All in Then & Now

A peculiar nostalgia? Oral histories of childhoods in a postwar Polish Resettlement Camp in the UK

A peculiar nostalgia? Oral histories of childhoods in a postwar Polish Resettlement Camp in the UK

Crecy Boone
Then & Now

After the second world war, a Polish Resettlement Corps was raised as part of the British Army to allow Polish servicemen wishing to remain in the West to be demobilized and resettled to Britain. Some 125,000 chose to do this, the number growing to 200,000 when soldiers were joined by families who had spent the war in refugee camps in British colonies. The only way such a vast number of people could be accommodated in post-war Britain was by placing them in ex-army camps. Dozens across the country were turned into Polish resettlement camps, having been built in rural areas in the early 1940s for the American and Canadian troops. Blackshaw Moor in Staffordshire became one of them. This post discusses the memories of people who grew up there.

The possibilities in transit: Helmut Newton’s experiences on a Shanghai-bound ship

The possibilities in transit: Helmut Newton’s experiences on a Shanghai-bound ship

Cheuk Him Ryan Sun
Then & Now

This post uses Helmut Newton’s provocative memoir, Autobiography, to explore how the ocean-going liner, as a mode of transportation, informed Jewish refugees’ experiences between 1938 and 1940. What did they do during their journey onboard Shanghai-bound ships? By joining Newton on the ship, this post draws connections between Holocaust Studies and Refugee Studies to reveal the significance of these vessels as a ‘space of possibilities’ for Jewish refugee passengers.

Which refugees are welcome? How ‘hard’ legal status and ‘soft’ notions of belonging shape the reception of displaced populations

Which refugees are welcome? How ‘hard’ legal status and ‘soft’ notions of belonging shape the reception of displaced populations

Claire Eldridge, Christoph Kalter, and Becky Taylor
Then & Now

The act of deciding who deserves welcome in a country is determined not only by ‘hard’ legal facts such as visa or passport status but also by ‘soft’ factors coalescing around nebulous ideas of ‘belonging’. This post explores the experiences of Anglo-Egyptians in Britain, harkis in France, and retornados in Portugal to show just how complicated the politics of welcome and belonging could be, and highlights the role of ‘soft’ citizenship in the process.

Holocaust refugees in a global context

Holocaust refugees in a global context

Niamh Hanrahan
Then & Now

There has been a recent global turn within Holocaust Studies: a growing body of scholarship focuses on Jewish refugees and the Holocaust in contexts that had been previously ignored, and highlights how those experiencing the war in Europe did so in different ways to those living through the conflict in other parts of the world. This post focuses on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.

Refugees and neutral territories: Hong Kong and Macau during World War II

Refugees and neutral territories: Hong Kong and Macau during World War II

Helena F.S. Lopes
Then & Now

Studies of neutrality tend to focus on legal and diplomatic aspects, but there is also an important social dimension: neutral territories are often destinations or stopovers for refugees, especially when these territories are adjacent to conflict zones. What does neutrality mean in practice when we put refugees at the centre of analysis? British-ruled Hong Kong and Portuguese-ruled Macau in the 1930s and 1940s offer connected case studies of displaced persons during the Second World War in East Asia.

The unwilling nomads of twentieth-century Europe

The unwilling nomads of twentieth-century Europe

Bastiaan Willems and Michał Adam Palacz
Then & Now

In the first half of the twentieth century millions of Europeans were displaced by war, genocide, the redrawing of international borders, and mass flight from countries ruled by autocratic regimes. In order to address the need for a more integrated analysis of their experiences, our edited volume A Transnational History of Forced Migrants in Europe. Unwilling Nomads in the Age of the Two World Wars looks at the collective experience of different refugee groups through the lens of a four-dimensional model of ‘host society’, ‘homeland’, ‘diaspora’ and ‘other diasporas’.

‘On the case’: methodological and ethical challenges of using casefiles as sources for refugee history

‘On the case’: methodological and ethical challenges of using casefiles as sources for refugee history

Antoine Burgard
Then & Now

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.

Time for a convention on internal displacement? The history of the internal displacement protection regime

Time for a convention on internal displacement? The history of the internal displacement protection regime

Bríd Ní Ghráinne
Then & Now

Relative to other forced migrants, refugees are in a privileged position in international law: they have legal status, rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention, and a specific organisation dedicated to their protection (UN High Commissioner for Refugees). Internally Displaced Persons, or IDPs, have a much less developed protection framework, even though the global population of IDPs is 59.1 million. So what explains this difference of treatment between these two categories of forced migrants?

Waves of migration: a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in numerical modelling and oral history

Waves of migration: a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in numerical modelling and oral history

Joy Damousi, Filippo Nelli, Anh Nguyen Austen, Alessandro Toffoli & Mary Tomsic
Then & Now

The journeys of people who have been forced to leave their homes have, over centuries, included travel across water, including rivers, oceans, and seas. This post presents a new approach to researching refugee boat journeys by sea, based on a collaboration between historians and ocean engineers. We have used oral history research with survivors of a particular boat, rescued off Vietnam in June 1982, alongside numerical modelling so that the sea state the boat travelled through and the specific movement of the boat in those conditions could be determined. The scientific analysis explains how the ocean and weather, paradoxically, both created the conditions that were dangerous for this vessel, but also placed it in a position where it was rescued.

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

UNHCR’s first urban refugee policy, 25 years on

Neil J.W. Crawford
Then & Now

On 25 March 1997, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) released its first global policy relating to urban refugees. Though UNHCR had always worked in towns and cities since its establishment in 1950, the agency itself viewed this work as peripheral to its main mission. By the 1980s and 90s the organisation had become firmly associated with large rural camps on the borders of states. A landmark piece of global refugee policy, the UNHCR Comprehensive Policy on Urban Refugees put down on paper for the first time a single, though contextual, approach to working in urban areas. But the March 1997 policy came under immediate criticism, and lasted less than nine months.

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