“Instead of a homeland I hold the metamorphoses of the world.”

Nelly Sachs, ‘Flight and Metamorphosis’

“The Europeans forget all too easily that the phenomenon of forced flight is in fact something originally European, as are the chimneys of Auschwitz and the Gulags in the Siberian snow. All too often they forget that only a few decades ago whole armies and bands moved through Europe, leaving behind them nothing but ruins, smoking remains and vast numbers of raped and tortured women. One forgets that even as late as 1959, thousands of people in Europe were still stranded in camps. One forgets that alone between the outbreak of the First and the Second World War and the resolution of the refugee problems associated with these wars, so in the period between 1914 and 1960, around 75 million Europeans fell victims to deportations, evacuations, flight or expulsion. These victims were our parents, grandparents … “

Jan M. Piskorski, ‘Die Verjagten’