While I was standing in the Jewish archives in Warsaw, Poland, during a recent humanitarian trip to strengthen programs of protection and safety for refugees from Ukraine, time became quite circular — an evocation of William Faulkner’s adage that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For brought before us were portions of an archive created at great personal risk during the Holocaust by Jewish ghetto residents that laid forth to an indifferent and inattentive world their experiences of fear, flight and displacement.
What is known to history as the Ringelblum Archive produced more than 30,000 pages of narratives and source material depicting the diversity, richness, despair, hopes, daily life and vitality of the Warsaw ghetto’s Jewish community. Residents faced starvation, economic disruption, rampant poverty, fetid air, typhus, dysentery, corpses strewed on the streets and random killings by Nazi guards, on top of the imminent threat of deportation to concentration camps.
But for these individuals, their resolve to memorialize their experiences and resist being perceived as an undifferentiated mass reflects their desire to call upon the world to shed indifference to persecution, evil and displacement. Faced with the knowledge that the world simply would not respond to the deprivations they experienced, the archive was surreptitiously buried, only to be unearthed in the postwar years. As 19-year-old David Graber, a ghetto resident, wrote: “What we’ve been unable to shout out to the world, we buried in the ground.”
Regrettably, this archive is not simply a historical artifact. Rather, it is eerily evocative of today’s reality as eight decades later, the war in Ukraine has again resulted in the mass flight of refugees who seek to forge ahead with their lives amid uncertainty, war and displacement. We again are confronted with a moral choice of remaining indifferent to the human tragedy of flight and displacement or endorsing the basic value that all people deserve welcome, safety and opportunity.
Since the start of Ukraine war in February 2022, around 8 million Ukrainians have fled and sought temporary refuge in Europe, of which 1.5 million of them settled in Poland. The Polish population has been generous and embracing of refugees, opening up their hearts and homes to their new neighbors. But the resources of the country cannot indefinitely sustain the reception of those forcibly displaced.
All refugees face destabilizing realities including food insecurity, unstable access to clean water, disorientation, vulnerability, lack of protection, economic uncertainty, barriers to inclusion and, in many instances, xenophobia of the host community. The Ukrainian refugee population exhibits a number of additional characteristics that create special challenges in their resettlement needs. First, the sheer numbers of refugees needing assistance are overrunning Poland’s internal capacity. Second, women and children constitute an overwhelming number of Ukrainian refugees, meaning that there is a heightened level of vulnerability during the migration and relocation process and oftentimes the absence of the traditional breadwinner. Third, Ukrainian men are largely prohibited from leaving because they must serve in the Ukrainian army. The familial rupture and the possibility of a battlefield death generate enormous psychological and economic stress.
Lastly, the brutal Russian invasion has traumatized Ukrainians and is destroying the country’s infrastructure; there is a significant need for mental health services.
Programs of refugee protection provided by the humanitarian community today are vast. They include empowerment and reproductive services for women, as well as risk reduction and protection for survivors of gender-based violence, a situation that regrettably far too often occurs. Many groups also offer children’s programs, including early education, trauma counseling and legal representation for unaccompanied children. LGBTQ refugees can get legal aid and all migrants can get emergency housing services, job training and outmigration services to Western Europe and the United States.
What is all too often forgotten is that each refugee bears an individual story of hope and pain. For me, that message became starkly communicated on the second floor of a dormitory for refugee children with autism and their families. There I met Nina, the Ukrainian grandmother of a child with autism. When she asked what I was doing at the facility, I told her I was on the board of a global Jewish agency that came to assist Ukrainian refugees by providing programs such as the one in which her grandchild was enrolled. Nina was silent for a moment and then burst into tears of joy and gratitude.
She knew at that moment, amid the cruelty of a war and the disorientation of her refugee journey, she was not alone. But it is in her wordlessness that I am shouting out to resist indifference to the core realities of the refugee experience: persecution, flight and displacement.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Robert Aronson is the immediate past chair of HIAS, an agency of the global Jewish community that provides safety and protection to refugees, regardless of religion, race, nationality or ethnicity.
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