Be the Refuge

If your life was in the hands of a stranger on the other side of the planet, what might you say to them? Would you tell them about your family and friends? Your hobbies? Dreams? Would you try to do anything you could to make them see that your life is valuable, to sway them to help you?

This is the reality that has always faced refugees. By definition, a refugee is a person who seeks refuge, is running from a situation that is impossible to live through. They place themselves into the hands of those living in safety, hoping that it could not be worse than what they have escaped and praying that it was worth leaving everything behind. An impossible situation faced by millions of displaced persons this very moment.

It is sitting in my literal life’s dream of living in France that I find myself on the doorstep of the European Refugee Crisis. The conflict in Syria took an issue which the European Union was willfully ignoring and turned it into the basis of every political argument, inspiring intense discord both between and within European states. I am most familiar with the French perspective as I am living here, but within every country in Europe this has been a topic hotly debated since mid-2015. I am not going to spend too long explaining the Refugee Crisis because a) I am totally unqualified and b) people who are qualified have tons of resources available online. I will eventually attach a list of videos and articles I recommend if you are interested in the background of why this Crisis is occurring now and what caused it. 

RE:A great video that gives you some basics on the Refugee Crisis

Let’s back up a few years… okay, a lot of years. 1934 to be exact. Frederick Bornstein is living in Hamburg where he has recently finished his medical training and Clara Lowenstein is living in Berlin as a dental student. They are Jews. As they see the rise of Hitler and the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws, they decide the only way to ensure their own safety is to leave Germany; so they do, leaving social status, promising careers, and their homeland behind. Clara follows Fritz to the United States in 1935 where they are only able to enter due to affidavits stating they are able to support themselves. Fast forward to 1994, their granddaughter, Rosemary, is born (pro-tip: that’s me). This is the story of how half of my family came to the United States and is a story I grew up hearing and knowing; however, it was not until within the last few years that I began to understand what it meant.

My family was lucky: lucky that my grandparents were young and able to move, lucky (in a sense) that numerous close family ties did not hinder their escape, lucky that they had a method of supporting themselves. A United States heavily struck by the Great Depression was only allowing refugees from Europe to enter the US with documentation stating that they could support themselves; my Opa, having just finished his medical training, was lucky in that my great-grandfather had garnered some fame in the international medical community during his life and connections with those who knew his father found him a job in a hospital in New York City. They were lucky in the million different ways that allow me to be here today.

Over the winter break, I visited Berlin where my Oma was from and where both the Lowenstein and Bornstein side of the family had family ties. I visited the Berlin Jewish Museum with the famed “Fallen Leaves” exhibit and where I first began seeing the ties between the Holocaust and the current refugee crisis. The WWII anti-semitic propaganda found in the countries Jews fled to was eerily reminiscent of the anti-muslim, anti-arab rhetoric that had flooded France since

my arrival in August 2015. But what truly affected me about my trip to Berlin was the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a walk I took around my Oma’s neighborhood. The Memorial was a really important step in my understanding of what it means to have that legacy of refugee grandparents and oppression that killed my people – I connected it to the refugees today. The moment at that memorial is truly where this story begins... More on that later! All over Germany lie small golden stones outside buildings. Often overlooked, these stolperstein (yep, stein means stone… yes, my name does mean brown stone) have a special purpose – to commemorate the inhabitants of that building who were deported and, often, murdered by the Nazi Socialist Party during WWII. I strolled through my grandmother’s neighborhood, freezing in the snow that would later delay my flight by 3 hours, and stopped to look at every Bornstein and Lowenstein stone. They were not my direct relations (as far as we know), but they are family in a sense, and it adds a physical element to a concept that is so hard to wrap one’s head around. 

The Shoah (the Hebrew name for the Holocaust) is a huge part of who I am and thus I decided that over my spring break, I would participate in the Auschwitz Jewish Center’s Program for Students Abroad. This four-day program held in Krakow and Oświęcim, Poland allows students to critically examine what accountability means and how our portrayal of history can change our perceptions of it. I was eager to do this program, but woke up one morning in a cold sweat with this thought in my head: “I could never live with myself if I sat here watching this crisis unfold in front of me and did nothing.” I excitedly look forward to the work I will do as a Public Health practitioner someday, but as a person who firmly buys into my school’s motto of “Men and Women for Others”, I felt that inaction in this situation would be a betrayal of my morals. And I could not get it out of my head! I initially had wanted to go directly to the island of Lesvos, Greece to aid refugees arriving on boats from Turkey, but was unable to afford the costs that would be associated with going to both Poland and Greece. But I did not give in! After some more searching, I remembered an article I had read about the French government bulldozing half of a refugee camp in the north of France in March and that is how I came to Calais. I ended up signing up to volunteer for Help Refugees/L’Auberge des Migrants, a coalition French-British NGO providing aid to the refugees in the Calais and Dunkirk refugee camps.

What I will be writing over the next few days/weeks is my reaction to and a synthesis of these two experiences from the eyes of the granddaughter of refugees. My biggest goal for you with this is to get you thinking about what accountability means and the part that you can play in helping those in need. My biggest goal for me for this is to try to understand and process what happened to my family and how I can use those experiences to help others. The cliché is that we learn from our history or we repeat it… I hope this journey can show all of us what we can learn from the past to change our present.

*disclaimer* I am not an expert on history or middle-eastern studies or ethics or pretty much anything except mosquito-borne diseases and maybe squirrels. I will try my best to explain what I experience and the thoughts it caused me to have, but please remember that this is a continuing learning experience for me.