By Alexia Gardner, Policy Analyst, and Anum Merchant, Policy Intern
In May of 1939, a boat of German Jews aboard the St. Louis pleaded for asylum in the United States. They were denied entry and returned to Europe. 254 of the passengers were later killed in the Holocaust.
Rosa Seligmann was murdered at Auschwitz. Martha Scheyer was killed at Sobibor. Erwin Rothschild in Bergen Belsen.
This unconscionable past haunts us. In the wake of World War II, protections for persons seeking safety from similarly grave danger were codified into international law. The 1951 Refugee Convention and its subsequent 1967 Protocol enshrined the right to protection from being returned to a country where one might face a threat to their life or freedom. These instruments ushered in hope for an era characterized by protection for those seeking refuge. Yet, this hope did not fully materialize, and today, the past mistreatment of refugees ricochets into the present.
In an archived piece from USCRI’s 1997 World Refugee Survey, Elie Wiesel likened global refugee policy to that of a passenger waiting for a bus. After boarding the bus, the passenger urges the driver not to allow ‘others’ to delay their departure. Wiesel envisioned a world where the bus could afford to wait another minute for others. But today’s treatment of refugees fits the bill of the hurried, impatient passenger.
Today’s refugee protection regime is increasingly shaped by practices of restriction, deferral, and containment, values that sit uneasily with the commitments made in the wake of the Holocaust. Broader trends across the world reflect stringent domestic policies and procedures that emphasize border control over protection. Governments often justify these changes through appeals to security and capacity, framing policies as pragmatic choices rather than the intentional closing of borders to certain populations.
The bus, it seems, has not disappeared. But its doors open less often now with shorter pauses. In an era of increasing volatility and the deliberate targeting of communities, the past does not demand remembrance but rather resolve. The protections enshrined in the wake of the Holocaust and World War II were never meant to be symbolic gestures but rather commitments the global community made to itself to not let the past seep into the present and repeat itself. If we are to truly progress, refugee protection must remain a matter of obligation, not one of convenience.
“On Refugees Today” by Elie Wiesel
Published 1997
Nobel Peace Prize winner and Boston University Professor Elie Wiesel has worked on behalf of oppressed people for much of his adult life. His personal experience of the Holocaust has led him to use his talents as an author, teacher, and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world.
The subject is close to my heart. I have been a refugee—and what Jean Amery, I think, said about victims of torture applies to refugees as well: once a refugee, always a refugee.
The refugee phenomenon is not new. It existed in antiquity. Expelled from paradise, Adam and Eve were refugees. Exile was a custom in ancient Greece. Socrates could have escaped capital punishment because he was given the choice between death and exile. He chose death. He must have known that the condition of the refugee is such that he or she dies more than one death.
What a refugee needs is a new home, be it temporary. In biblical times it was called “sanctuary,” created for those who had committed involuntary manslaughter. Inside the sanctuary, they were protected against possible avengers. They could leave the sanctuary only at the death of the High Priest. That is why the mother of the High Priest would bring them all kinds of presents—so that they would feel well and comfortable, and would not pray for their liberation, which would be at the price of her son’s life.
Today’s refugees are of a different sort. They have committed no crime. They come from countries where crimes have been committed by their governments. In this twentieth century, marked and perhaps doomed by its unprecedented taste for hatred, violence, and bloodshed, all refugees are, almost by definition, innocent.
Granted, this does not mean that there had not been mass migrations before. Small or big, wars have always produced voluntary or forced movement of people. But beginning with the Holocaust, they were different. For in our times, everything was different. Never before had evil decrees targeted an entire people by sending six million of its men, women, and children to an antinomian form of sanctuary: one in which death had taken on the attributes of divinity.
Never before had one category of victims been subjected to such solitude, torment, and anguish. Never before had there been such quasi-universal indifference to those who survived their own death.
When in 1945, after Germany’s unconditional surrender, the entire world learned about the dimensions of Auschwitz and Treblinka, displaced-person camps were established for thousands upon thousands of emaciated camp survivors in the American and British zones. The conditions were atrocious. Some remained there for three, four, five years as poor relatives at best, if not as beggars, isolated by official and unofficial attitudes of false charity and painful humiliation. Many wanted to go to Palestine, but Great Britain kept its gates closed. The United States and Canada enforced strict regulations. Candidates for immigration were treated by U.S. vice consuls with disdain when not with hostility.
I myself was among the 400 lucky adolescents who had been offered asylum by General Charles de Gaulle. I lived in Paris for many years, always as a stateless temporary resident. Year after year, I would go to the Prefecture de Police to validate my residence permit. Each time, it was a humiliating experience. I felt like a Kafka character trying to enter the forbidden castle.
What about those men and women who still seek a refuge somewhere? Boat people do not belong to the past; some are still to be found in their miserable little boats, waiting for a miracle. In former Yugoslavia, one is confronted by victims of ethnic cruelty. Then there are those who left or wish to leave the former Soviet Union—or tormented countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—and have nowhere to go; some are still at home, but already refugees at heart.
What should our attitude be toward them? I would say: let us remain faithful to our tradition and open if not our borders at least our hearts to them. We have all been refugees before landing on these shores. It could create economic difficulties? Our nation has overcome more difficult ones. We are famous for solving insoluble economic problems. That does not mean we should invite and admit millions—and all at once. It means simply to adopt a more human and more humane policy toward refugees.
In other words: let us not be like the passenger waiting for a bus. After a lot of pushing and shoving, he manages to board it. Once inside, he urges the driver to move immediately and not allow “others” to delay his departure.
The bus can afford to wait another minute.
