‘On the case’: methodological and ethical challenges of using casefiles as sources for refugee history
Casefiles are a common source for scholars in social history and related fields. They have, for instance, been crucial in the development of micro-historical approaches to the Holocaust. In recent years, they have been taken into consideration to examine humanitarian responses to and experiences of forced displacement. In this post, I would like briefly to discuss some of the potential, limitations, and challenges that this material entails. To do so, I will examine a specific set of sources: the casefiles of a group of more than 1,000 young Holocaust survivors who were resettled to Canada in the aftermath of the Second World War through a project sponsored by the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). These young people were predominantly Eastern European teenage boys who, at the time of application for a visa, lived in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, children’s homes and with foster families across Europe.
Predominantly written in English, the two- to six-page forms have detailed information about each young applicant. Caseworkers from the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) or the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) completed the forms and, in doing so, acted as intermediaries between the young applicants and the Canadian ‘gatekeepers’. Files reveal how caseworkers understood and constructed the young survivors, but there is little information about the caseworkers themselves, the majority being women whose invisibility reflects the widespread gender bias in the production of archives.
Despite this invisibility, the casefiles are insightful on many levels, both as a source and as a subject. They allow historians to retrace trajectories and better understand refugee experiences. Of course, one must keep in mind that these trajectories are narrated and mediated. They are what the young refugees were willing and able to recount and what the caseworkers understood and decided to write down. They also reflect the influence of less visible intermediaries such as the translators or typists whose crucial roles have been examined by Maxime Maréchal, Sara Cosemans, or Rebecca Tipton. But despite their uncertainty, the hundreds of narratives that emerge from the casefiles can teach us many things about how these young refugees navigated the immediate aftermath of the war.
One of the first takeaways is that most trajectories are made of many detours and wanderings – what Paul-André Rosental has called the ‘invisible paths’ of migration, because this messiness often disappears from later narratives that present the journey as a linear process. This contingency and messiness is particularly important to better understand the decision making and motivations behind refugee journeys, especially how individuals navigate their ‘world of possibilities and constraints’ (that is, which options were available to them at different times of their journey).
Casefiles also help us better understand the discourses and practices of the different actors involved in their production. In my case that meant examining how caseworkers, Canadian immigration officers, and medical doctors among other actors all exercised their power. Immigration officers and CJC representatives gatekept the resettlement to Canada by accepting or rejecting applications often on health, age, and family grounds: the project was only opened to ‘healthy’ minors who were ‘full’ orphans. Caseworkers imposed a ‘paper identity’ on the applicant by writing down, for instance, a name or a birthdate in the file that, despite the uncertainty of the times, became the ‘truth’. They also established the applicant’s persecution by documenting their survival trajectory and the death of both parents. And finally, they shaped the applicant’s narrative and personality to create ideal candidates that matched the expectations of Canadian authorities and foster families. The many intermediaries who were involved in migration processes played a crucial role, and could facilitate as well as restrict applicants’ movement and access to resources. State bureaucracies do not present a monolithic face to people on the move.
The mediated nature of the casefiles also raises the challenging question of how, as historians, we should handle the stories that emerge from them. On one hand, these are the words of caseworkers. They reflect their values and priorities, and how they interpreted and sometimes resisted the administrative framework they navigated. But these words are also glimpses of emotions and representations, of how refugees made sense (of course within structural parameters) of their journeys, their experiences of persecution, their grief, but also their visions for their future. The stories in the casefiles originated from an imperative to tell one’s story within a defined space with strict rules. But they also shed light on the trajectories, modes of thinking, and emotions of these young people.
Significantly, a close reading of the casefiles highlights potential strategies that young refugees could develop during their interactions with caseworkers. In these files, young refugees misrepresented their age, nationality, or the situation of their parents in order to facilitate their resettlement. They took advantage of being in the grey zone of adolescence, navigating between the legal categories of childhood and adulthood and between the control and protection of power structures.
Highlighting such strategies is absolutely crucial if we are to consider young refugees as actors of their own lives who adapted to their environment, often through the ‘subversion of unfair power structures’. But such efforts also come with a set of challenging methodological and ethical questions.
One recurring question is about ‘agency’. My research lies at the intersection of fields whose main aim in recent years has been to locate the voices of those at the centre of the research and ‘take seriously’ the agency of displaced persons and child Holocaust survivors. (The work of Ruth Balint and Rebecca Clifford is exemplary here.) This emphasis has served as a more than necessary corrective to earlier paradigms that understood these populations as passive. However, the notion of agency itself has been surprisingly undertheorized, and only recently questioned because of its excessive focus on the rational individual and on simplified binary relationships between children and adults.
These warnings are valuable when one is working with casefiles. First, because casefiles can reinforce the tendency to focus on individuals and overshadow the collective nature of experiences of persecution and forced displacement. This is true for adult refugees, but even more important for young people who have siblings, relatives, and friends who are crucial in shaping their journey. Second, because ‘agency’ in the casefiles is only visible when the young people disrupt, defy, or rebel against power structures; in other words, when they act like adults. Those who stay silent or conform are ignored. In my own research I have acknowledged the ‘agency’ of the young survivors who misrepresented their identities, ignored the guidance of the adults they interacted with, and generally moved away from expectations of ‘passivity’ and ‘innocence’ that are attached to Western understandings of childhood. But the many others who did not disrupt such expectations were still making sense of and responding to their displacement in various ways.
Voice and agency should not be confused. However, one can argue that the limitations of ‘agency rescue’ are also entangled with a broader ethical issue around the ambition of giving voice to refugees and other allegedly ‘voiceless’ populations. Is such an ambition inherently paternalistic and incomplete? Some scholars and activists in other disciplines are moving away from traditional ethnographic methods to embrace, with more or less success, co-production of knowledge. Projects such as Refugee Hosts insist on the fact that knowledge belongs to those ‘affected by and… responding to displacement’. But when coproduction or even oral history are not available, historians have to at least acknowledge that they are speaking for and not speaking with refugees, constantly questioning the silences of their sources and whose narratives are excluded from the archives.
The header image shows the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee case file, accompanied by a photo, of a teenager named David (1947). Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives.
Antoine Burgard is grateful to Stephanie Rinaldi, Janice Rosen, and Benjamin Thomas White for their help with this piece.
