Experiences Of Deportation Research Articles

Trauma and the Museum Exhibition: How to Create an Exhibition on Traumatic Experiences?

In the article, the author presents the solutions used during the arrangement of the first temporary exhibition of the Sybir Memorial Museum [Memorial Museum Siberia], entitled ‘Only Pain is Mine’, which presents various aspects of the reality of women and girls - their tragic experiences of deportation, exile, imprisonment in the Soviet Union or during the Soviet occupation, mainly in the context of broadly understood femininity, women's bodies and their roles. The article discusses the issue of working with the themes of trauma, traumatization and violence against women addressed in activities carried out during exhibition and education projects.

Things That Could Have Helped Me Cope: Adults Reflect on What They Needed as Children After the Deportation of a Parent

Experiencing parental deportation during childhood is associated with higher rates of mental health and behavioral health challenges. This adversity may be exacerbated by the uncertainty of what is happening to their deported parent and to their family system following a deportation experience. Effective clinical intervention can reduce the likelihood and/or severity of physical health, mental health and behavioral health difficulty caused by the trauma of parental deportation; however, clinicians have insufficient resources and guidance on effectively engaging with children and their families following parental deportation. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with English-speaking Latino individuals from the United States who experienced parental deportation between the ages of 6 and 17 ( n = 10). Using interpretive phenomenology analytic procedures, three major themes emerged related to participants’ experiences of their family after their parent’s deportation: (a) I wish I knew what was happening, (b) I wish people had checked in on my emotions, and (c) I wish people had been supportive and included us in the conversation. These findings are examined from an ambiguous loss framework to provide clinical implications of children’s needs after parental deportation. Suggestions are offered from the adults who lost their parent to deportation as a child about what they needed following their loss. By understanding what children need in these moments of crisis, practitioners, providers, and others are better prepared to address this form of complex childhood adversity.

Crecer en el lager: los testimonios literarios de la infancia y la adolescencia en el campo de concentración

Narrating the experience of deportation in nazi concentration camps is a highly complex task that grapples with issues related to the difficulty of transmission and Trauma Studies. Over the past two decades, there has been an increase in publications of testimonies from children of the Shoah, who have begun to narrate their memories motivated by the need to transmit their legacy to new generations and due to the natural disappearance of witnesses. This study aims to address the main characteristics of this new literary corpus to establish its bases and obtain a clear picture of the childhood experience in the camps.

The discipline of hope: abolishing the prison of immobility in post-Deportation narratives

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of hope in the stories of people with experiences of deportation collected during a photojournalistic research project following deportees from Europe. Drawing on the political philosophy of hope, specifically Ernst Bloch, this article explores the complex and ambiguous presence of hope and despair in the stories of deportees. Hope could present itself as denial, naïve optimism that everything will be fine, or as despair, a loss of hope. However, it also demonstrates itself in the persistence of not giving up hope for different futures. Building on Mariame Kaba’s abolitionist thinking, the article illustrates how this ‘discipline of hope’ emerges as a survival strategy that has prefigurative socio-political dimensions. In the stories of deportees, this ‘discipline of hope’ was evidenced at the level of both imagination and practice; as a way to escape the post-deportation ‘prison of one’s home’ or other unfavourable conditions people found themselves in. The interviewees’ persistence in moving despite the border regime’s violence reveals the system’s ultimate failure to work against humans’ aspiration to strive for better lives through mobility and points to the transformative nature of hope.

"It felt like hitting rock bottom": A qualitative exploration of the mental health impacts of immigration enforcement and discrimination on US-citizen, Mexican children.

Latino immigrant families in the United States were disproportionately affected by intensified interior immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. US-citizen children are victimized by policies targeting their immigrant parents; research is sparse regarding how these polices affect children who experience parental deportation and children who are at risk for parental deportation. Additionally, anti-immigrant rhetoric can result in increased discrimination that also threatens children's psychological health. This qualitative study (N = 22) explores children's lived experiences of discrimination, parental deportation or threat of parental deportation, and perceived impacts on mental health. Interviews conducted from 2019 to 2020 revealed that children who are directly affected by or at risk for parental deportation experience detrimental impacts to their psychological well-being. Children experience discrimination as Latinos and children of immigrants, which is also detrimental to their mental/emotional health. Incorporating children's perspectives is critical to informing public health interventions. Findings demonstrate the need for family-friendly immigration reform.

Changing Borders and Women as the Narrator: The Case of Syrian Circassians

Since 2011, with the Syrian conflict, a sizeable portion of the Syrian Circassian diaspora have fled to Turkey. The experience of deportation due to the Syrian civil war exposed the community to the same trauma for the third time. However, as the refugees were forced to leave their country, they experienced different conditions than their Arab and Kurdish counterparts. Utilizing solidarity networks through their kinship relations, the Circassian diaspora appears to have avoided the hardships encountered by other refugee groups at least to some an extent. In the meantime, the diaspora developed new survival strategies in the face of general negative attitudes towards refugees and Syrians. The recent diasporic experience has been generally discussed with regards to issues of social class, ethnic affiliation, and distinction. Yet, the gendered dimension of the recent forced migration has been underestimated or neglected. This study aims to understand whether the women within the Circassian community who migrated from Syria to Turkey generated new forms of roles to meet the social demands of the new diasporic experience. The evidence discussed here is based on fieldwork that was conducted in 2019. One of the significant findings to be assessed in this study is the reinforcement of the patriarchy within the diaspora and the factors that facilitated this process.

Ezekiel and the Construction of Cultural Trauma

AbstractThe book of Ezekiel may be effectively understood in terms of Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, in which catastrophic events take on a wider cultural significance because they are perceived as having consequences for group identity. The book of Ezekiel develops a new master narrative of Israelite history and identity, in which the catastrophes of 597 and 586 BCE are the culmination of generations of moral and religious offences against Yhwh, the God of Israel. Ezekiel’s narrative constructs these events as having profound consequences for Israel’s identity. Those taken to Babylonia are identified as victims of divine violence; as victims, they are the ones whom Yhwh has chosen as true Israelites. The book distinguishes this new Israel from the remnants of the old one still in Jerusalem, rejecting the claim that the latter are still members of the house of Israel. According to Ezekiel, to be an Israelite means to be a deportee. Although few texts outside Ezekiel are quite so overtly negative regarding Israel’s history, its reckoning of the significance of Jerusalem’s fall for Israelite identity resonates throughout the canon. With rare exceptions, the experience of deportation and life in Babylonia became thesine qua nonof Israelite identity: only those who had it could count themselves true members of post-597 Israel. As a construction of the cultural significance of trauma, therefore, Ezekiel was remarkably successful. Thereafter, the events of 597 were construed not simply as practically and politically catastrophic, but astraumatic: the new master narrative placed them front and centre, with indelible and profound consequences for Israel’s self-understanding.

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Wang Anshi and Song Poetic Culture

Not just statistics: Exploring the experiences of Mexican deportees

AbstractCentering the narratives of seven Mexican deportees, this study explored the consequences of deportation on participants’ mental health. Participants’ accounts of the deportation experience highlighted the frustration, fear, and disappointment individuals often felt after being forced to abandon established lives in the United States. Their narratives captured the challenges involved in migration and deportation. This study highlights the need for mental health counselors to become more knowledgeable of the issues that affect the lives of deportees.

After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France by Philip Nord

The historical literature about the memory of the Occupation in France is immense. Since Rousso’s pioneering study, the accepted narrative was that for twenty-five years after 1945, the French lived a consoling Gaullist myth that France had been a nation of resisters.1 This myth not only underplayed the role of collaboration, but its focus on the heroes of the resistance marginalized the experiences of the Holocaust victims: Jews who tried to tell their story were ignored. This heroic narrative, so the argument goes, shattered at the end of the 1960s in the wake of the upheavals of May 1968 and the Six Day War. Increasingly the Holocaust, and Vichy’s role in it, has come to dominate French collective memory.This interpretation has been much contested in recent years, especially, as Azouvi has dubbed it, the “myth of silence” regarding the Holocaust.2 Nord’s new book is a distinguished contribution to this revisionist literature. As he says at the outset, “This will not be a history of the silence-to-voice narrative” (7). He shows that the shadow of deportation, and of the concentration camps, was pervasive in France after 1945. But he distinguishes that deportation memory from the memory of the Holocaust; it focused primarily on resistance deportees who “emblematized the wartime tribulation of the nation as a whole” (230). This does not mean that no Jewish voices were heard: “There was a distinctive Jewish voice in the post-war remembrance of the Deportation” (162). This voice, however, had to find its place in the wider deportation narrative. To the extent that there was ever a “Gaullist myth,” Nord sees it as most prevalent not immediately after the war but in the 1960s during Charles de Gaulle’s presidency. The result was that the post-1968 generation believed that it was discovering for the first time a story that had already been told in different ways during the two decades after the Liberation.The importance of Nord’s subtle book is less his re-writing of a narrative that has already been challenged than his careful attention to the complexity of the debates around the memory of deportation. Three themes stand out. First, he shows that the memory of deportation was never homogeneous. He carefully distinguishes between, for example, the Communist reading of deportation from that of the camp survivor David Rousset, who invented the term “concentrationary universe” in his L’Univers concentrationnaire (Paris, 1946). Nord’s second originality is to pay careful attention to the dialogues between Catholic and Jewish intellectuals in the decades after the war. His analysis of the anguished debates between Catholics like Jacques Maritain, François Mauriac, and Michel Riquet and Jewish writers like Elie Wiesel and Jules Isaac is one of the most illuminating features of this book. Although Maritain’s attempt to incorporate the Holocaust into a Christian salvific framework—a sacrifice that was also part of humanity’s struggle to redemption—was unacceptable to Jewish spokesmen, it did at least help to open a debate about the meaning of the Holocaust.Thirdly, Nord examines the debates about how to represent the deportation experience in literature, film, and painting, and how to memorialize it in monuments. Nord offers subtle analyses of the gestation, conception, and symbolic meanings of several key monuments, such as the Struthof Monument in Alsace and the Deportation Memorial on the Ile de la Cité in Paris. In regard to the Mémorial du Marty Juif inconnu (now the Mémorial de la Shoah), he shows that even though the monument had universalizing aspirations—part of French Jews’ desire to show that they belonged to the national community—this perspective must not blind us to the “affirmative Jewishness of the tomb” (185).This rich, nuanced, and often moving book uses a wide range of sources and methods—literary criticism, art history, and an analysis of philosophical debates—to make a major contribution to our understanding of how the French have remembered one of the most painful periods in their history.

Adult Beliefs About the Migration Motives of Unaccompanied Honduran Youth

A number of researchers have examined undocumented migration from Central America. This literature lacks information about adult beliefs regarding the motivations of minors who journey from Central America unaccompanied and undocumented. Using data from a recent survey conducted in Honduras, we examine adult Hondurans’ beliefs about why unaccompanied minors leave the country unaccompanied. The dependent variable is a dummy variable that measures “why children leave the country.” Predictor variables are attitudes toward smuggling, willingness to leave without documentation, deportation experience, age, income, and residence in the northern part of Honduras. Using multinomial logistic regression, we find support for four of the eight hypotheses. Findings indicate that adults from the northern region are most likely to believe minors would leave for reasons associated with undocumented immigration. Those who are younger, with lower incomes, and with less access to sanitation are more likely to believe minors would leave without documentation.

Kilka słów na marginesie Dziennika z getta Miriam Korber-Bercovici

A Few Words on the Margin of the Diary Written in the Djurin Ghetto by Miriam Korber-Bercovici The purpose of the article is to present fragments of the diary of Miriam Korber-Bercovici, a young Jewish woman deported with her whole family from Southern Bukovina to the Transnistria Governorate under the Antonescu regime. The excerpts translated from the original Romanian into Polish mainly concern the author’s experiences of deportation and everyday life in the Djurin ghetto. They were selected in order to acquaint Polish readers with the situation of the Jews of Bukovina and Bessarabia displaced to the Transnistria Governorate during World War II. The diary was first published in Romania in 1995 as Jurnal de ghetou. The presented translation is based on the second edition of the diary published in 2017 by Curtea Veche Publishing House and Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania.

The art of coming home. Experiencias de reinserción laboral de migrantes deportados de Estados Unidos

El objetivo del artículo es analizar la experiencia de la deportación y reinserción laboral de una mujer migrante que se ha establecido en el municipio de Nezahualcóyotl, Estado de México desde 2016. A partir de una metodología cualitativa y un enfoque biográfico recuperamos la voz de nuestra informante y su subjetividad sobre la experiencia vivida en Estados Unidos, así como de las acciones emprendidas para autoemplearse en un contexto urbano. Los hallazgos advierten que entre la población migrante deportada es necesario cambiar la mirada del norte al sur para una reinserción laboral exitosa, aunque ello no necesariamente signifique que pueden despojarse del que consideran su hogar en ese país. Asimismo, se destaca el papel de la persona migrante como agente y de los capitales humano, social y político como recursos para la implementación de iniciativas que promueven la reinserción laboral individual y colectiva de los migrantes deportados.

‘In Russia We are Muslims, In Turkey We are Gyavurs’: Fluid Identities of the Armenian-Speaking Muslim Hemshils

The study examines the process of re/formation of social, ethnic, and religious identities in the Caucasian Black Sea frontier. It resulted in empirical validation of constructivist paradigm. The author tries to elucidate the creative process of ethnic identity formation, which is, according to the presented empirical data, directly linked to socio-economic surrounding of the group. Admittedly, the Hemshils serve as a vivid example of fluidity and flexibility of social identity. The study tries to show how Hemshils’ ethnicity has been shaped by their historical destinies and how they represent it in their everyday life. Living in the borderlands, subsequent bitter experience of deportation, legal disabilities and social deprivation in the receiving societies have predetermined unstable and situational quality of Hemshils’ ethnic identity. The last few decades have been crucial for survival of Hemshils’ communities. New social conditions set the stage for the re-articulation of their ethnic self-identification. Actually, each member of the group may virtually choose between the habitual Turkish option, ‘domestic’ Hemshil or ‘lost’ one, as they have suddenly realized, and some of them regained their Christian-Armenian identity. The versatile dramatic experience tends to foster fluid type of identities redefining and reiterating them repetitively. The aim of the research is the ethnographic description of the discoursive contexts of those unstable changes. The research addresses social scientists and students as well as anybody who cares of how social identity is molded.

HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATIONS IN PAINTING BY FELIX NUSSBAUM

The article is devoted to the analysis of Holocaust representations in Felix Nussbaum’s paintings according to historical-philosophical, visual-anthropological, semiotic analysis. Topic of the article is justified by insufficient study of Holocaust images in painting, including the way of representation the memory of the Jewish genocide in painting, experience of deportation to death camps, Holocaust traumas. The relevance of the article is due to insufficient study of the work of the German artist of Jewish origin Felix Nussbaum, who was a victim of Holocaust. Nussbaum as an artist represents an artistic movement «New Objectivity» which was focused on reflecting real essence of things; the artist was also influenced by modernist movements as well as the anti-Nazi one. Nussbaum is a victim of Holocaust who was forced to flee from Germany with his family, constantly go into hiding, and in the end he perished in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Significant period of Nussbaum’s legacy is dedicated to the reflection of horrors in the camp Saint-Cyprien (an internment camp), where he was sent. The author considers the concepts of cultural memory in foreign historiography, concepts of the existentialism philosophy, through the prism of which he analyzes the practices of Jewish genocide (Jewish isolation, destiny of refugees, etc.) and what images panting used for its representation. The article investigates, how events of Holocaust affected the formation of artist`s subjectivity, his artistic manner, symbols and artistic means which he uses in his works. In the perspective of visual-anthropological analysis author highlights problematic topics and typology of images, which were reflected in the paintings of Felix Nussbaum, namely: traumatic experience of emigration for survival, experience of deportation and life in the camp, feelings of fear and approaching of death, family theme and personal experiences of the Holocaust. The author highlights autobiographical, historical-philosophical, artistic aspects of Felix Nussbaum`s paintings. The article considers what artistic means Nussbaum used to oppose the policy of Jewish genocide through painting. Based on Felix Nussbaum’s work, the author analyses how the artist depicts «traumatic places» (based on Aleida Assmann), and how he expresses his traumatic experience in artistic images.

Re-experiencing trajectories of posttraumatic stress disorder among older adults exposed to an exile

One of the main symptoms in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is re-experiencing the trauma (APA, American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5 Task Force, 2013), and studies have mentioned the effects of re-experiencing symptoms immediately after traumatic instances. Also, adverse psychological reactions of a traumatic event that occurred many years ago have not been extensively examined in the literature. In this respect, whether the content or frame of reexperiencing trauma symptom groups have differed from others during long years is questioned. The aim of this study is to determine the nature of the re-experiencing symptoms among individuals experienced by a shaky traumatic event many years ago. The interviews were conducted with 61 Ahıska Turkish older adults, who had the experience of deportation and forced migration. The participants’ feelings, thoughts and experiences related to those events were recorded by a video. A total of 2204 re-experiencing memos were recorded by qualitative analysis of video recordings in MAXQDA12 (VERBI, 2015). Principal codes of these memos were re-experiencing events directly by self or witnessing others pain, showing physical reactions (heath breathing, sweating) when reexperiencing, shaking emotionally, reporting flashbacks, recollections of nightmares, and having intrusive memories often. Findings demonstrated that re-experiencing the trauma even long-time after the event are not different from other immediate reactions. Re-experiencing symptoms are discussed in the frame of PTSD theories with clinical implications for deported and forced-migrated individuals. Results reveal that deportation/forced migration experiences during childhood and adolescence have life-long trajectories among older adults.

‘The fiery circle of temptation: opt, opt’: why a minority of Italian Military Internees chose to cooperate with the Nazi-Fascists

Between 8 September 1943 and the end of the war, Italian Military Internees were confronted daily with a stark choice between continued resistance and opting to assist the Reich by fighting or working. Extraordinarily, over 600,000 said no, and endured internment or forced labour until they were liberated or died. Paradoxically, the minority who made the more predictable choice of opting to cooperate, the so-called optanti, constituted an anomaly. This article examines their motivation by giving an overview of the political background, the experience of deportation, the Lager environment and the phases and methods of propaganda. Primary sources indicate that hunger was a common denominator in their decision, but that the weight of other factors, which varied with individuals, broadly speaking fell into three categories: bleak honesty, specious cynicism and maverick idealism. These categories are illustrated by four case studies: the mass adhesion at Biala Podlaska and the individuals Pietro Faraci, Tranquillo Frigeni and Remo Faustini.

Exploring the Experiences of Deportation and Reintegration of Aging Deported Men in Trinidad and Tobago.

Older deported men in Trinidad and Tobago face unique challenges in reintegrating into life after deportation. This qualitative study examined the intersection of aging and deportation to identify factors that affect the reintegration experiences of aging deported men. Qualitative interviews were conducted with 16 deported men over the age of 50 and were analyzed using the constant comparison method. Findings show that reintegration was influenced by complex intrapersonal, subsistence, and social challenges. The findings in this study point to the need to expand social support networks available to aging deported men and provide greater opportunities for them to meet their economic and subsistence needs, and the need to strengthen strategies to reduce the stigma and discrimination associated with aging deported populations.

Changes in the Dimensions of Life of Filipino Deportees from Malaysia


 
 
 This research examined the life experiences of Filipinos deported from Malaysia. Anchored on the symbolic interaction theory, the study sought to investigate how the interpretation of these experiences defined and shaped their personhood. It documented the life experiences of Filipino deportees before and after deportation from Malaysia to determine the consequences of such forcible repatriation on their health, socio-economic, cultural and psychosocial dimensions of life. The study looked into coping strategies with life changes focusing on deportation as a main turning point and identified this event’s differential treatment considering the variables of age and sex group. The research utilized a exploratory design and presented extensive case studies of 24 Filipino deportees, eight of which are included in this paper synthesized from in-depth interviews of deportees and key informants. Other technique used were non-participant observation and data gathering from records of government offices assisting the repatriates including the Department of Social Welfare and Development Region 9 and the Zamboanga City Philippines Social Welfare and Development Office. The study showed varying consequences of deportation with respect to the deportees’ health, socio-economic, cultural, and psychosocial condition. While all the respondents admitted having been adversely affected by their deportation there is evidence of remarkable resiliency and optimism as gleaned from their narrations. Deportees have varied interpretations of deportation in their lives. For some respondents, the experience meant re-connection and re-union with the family in the place of origin. For others, the experience meant free travel to their homeland. A number of respondents reported deportation was an opportunity to be free from detention, an experience which they described as "hell". Most of the deportees were stigmatized with the new identity, that of a Halau. Deportation was a shameful event to the family and friends but it has to be accepted because it happened and they made it happened. The respondents interpreted experience as evidence they were “meant to be at the lower rung of the ladder of life due to many reasons. Many reported the deportation experience meant they lost loved ones and felt diminished in individual worth and dignity. The recommendations that the study can make have been elucidated in the findings of the study which can be realize through policy formulation, advocacy, education/information, social networking and social services.
 
 

Materiality of the State of Exception

Materiality of the State of Exception