January 29th, 2017
By The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
By The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
"Hannah Arendt arrived in France as a refugee in 1933. After escaping from Gurs internment camp she once again narrowly escaped arrest in Marseille and made her way — with the help of Varian Fry and my Bard colleague Justus Rosenberg — to Lisbon with her Husband Heinrich Blücher. Her friend, Walter Benjamin, was not so fortunate. Stopped at a border crossing in the mountains between France and Spain, Benjamin committed suicide."
In 1943, Arendt wrote an essay "We Refugees" seeking to remind us what refugees actually are:
“A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees.”
And her description of “we refugees” begins with the familiar.
“The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. Nevertheless, as soon as we were saved -- and most of us had to be saved several times -- we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us.”
“A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees.”
And her description of “we refugees” begins with the familiar.
“The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives. Nevertheless, as soon as we were saved -- and most of us had to be saved several times -- we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us.”
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