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.
