TY - JOUR
T1 - Navigating a Limited ‘World of Possibilities’: Refugee Journeys of Jewish Children and Youth in the Aftermath of the Holocaust
AU - Burgard, Antoine
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was made possible by the support of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah. I am grateful to Tim Cole, Peter Gatrell, Mona Gleason, Laura Hobson-Faure and Célia Keren for their insightful comments, as well as to Jonathon Catlin and Stéphanie Rinaldi for their thorough copyediting. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers whose thought-provoking suggestions have greatly strengthened this article. Previous versions of this text have been presented at the 'Microhistories of Flight from Nazi Germany' conference (University of Luxembourg) in January 2018, the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute research seminar (University of Manchester) in October 2018, the Histories and Historiographies of the Shoah seminar (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and the 'Lessons and Legacies' conference in November 2018 (Washington University in St Louis). I would like to thank all the organisers and participants for their feedback, especially Roisin Read, Marion Kaplan, Anna Hájková, Claire Zalc, Nicolas Mariot and Sarah Gensburger.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), 2021
PY - 2022/5/1
Y1 - 2022/5/1
N2 - What can historians bring to the current discussion about refugee journeys? Building on the example of a group of 1,115 young Jewish survivors who went to Canada in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, this article addresses two essential questions: why did they leave and why did they go to Canada and not elsewhere? Drawing on Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc's notion of a ‘world of possibilities’ and taking into consideration age as a category of analysis, I argue that one can formulate hypotheses about these journeys by, first, mapping what was and was not available to the young survivors at different moments of their displacement and, second, by looking at how individuals navigated these possibilities and constraints. In so doing, this article aims to nuance approaches that uncritically emphasise agency, and therefore erase the specificity of young people's experiences of displacement.
AB - What can historians bring to the current discussion about refugee journeys? Building on the example of a group of 1,115 young Jewish survivors who went to Canada in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, this article addresses two essential questions: why did they leave and why did they go to Canada and not elsewhere? Drawing on Nicolas Mariot and Claire Zalc's notion of a ‘world of possibilities’ and taking into consideration age as a category of analysis, I argue that one can formulate hypotheses about these journeys by, first, mapping what was and was not available to the young survivors at different moments of their displacement and, second, by looking at how individuals navigated these possibilities and constraints. In so doing, this article aims to nuance approaches that uncritically emphasise agency, and therefore erase the specificity of young people's experiences of displacement.
UR - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777321000205
U2 - 10.1017/S0960777321000205
DO - 10.1017/S0960777321000205
M3 - Article
SN - 0960-7773
VL - 31
SP - 227
EP - 242
JO - Contemporary European History
JF - Contemporary European History
IS - 2
ER -