All tagged Grief

Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 2

Refugee-adjacency and the unrecognised grief of those left behind, part 2

Lauren Banko
Then & Now

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.

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

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

Lauren Banko
Then & Now

Historians have often explored what it means to be a refugee. But what happens to refugee history when we consider how and with what consequences people do not become labeled as refugees? This two-part blog post tells the story of two individuals who might have been refugees, but didn’t: 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. They are ‘refugee-adjacent’ individuals: people whose families became refugees or forcibly displaced persons, but who themselves did not. A refugee-adjacent individual has not been labelled as a refugee or displaced person. But they are deeply affected by what Peter Gatrell has termed refugeedom.