Enforced Migration Research Articles

Climate change and health: The case of mapping droughts and migration pattern in Iran (2011-2016).

Migration and mobility of population have been reported as a common reaction to drought. There is historical evidence to suggest the health effects of droughts and human migration linkage in Iran. This study aimed to map the drought and migration patterns in Iran in 2011 and 2016 and explore their possible health impacts. This sequential explanatory mixed-method study was done in two stages of spatial analysis and qualitative study. Data mapping was conducted through the equal interval classification and using drought, migration, and agriculture occupation data based on provincial divisions in Iran in 2011 and 2016. This qualitative study was conducted using the content analysis approach. The in-migration rate was higher in 2011 rather than 2016. Migration to cities was much higher than migration to villages in both years. The frequency of male migrants was higher than females in all provinces in 2011 and 2016. Physical and mental diseases as well as economic, sociocultural, education, and environment effects on health were extracted from the qualitative data. A holistic picture of droughts and migration issues in Iran and their health consequences were achieved by the present research. Further research is needed to explore the determinants of health impacts of climate change in vulnerable groups. Public health problems can be prevented by adaptive and preventive policy-making and planning. This can improve the coping capacity of the population facing droughts and enforced migration.

Gender impact assessment of land acquisition compensation for sustainable environmental management of Wuxikou Hydropower Projects

Reservoir compensation and resettlement are the two important keys for enforced migration for water conservancy projects. For reservoir migrants in China, the most severe loss of inundation is that of land, so land rights are the most critical in land acquisition compensation (LAC). In this study, based on the field survey of Wuxikou reservoir migrants in China, a social relations approach is adopted to analyze the gender gaps in the three dimensions of rules, resources and power in LAC. Besides, the study discusses the causes of gender gaps in LAC of reservoir migrants, both external and internal. External causes include the absence of a gender perspective in land systems design and migration policies, the insufficient implementation of related compensation policies, etc. Similarly, internal causes include a deviation of village rules and customary laws from policies, the patriarchal gender culture of “son preference”, and the marital mobility of virilocal residence. Studies find that gender gaps exist in related local policies and laws, as well as their enforcement. Besides, migrant women lacked participation in rule-making. The distribution of compensation resources was skewed towards men, while migrant women had de facto difficulties in accessing financial compensation, productive lands, and living sites. However, migrant men had more power in the leadership of village affairs, expression in village meetings, and decision-making in family affairs than migrant women. The findings of the study reveal that to bridge the gender gaps of reservoir migrants' rights and socio-economic benefits, governments or development enterprises should reasonably build up an equal gender environment and empower migrant women, which will help to achieve the sustainable development of water projects in China.

Negotiating smuggling: tribes, debt, and the informal economy in Turkish Kurdistan

ABSTRACT This article draws from ethnographic and oral history research to explore the intersection of cigarette smuggling and tribal relationships in Cizre, a Kurdish city located near Turkey's border with Syria and Iraq. Cigarette smuggling serves as a primary source of income for the city’s tribal communities, operating beyond the state's oversight and outside the ‘secure’ networks of the regulated market. This informal economy necessitates active collaboration amongst participants to effectively avoid state surveillance, and establish partnerships and substitute networks for coordinating the transfer of cigarettes, as well as for securing credit – all rooted in their tribal affiliations. I suggest that due to its significant reliance on tribal networks, the cigarette smuggling industry has allowed the Kurdish tribes to preserve their influence within an urban setting, even after their detachment from their pastoral economy and fragmentation as a result of enforced migration. I argue that the prominent role played by tribes in orchestrating the cigarette smuggling economy is indicative of the redistributive function that these institutions have increasingly assumed for their constituents.

The Rabbi Frain’s Be-longings, Spain 1492–93: Things and Theory, History and Fabulation

On the 31st of March 1492, the Catholic monarchs Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Aragon and Castile issued the Edict of Expulsion. The Edict ordered that Spain’s Jews depart from Spanish lands. Before his enforced migration to Portugal, Rabbi Frain of Burgos left a small collection of items with his friend Doña Isabel Osorio. In May 1493 a further royal decree ordered that all Jewish goods which were in the possession of Spanish citizens should be handed over to the Crown in order to fund Christopher Columbus’ second journey to the Americas. Rabbi Frain’s belongings were thus sequestered and sold. This article contemplates the Rabbi Frain’s belongings through a theoretical lens, specifically, the work of Jane Bennett and Graham Harman, asking whether history can be told from the perspective of things and objects. The article ends with fabulation, reimagining the trauma of departure, when the borders between things and humans disappear.

Hospitalidad, identidad y “transtierro” en el exilio español de 1939: El neologismo de José Gaos desde la teoría del trauma

This paper aims at delving further into historical and philosophical assumptions underlying Jose Gaos’s notion of “transtierro”. After going into exile and being settled in México in 1938, the Spanish philosopher coined the term “transtierro” so as to grasp the nature of Spanish diaspora in the new country. By bringing light into the extent to which the Mexican authorities support the arrival and settlement of the refuges after the Spanish Civil War, “transtierro” contributes to reframing the exile as a non-traumatic experience. Moreover, due to the bonds between Spain and Mexico, the experience “transtierro” is shaped by Gaos as the transition between one fatherland to the other. Against the backdrop of such reading, this paper goes further into the flaws and historical bias underlying the concept of “transtierro”. By echoing different readings and through the lens of trauma theory this paper provides both an interpretation and a critique of “transtierro”’s potentiality when it comes to underscore new collective identities in the exile and to overcome the traumatic legacies enforced migration use to bring about.

W(h)ither entrepreneurship? Discipline, legitimacy and super-wicked problems on the road to nowhere

The discourse of the twenty first century is increasingly a discourse of crisis – global warming, climate change, environmental degradation, health pandemics, geopolitical instability, poverty, enforced migration and refugee movements, among others. Increasingly these ‘grand challenges’ pose complex environmental and social problems that present radical uncertainty regarding the consequences of current actions and encourage multiple conflicting evaluations. We argue in this paper that in response to this ‘new world’ of super-wicked problems and hyperobjects, there is a unique opportunity for entrepreneurship to take centre stage, given that the entrepreneurial context itself is extreme in terms of uncertainty, time pressures, cognitive load, emotional reactions, and social interactions. However, there is a danger that this opportunity may be compromised by ongoing debates over the status, coherence, identity and legitimacy of entrepreneurship as a discipline. Accordingly, we argue for more problem-oriented research in entrepreneurship, not as an additional focus of attention but as foundational to the nature of the discipline itself. This argument is based on a broader discussion of the nature of scientific disciplines as the increasingly specialised division of knowledge and challenges the drive to establish entrepreneurship as a theory-led scientific discipline in the traditional mode. Commitment to the social legitimation of disciplinary discourse advocating problem-oriented entrepreneurship avoids the danger that consensus in the discipline is established at the expense of intellectual development, practical relevance and real impact.

Pastoral care in education today: its continuing role in promoting mental health in children and young people

ABSTRACT There are many difficulties facing families in today’s world, including economic pressures, fallout from the pandemic, and enforced migration from war-torn countries. Mental health problems are known to have a disproportionately negative impact on the lives of children and young people and their families who are already vulnerable through such conditions as poverty or being a refugee, that put them at heightened risk of marginalisation and discrimination. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the complexity and scale of the problems. However, in this article, I argue that pastoral care systems in schools continue to play a significant role in alleviating the distress of children and young people, of building on their inner strengths of resilience, hope and creativity, and of connecting to the people, systems and resources around them. This article proposes two key recommendations for pastoral care in education – the need to create systems and interventions that reach out to families in the community and the need to enhance and strengthen peer relationships both within and beyond the school community.

The Inconclusive Repatriation of Afghan Refugees from Pakistan: Prospects and Challenges

Refugees and internally displaced persons are inescapable remnants of wars, political turbulence and natural disasters. Historically, people confronting religious and racial persecutions used to leave for non-violent regions, but presently political subjugation is the major cause of enforced migration. The settlement of around eighty million displaced persons worldover is a paramount global challenge. The refugees, displaced persons and migrants occasionally gain worldwide significant for serving the political interests of various great powers; otherwise, along with their host nations they bear least worth for the world powers. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 out-broke more than four million refugees into Pakistan. The West, especially the United States (US) as part of their anti-Communist Cold War agenda, lavishly assisted the Afghan Mujahidin, as they had launched guerilla warfare against the Soviet troops. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in 1992 initiated a large scale repatriation of Afghan refugees from Pakistan after the Russian withdrawal from Kabul. Another massive repatriation program was also initiated in 2002 after the collapse of the Taliban regime by the US led International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF). However, the terrible economic and security situations in Afghanistan spoiled the fruits of repatriations. On the other hand, Pakistan seeks the repatriation of millions of Afghans from its soil at the earliest, while the UNHCR, the refugees and Afghanistan have been apparently adopting the time-gaining strategy. An in-depth study of this highly complex issue reveals that Islamabad has yet to table a comprehensive repatriation plan, Kabul is incapable and inadvertent to the issue and the global community has least interest in the Afghan refugees. Pakistan and the refugees have been suffering since decade

EXPLORING TRAUMA AND HOPE IN REFUGEES’ POEMS

A situation of enforced migration in which individuals are compelled to migrate against their own causes a sense of displacement (Shamsuddoha et al., 2012). As of 2019, UNHCR has confirmed a population of 79.5 million forcibly displaced refugees, which accounts for nearly one percent of the global population. Displaced refugees is a topic that has gained international focus in numerous disciplines - anthropography, geopolitics, health sciences, to name a few. This paper examines displaced refugees through two recent poems composed in 2018: Greetings to the People of Europe by Alemu Tebeje and When Exile Comes: How the Brain Reacts to Trauma by Eric Ngalle Charles. Both poets have lived as refugees, and they both have experienced displacement and consequently, its hardships. It aims to provide a linguistic lens in analysing displaced refugees’ plights by identifying and foregrounding distinctive linguistic devices in the poems. The in-depth stylistic analysis of the poems unveils that, while trauma is commonly discovered, hope and future viewpoints are equally registered.

(NIE)PAMIĘĆ WIELOKULTUROWOŚCI W LITERATURZE O PRZESIEDLENIACH NA ZIEMIE ZACHODNIE

Artykuł dotyczy polskiej literatury o przesiedleniach na tzw. Ziemie Odzyskane. W wyniku zmiany granic państwowych Polski w 1945 roku doszło do masowych migracji, często o charakterze przymusowym. Migranci mieli stworzyć homogeniczne społeczeństwo, toteż w literaturze dotyczącej osadnictwa raczej unikano negatywnych reprezentacji tygla kulturowego. W artykule zaprezentowano wybrane obszary, które zostały zepchnięte na margines pamięci zbiorowej: kresową odrębność części osadników, konflikty między przesiedleńcami oraz autonomię grup etnicznych.

Assessing the relative contribution of economic, political and environmental factors on past conflict and the displacement of people in East Africa

According to the UN Refugee Agency in 2016 there were over 20 million displaced people in Africa. There is considerable debate whether climate change will exacerbate this situation in the future by increasing conflict and thus displacement of people. To explore this climate-conflict-refugee nexus this study analyses whether climatic changes between 1963 and 2014 impacted the risk of conflict and displacement of people in East Africa. A new composite conflict database recording major episodes of political violence (MEPV) was compared with climatic, economic and political indicators using optimisation regression modelling. This study found that climate variations as recorded by the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and the global temperature record did not significantly impact the level of regional conflict or the number of total displaced people (TDP). The major driving forces on the level of conflict were population growth, economic growth and the relative stability of the political regimes. Numbers of TDP seemed to be linked to population and economic growth. Within TDP, ‘refugees’ were recorded as people that were forced to cross borders between countries. In contrast to TDP and conflict, variations in refugee numbers were found to be significantly related to climatic variations as well as political stability, population and economic growth. This study suggests that climate variations played little or no part in the causation of conflict and displacement of people in East Africa over the last 50 years. Instead, we suggest rapid population growth, low or falling economic growth and political instability during the post-colonial transition were the more important controls. Nonetheless, during this period this study does shows that severe droughts were a contributing driver of refugees crossing international borders. This study demonstrates that within socially and geo-politically fragile systems, climate change may potentially exacerbate the situation particularly with regards to enforced migration.

‘Ici, une immense usine perfectionnée; là, une chambre meublée de faubourg’: Julien Duvivier, mobility and migration

This article focuses on a specific instance of migration and mobility in French film director Julien Duvivier’s career, namely his first brief stint in Hollywood in 1938. He was invited to film The Great Waltz, an expensive costume drama, for MGM, a studio renowned for its lavish attention to mise en scène. Unlike other French directors who had spent, or would subsequently spend, time in America, Duvivier succeeded in inculcating his own particular formal and visual touches into the film, while simultaneously negotiating the tricky terrain of producer interference and suspicion of a foreigner’s working methods. Duvivier’s professional leap from one cinema ecosystem to another paved the way for his enforced migration to Hollywood in 1940, when he escaped from Occupied France to work again in the studio system. For Duvivier, Hollywood did not disable his talent, but rather enabled it, revitalising his praxis and leading him towards increasingly ambitious projects back in France.

International Cooperation and the Logistics Market in Northeast Asia: Problems and Prospects for North Korea

IntroductionIn the past, because of political tensions and environmental reasons, the border region of Russia, China, and North Korea did not receive much attention, especially in terms of economic growth potential, even though specialists had designated the area economic territories in the early 1990s.1 The border however, is now increasingly reattracting attention from Northeast Asia experts because of its potential as a treasure trove of natural resources and a global logistics hub. Although, in the political point of view, conflicts of interests between North Korea/South Korea, China/Russia, Russia/Japan, and Japan/China are still unresolved, regional cooperation for the mutual benefit of all parties-especially in trade, investment, and energy supply-is being increasingly reassessed.In this Russia has planned to diversify its natural resource exports, balance regional development within the country, and expand its regional political influence. China has accelerated its efforts to develop its three northeast provinces (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning), secure its way out to the East Sea (Sea of Japan), and improve accessibility to natural resources, such as oil and gas buried in Russian Siberia.2 North Korea spurs development of its Rason Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in order to overcome prolonged economic difficulties.3 South Korea searches for ways to secure energy resources along with its efforts to develop logistics routes connected throughout the Eurasian continent, which was highlighted in 2013 in the Eurasia Initiative of the Park Geun-hye government.4 Japan places top priority on ensuring resources near the Tumen River estuary as well. The region, frequently called as such by South Koreans since the late 1980s-and which includes the border areas between Russia, China, and North Korea, part of the Russian Far East and Siberia, and part of Northeast China-has reemerged as a crucial juncture because of the mutual interests of all parties interlinked in the economic and the political spheres.5In addition, because of climate change and the progress of global warming, the availability of a potential route to the Arctic Ocean is emerging. Moreover, this situation increases the availability of Russian Far East ports and natural resources development in the northern region. Logistics infrastructures and their operating systems to access the resources therein are still vulnerable. The closed customs system between China and Russia could be a constraining factor for building a seamless cross-border logistics system. The most critical barrier to growth, however, would be the disconnected maritime and/or inland logistics network to North Korea, under the influence of political factors. As a way to solve political tensions with isolated North Korea, economic cooperation in the northern logistics market (including the Korean Peninsula, China, and Russia) presents itself as a necessary task to accomplish. To achieve this goal, an understanding of the current status and implications of the northern logistics market and prospecting in the direction of future changes are necessary.Historical Background of the Northern Economic Bloc6RussiaImperial Russian territorial advancement toward the present Russian Far East began with the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, signed with Qing China to define the respective boundaries mainly along the Amur River.7 Subsequently, Russia advanced to Alaska in 1741.8 During the decline of the Qing in the mid-nineteenth century, Russia conquered Vladivostok in 1859 and established the present borderline of the Russian Far East.9 In 1891, Russia started constructing the Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR), completed in 1903.10 With the demise of Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union established fifteen regions for economic development from 1920 to 1957, setting up nineteen basic economic regions, including Siberia afterward. The rapid growth of this region attempted by the Soviet Union was based on rich physical resource endowment, while scarcity of the labor force was supplemented with enforced migration by the state authorities. …

“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage

Given the high mortality rates aboard slave ships, the Middle Passage was known as a “voyage of death.” Disease and death, sickness and mortality, profoundly characterized the lives of Africans during the Atlantic crossing. This essay examines the subjective experience of dispossession, focusing in particular on a psychosomatic disease that was thought to be endemic to Africans forcibly migrated from home: “fixed melancholy.” Drawing on tracts on nautical medicine, slave ship captains’ journals, and evidence generated by the Parliamentary Committee’s testimonies, I argue that “fixed melancholy” is best understood as a form of nostalgia, an affective attempt at return that is simultaneously a symptom of the emotional distress produced by dislocation and a mechanism for slaves to resist their conditions of servitude. Via a brief reading of the opening chapters of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, I also show how nostalgia—or the memory of place—continued to exert a residual influence on the emancipatory imagination in black diaspora.

English

This paper attempts to study the diasporic dimension of Indian diasporic writer late Aga Shahid Ali who emigrated from Kashmir to America. Aga Shahid Ali narrates the loss of his homeland due to enforced migration and exhibit the original exilic resonance of diasporic experience. In his poetic collection ‘the country without a post office’, the poet articulates diasporic experience of exile, loss, pain and creates possibilities of Kashmiri diaspora in America. Key words: Aga Shahid Ali, the country without a post office, diaspora.

Considering marine transgression as a mechanism for enforced migration and the littoral Gulf ʿUbaid phenomenon

ʿUbaid pottery was famously recorded by H.R. Hall during the excavation of a tell mound at Al ʿUbaid, and for nearly half a century became associated with the origins of urbanisation and developments in social hierarchy in southern Mesopotamia. The discovery in 1968 of ʿUbaid pottery around the western Gulf littoral, some 1000 km to the south of Mesopotamia, raised questions regarding the nature of interaction between these two societies. This paper considers the origins of this interaction and the effects of geomorphology, hydrology and the palaeoenvironment on regional migration. The extent to which topography and marine transgression were a catalyst for migration is also discussed as well as how, or if, such factors influenced post‐transgression settlement dynamics.

Sir Walter Scott's Transatlantic Ecology

How did Sir Waller Scott engage with human migration and the timber trade between Scotland and the British Crown Canadian Colonies in the early 19th century? This question points to interrelations between Scott's writing, the Highland clearances, growth in the transatlantic lumber industry, and the export to Britain of live trees (seeds and saplings) from the Provinces of Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Scott was, and remains, known for his representations of changing Scottish landscapes in the Highlands and Islands, the margins between the Highlands and Lowlands, and the Borders region. In those landscapes, developments in sheep husbandry, commercially motivated forestation of areas classified as or wilderness, and policies of coerced or enforced migration of small farmers and land workers were altering the economic structure and ecology of Scotland. As a Romantic writer, Scott regarded aesthetic experience and sympathy as ways of understanding the altered demographies and biospheres of his home nation. He was equally committed to an empirical, experimental approach to trees on his own Abbotsford estate at Melrose in Roxburgshire. Scott's reputation and the esteem for his expertise in arboriculture led to his being one of four specialists commissioned by the Highland Society in 1823 to report on practices of propagating and transplanting trees at Henry Steuart's Allanton estate in Lanarkshire, north of Glasgow. The report of those four aimed to identify a strategy for the forestation of new areas in Scotland, particularly on what was regarded as marginal land. Scott recalled live years later in his review of Steuart's The Planter's Guide: or, a Practical Essay on the Best Method of Giving Immediate Effect to Wood by the Removal of Large Trees and Underwood for the Quarterly Review March, 1828, that the soil on Steuart's land was moorish, with the no striking features of grandeur of (323). His denial of aesthetic features appears to forestall emotional reaction, directing attention to the matter in hand: that is, to the science of cultivating trees. However, aesthetic experience is only suspended because, in a short time and after careful transplantation, young trees from a sample group add picturesque or sublime qualities such as of form and vigour (324) to Steuart's estate. By implication, nursery growth and transplantation has the potential to transform other areas of Scotland. Ecological factors are crucial agents in the postponement of affect: for the consistency of the soil on the Allanton estate--similar to that of moorland--allows the trees to flourish in harsh conditions. A second sample group of trees included mixed native species and imported Canadian Birdcherry, showing experiments with tree varieties that grew in different soils (324). From the start of his writing career, Scott's representation of relationships between people and trees is informed by Scottish Enlightenment theories about science and human history, and by developments in Germany including Johann Gottfried Herder's Outlives of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1791). Herder argued that human beings exist within a natural system or geographical aerology in which they and other living things in any region respond to the nature of the quality of the land, air, water and other regional factors, all of which contribute to a diverse universe of interrelated environments in which variety is beauty (24, 25,149). the MLA panel where this paper was first delivered and in this issue of TWC, James McKusick identified an early ecosystem approach to natural boundaries in Scott's work on forestry, and specifically in the 1827 essay for the Quarterly Review that carried the running header On waste lands. As McKusick notes, Scott takes a biocentric perspective in his planting essay that responds to an earlier sylvicultural treatise by John Evelyn, and that assents to the interdependence of all living things within a complex, dynamic system. …

Migration in the Swiss Alps and Swiss Jura from the Middle Ages to the mid-20th century: a brief review

This paper aims at retracing the important phases of migrations in the alpine regions and the Jura from the Middle Ages up to the middle of the 20th century. Migration has always functioned as a necessary complement to the resources of the inhabitants of the upland regions and it increases when the economic disparity with the lowlands becomes more marked. A striking characteristic of such migration is the great diversity that can be observed, since not only the destinations of the migrants varied from community to community, but also different forms of mobility coexisted within the same territory. Migration might be seasonal, pluriannual, lifelong or even definitive. It is also notable that the various types of migration can be observed to be part of a plurisecular tradition, apart from some significant exceptions, such as the emigration of the Walser, enforced migrations and the new types of migration as from the second half of the nineteenth century. The mobility of part of the population was also a consequence of modifications deriving from changes in the prevalent type of production (animal husbandry instead of the cultivation of cereals), as well as from demographic factors. In addition to these factors one can observe the role played by political institutions throughout the period under study: seigneurial power in the Middle Ages, the communal and cantonal instances until the second half of the nineteenth century, and afterwards the federal authorities.

Extending the Frontiers of Transatlantic Slavery, Partially

Eltis and Richardson's Extending the Frontiers is the first volume to analyze the latest, monumental, installment of their slave-voyage database. However, despite the volume's laudable synthesis of primary and secondary data about intra-Caribbean enslaved migration, its considerable contribution to scholarship about the operations of slaving ships from specific countries, and its important findings from the raw data concerning the scale and direction of the enforced migration, the volume has one fundamental shortcoming. It fails to engage experts who might have helped to explain significant implications concerning the people who were actually enslaved and the merchants and political authorities in Africa who were involved in enslaving them.

Almost Memories/Almost True Stories

The Organ and the Eggs Memories are neither stories nor true stories but something in between that emerges to become submerged again, its confirmations turning into suspicions. Augustine said that memories are the presence of things past. But if the past could speak directly, it might challenge the truth of memories because that presence would have changed the past to fit contemporary needs. And if you want to search for truth because it must be somewhere, it would be in the changes. Soothing or terrifying, they might be as imaginary as resurrection in the flesh; and as seductively deceptive. There was that small, muddy village in Northern Bavaria where we had inexplicably landed at the end of the War. Over the decades, I have sometimes remembered those years as nothing but hunger, cold, boredom and fear. But it also seemed that in these memories the child preoccupied with finding food and staying clear of the ferocious village geese, dogs, and teenage boys was retreating. I was forgetting what it had felt like to be this child. Had I been able to watch my former self running away in panic from Wotan's wind-borne chase of a thousand geese, wildly gesticulating and infernally screeching, I would have sympathized with that terrible, hilarious panic. But the mesh of memories growing between her and the person I would have become in each subsequent instant of remembering made it easier to smile at that old fear. Later, I might even have been tempted to think that the teasing I still remember as unfair could have been partly deserved. Suspecting my memories, however gently, I would never know who I was then, and where; and what the War had done to us. But, then, what do we mean when we say really or truly. Time changes everything. Appealing to our memories to sort out pasts and presents we act as if we know that. But do we understand that what we witness is the pastness of our fears and desires? More destructive than anything else in Western historical memory, the Second World War inexorably separated the past from the future. It is true, many remote villages like ours seemed barely touched by it. But as if it needed an epilogue to Germany's dead cities and the enforced migrations of many millions of homeless people, the War had deposited into them large numbers of refugee mothers and children. Packed tightly into an open truck, we clutched our small wet bundles, ourselves shaken like rags by the cold wind and the fear of being flung off the truck. It stopped abruptly; our eyes shut against the heavy rain opened; we looked at the village and knew that it would always have been cut off from the rest of the world. All hopes of leaving here would be nothing but a hazy dream; and trying to get back to where we had come from nothing but a black rock of futility. Back there, in the past, I had been taught to ride the tram by myself when I started school. I had loved the safe adventure of riding around our city naming, as my mother had taught me, the famously beautiful old palaces, churches, and bridges so that I would always know where I was. That city would soon be famously bombed out of existence; we would leave our burnt-out house and for many months walk towards the promised land of the American Zone. Here, our mother said, we would all be safe. There were many millions of refugee children uprooted by the War and there would be many more in the wars to come, though that would have seemed unimaginable in 1 945. Many children must have felt hope - and helplessly out of place as I did in those unwelcoming villages with their ancient, alien ways. Mother said this was the first time in many months that we could stay for a little while, and in a house; and that we had to be grateful. We were; grateful and trying hard not to be seen or heard. But there was also the sudden sharp flash of memories of our house before it was bombed, all the things we loved now burnt or shattered. In the refugee camp we had inhabited a small square drawn on the floor, floating in our one-dimensional living space and trying not to trespass into the neighboring square. …