Tag Archives: displaced persons

Refugees: Deja Vu

Francine Klagsbrun’s book, Lioness; Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel, suggests an eerie similarity with current refugee crises. Today, the millions of people forced from their homes by war and famine mirror those of Golda Meir’s lifetime.

Before World II, as the Nazis began rounding up their Jewish populations, too few nations were willing to take in Jewish escapees from Nazism.

Today, many balk at accepting refugees from the horrors of wars in the Middle East. Some Americans resent, not only Middle Easterners, but refugees from their own hemisphere.

After World War II, refugees flooded Europe, becoming the DP’s, the displaced persons, a haunting reminder of today’s displaced men, women, and children.

Many Jewish survivors, their homelands ripped apart by the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, moved to the Middle East and became part of the modern state of Israel.

A mass exodus is never orderly or pretty or completely containable. Understandably, existing cultures do not appreciate strange ideas and customs knocking at their gates in large numbers.

Arab culture in Palestine changed beyond recognition. Today, in some African nations, war and famine (the two often go together) have sent desperate people to overwhelm the local populations of small towns.

No one solution is going to solve migration problems. A manageable number of newcomers can contribute to the revitalization of an older nation. New, energized citizens provide energy and entrepreneurs for the society, benefitting it at least as much as the refugees are helped.

However, great numbers, as in Middle Eastern nations like Lebanon and Jordan and in several African countries like Chad and Uganda, have swamped the local populations.

We have not, so far, supported peacemaking as we have supported war. That choice is tragic. Peacemaking aims to keep populations safely in their own countries. If we do not channel more effort and resources into this ancient art, we will be overwhelmed by unstoppable calamities.

Refugee Story from the Mother of A Friend

I’m reading the story of a refugee, the mother of a friend of mine. The mother was a child during World War II. Her family was fairly well off on their Latvian farm in the Baltic region of Europe before the war. Then they fled, as armies churned toward them.

She was wounded from nearby fighting. They fled further with millions of other civilians. Some estimate the number of displaced persons during the war as high as sixty million.

Finally the war ended, but they could not return to Latvia, now under Russian control. Europe was devastated from the war. They were placed in a “displaced persons” camp with thousands of others from different countries. They remained in the camp about four years.

Eventually, the family emigrated to the United States. She became a nurse, and her family entered the American mainstream.

Now we are again facing the greatest civilian displacement since that other war. They come from the fighting in Syria, Iraq, Lybia, Afghanistan and some sub Saharan countries. Economic refugees join the surge, making it more difficult to identify true refugees.

Families grab what they can carry and flee to any country that promises safety. They pay life savings to human smugglers, who, once paid, don’t care whether they reach safety or not. Thousands die en route.

Perhaps we can learn lessons from that other time. Obviously, the chaos that ensues when thousands of people surge into small countries calls for a more orderly process. The fact that the European Union, or the rest of the world, was not prepared for this exodus is water under the bridge. Better to work on the immediate situation.

Perhaps displaced person camps can be set up, especially for families. They could be cared for in a more humane setting while proper vetting of the applicants is carried out. We would expect all democratic nations, including the United States, to take in refugees, as the U.S. did following World II.