administrations placed the in limbo because of their closeness to refugeedom. Ahmad’s arrival at Cinecittà in 1950, destitute and unable to find information on his family, mirrored those arrivals of European displaced persons at the end of the Second World War. His material dispossession, and his loss of a future home either in Palestine or with his Czechoslovakian girlfriend, linked him further to the grief that is often embedded within experiences refugeedom. Ahmad’s letters to the IRO and UN in 1949 and 1950 are erudite and articulate, and use expository language. By 1951, his approach shifted, and he resorted to begging for help. But his desperate appeals came to naught, and his file ends without the IRO or UN taking decisive action to assist Ahmad in finding his parents or leaving Italy.
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The emergence of refugee studies was accompanied by a historiographical focus on how, when, why, and with what consequences persons have been labeled and categorised as ‘refugees’ or ‘displaced’. Refugee history has been party to debates over how to interpret refugee identity and the ways that bureaucratic labels determine treatment of displaced persons at multiple scales; to be sure, the 1951 Refugee Convention remains hegemonic in terms of how contemporary scholars and policy makers theorise about and define refugees in an institutional light. Scholars of refugee history have taken less initiative to map the intersections of refugeedom. Positing refugeedom alternately as a framing device, analytical concept, and set of tangible structures, historians are able to see that refugees and displaced persons are not the only groups who occupy this matrix of networks, sites, subjectivities, materiality, and identifications. Yet, despite the multidisciplinary promise of refugeedom, historians often neglect persons and communities who do not fit under the label of ‘refugee’ or ‘displaced person’. In setting aside these uncategorised persons from scholarship, historians do a disservice, first to the field of refugee history, and second, to potential explorations of non-state or non-institutional narratives that can come from this shift in focus.
The grief of refugees and family members left behind or left somewhere far from their original home often went unrecognised by state or colonial authorities, and by international agencies. Recognising this grief, and its dual relationship with mobility and with the specific emotional neglect of refugee-adjacent persons by bureaucratic structures, offers a step toward better understanding refugeedom and the predicaments of a different type of displacement. It does so by placing refugee-adjacent persons at the centre of historical enquiry.
The header image shows the Cinecittà displaced persons camp in Rome—roofless accommodation units set out on a studio floor, viewed from overhead. Jack Salvatori, Umanità, 1946, sourced from the Primo Levi Center drawing on this academic article.
