Exodus

Abstract

To understand the young refugees’ later lives, it seems important, even necessary, to know something about what happened to them during the 1930s and 1940s. Where did all those refugees come from, one might ask, and why did they have to leave their own countries? This chapter recapitulates and summarizes some pertinent facts and figures, based on the widely dispersed data in the existing literature, so as to set the stage for the presentation of the results of our own research in the next chapters. Most of the chapter describes the refugee movement of that period in general; a later section then focuses more closely on children who became the subjects of our “Second Wave” project.