A refugee, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is a person "forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as a result of who they are, what they believe in or say, or because of armed conflict, violence or serious public disorder." Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by a contracting state or by the UNHCR if they formally make a claim for asylum.
Alsace is a cultural region and a territorial collectivity in eastern France, on the west bank of the upper Rhine next to Germany and Switzerland. In January 2021, it had a population of 1,919,745. Alsatian culture is characterized by a blend of German and French influences.
The Huguenots are a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed (Calvinist) tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Besançon Hugues (1491–1532), was in common use by the mid-16th century. Huguenot was frequently used in reference to those of the Reformed Church of France from the time of the Protestant Reformation. By contrast, the Protestant populations of eastern France, in Alsace, Moselle, and Montbéliard, were mainly Lutherans.
The right of return is a principle in international law which guarantees everyone's right of voluntary return to, or re-entry to, their country of origin or of citizenship. The right of return is part of the broader human rights concept of freedom of movement and is also related to the legal concept of nationality. While many states afford their citizens the right of abode, the right of return is not restricted to citizenship or nationality in the formal sense. It allows stateless persons and for those born outside their country to return for the first time, so long as they have maintained a "genuine and effective link".
Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is a commune in the Haute-Loire department in south-central France.
Aliyah Bet was the code name given to illegal immigration by Jews, many of whom were refugees escaping from Nazi Germany or other Nazi-controlled countries, and later Holocaust survivors, to Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, in violation of the restrictions laid out in the British White Paper of 1939, which dramatically increased between 1939 and 1948. With the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, Jewish displaced persons and refugees from Europe began streaming into the new state in the midst of the 1948 Palestine war.
André Trocmé and his wife, Magda, were a French couple designated Righteous Among the Nations. For 15 years, André served as a Protestant pastor in the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, in south-central France. He had been accepted to the rather remote parish because of his Christian pacifist positions, which were not well received by the French Protestant Church. In his preaching, he spoke out against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in neighboring Germany and urged his Protestant Huguenot congregation to hide Jewish refugees from the Holocaust during World War II.
Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Czechoslovaks, Estonians, Greeks, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Kalmyks, and Belarusians.
Sh'erit ha-Pletah (Hebrew: שארית הפליטה, romanized: Sh'erit ha-Pletah, meaning surviving remnant, and is a term from the Book of Ezra and 1 Chronicles is a Hebrew term for the more than 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons camps after the end of the Holocaust and Second World War, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.
HIAS is a Jewish American nonprofit organization that provides humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees. It was established on November 27, 1881, originally to help the large number of Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States who had left Europe to escape antisemitic persecution and violence. In 1975, the State Department asked HIAS to aid in resettling 3,600 Vietnam refugees. Since that time, the organization continues to provide support for refugees of all nationalities, religions, and ethnic origins. The organization works with people whose lives and freedom are believed to be at risk due to war, persecution, or violence. HIAS has offices in the United States and across Latin America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Since its inception, HIAS has helped resettle more than 4.5 million people.
Numerous internment camps and concentration camps were located in France before, during and after World War II. Beside the camps created during World War I to intern German, Austrian and Ottoman civilian prisoners, the Third Republic (1871–1940) opened various internment camps for the Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Following the prohibition of the French Communist Party (PCF) by the government of Édouard Daladier, they were used to detain communist political prisoners. The Third Republic also interned German anti-Nazis.
The history of immigration to the United States details the movement of people to the United States from the colonial era to the present day. Throughout U.S. history, the country experienced successive waves of immigration, particularly from Europe and later on from Asia and Latin America. Colonial-era immigrants often repaid the cost of transoceanic transportation by becoming indentured servants in which the new employer paid the ship's captain. In the late 19th century, immigration from China and Japan was restricted. In the 1920s, restrictive immigration quotas were imposed but political refugees had special status. Numerical restrictions ended in 1965. In recent years, the largest numbers of immigrants to the United States have come from Asia and Central America.
The problem of Kurdish refugees and displaced people arose in the 20th century in the Middle East, and continues today. The Kurds, are an ethnic group in Western Asia, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey.
Madeleine Barot was a French activist and theologian, who was influential in Protestant, humanist, and human rights movements.
The Holocaust in France was the persecution, deportation, and annihilation of Jews between 1940 and 1944 in occupied France, metropolitan Vichy France, and in Vichy-controlled French North Africa, during World War II. The persecution began in 1940, and culminated in deportations of Jews from France to Nazi concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland. The deportation started in 1942 and lasted until July 1944. Of the 340,000 Jews living in metropolitan/continental France in 1940, more than 75,000 were deported to death camps, where about 72,500 were murdered.
Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France is a 2014 book by Caroline Moorehead.
A refugee crisis can refer to difficulties and dangerous situations in the reception of large groups of forcibly displaced persons. These could be either internally displaced, refugees, asylum seekers or any other huge groups of migrants.
Between 1933 and 1945, a large number of Jews emigrated from Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. This exodus was triggered by the militaristic antisemitism perpetrated by the Nazi Party and by Germany's collaborators, ultimately culminating in the Holocaust. However, even before the genocide itself, which began during World War II, the Nazis had widely sponsored or enforced discriminatory practices—by legislation, in many cases—against Jewish residents, such as through the Nazi boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. Although Adolf Hitler and the German government were initially accepting of voluntary Jewish emigration from the country, it became difficult to find new host countries, particularly as the 1930s were marked by the Great Depression, as the number of Jewish migrants increased. Eventually, the Nazis forbade emigration; the Jews who remained in Germany or in German-occupied territory by this point were either murdered in the ghettos or relocated to be systematically exploited and murdered at dedicated concentration camps and extermination camps throughout the European continent.
Jacques Martin (1906–2001) was a French pacifist, one of the first conscientious objectors in France, and a Protestant pastor. His commitment to French Resistance and to the protection of persecuted Jews earned him the recognition of Yad Vashem as a "Righteous Among the Nations." He died in Die on 23 July 2001.
Jacques Maury was a French pastor.