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Belgian refugees (France, Britain, Netherlands) v 9 v Belgian refugees during the First World War (France, Britain, Netherlands) Michaël Amara Introduction: the exodus The German invasion of Belgium in the First World War, from August to October 1914, led to the flight of more or less 1.5 million Belgian civilians. The vast majority of them sought asylum abroad, in the Netherlands, France and Great Britain. The magnitude of this exodus gave birth to a huge diaspora unique in the history of Belgium. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children of all ages
to Belgian Refugees during the First World War ’ Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity, Migration and Diaspora , 34 : 2 , 101 – 12 . Jenkinson , J. (ed.) ( 2018 ), Belgian Refugees in First World War Britain ( London : Routledge ). Kaplan , D. ( 1988 ), Lewis Hine in Europe: The Lost Photographs ( New York : Abbeville Press ). Kind-Kovács , F. ( 2016 ), ‘ The Great War, the Child's Body and the American Red Cross ’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d'histoire , 7486 , March , 1
This book talks about the mass displacement of civilians, estimated to be 14 to 15 million, in the twentieth-century Europe during the First World War. It looks at the causes and consequences of the refugee crisis and its aftermath, and the attempts to understand its significance. Key sites of displacement extended from Belgium to Armenia, taking in France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, East Prussia, the Russian Empire, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Serbia. The German army's occupation of Belgium, France, Poland and Lithuania prompted the mass flight of refugees, as did Russia's invasion of East Prussia in 1914. Jewish, Ruthenian and Polish civilians in the Habsburg Empire fled their homes or were deported by the military to distant locations. Following Italy's attack on Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Habsburg authorities ordered around 100,000 Slovenian subjects of the empire to leave. The Austrian and Bulgarian invasion of Serbia brought about a humanitarian catastrophe as civilians and the remnants of the Serbian army sought safety elsewhere. However, mass flight of civilian refugees did not begin in 1914 nor did it come to an end in 1918. Muslim refugees fled to the relative safety of Anatolia in order to escape violent persecution by Bulgarian and other forces during the Balkan Wars on 1912-13. There were complex movements of population between Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey before 1914. The complex process of repatriation and resettlement affected soldiers and civilians alike and rarely took place in stable or peaceful circumstances.
der Leithe, Wagna, Steinklamm, Mittendorf and Gmünd.22 Polish and other refugees spent several weeks in Russian-administered camps in Kobrin and other villages in the tsar’s western borderlands.23 Belgian refugees were sometimes despatched to designated camps in Holland and forced to live in squalid conditions in camps at Gouda, Nunspeet and elsewhere (see the chapter by Michaël Amara).24 Armenian refugees were resettled by the Egyptian Red Cross from the Ottoman province of Alexandretta to a refugee camp in Port Said, where their movement was closely controlled.25
refugees of their own denominations in any number. For the Roman Catholic Church in the Salford Diocese, it was a matter of principle. Whatever the feelings of their congregants, the hierarchy of the Church in Salford was disinclined to put itself out in the rescue of refugees, particularly those of Jewish origin. The response of the Roman Catholic Church to refugees was particularly shaped by the Church’s response to the rise of Fascism. Belgian refugees from the German occupation of 1914, some 3,000 of whom are said to have been given help in Manchester, were received
, fighting against a well-defined – and hateful – enemy. The chapter then delves further into such attitudes, revealing the exclusions from this picture of national unity, the contemptible ‘others’ who were suspected of undermining, rather than contributing, to the war effort: not only cowardly pacifists and ungrateful Belgian refugees, but also ‘alien’ Jews, affluent munitions workers and spendthrift soldiers’ wives, as well as young ‘shirkers’ who, unlike their elders, refused to shoulder their fair share of the burdens of war. Ultimately, this chapter suggests, the
dissuade charitable organisations from setting up funds in aid of refugees, such as Manchester’s Belgian Refugee Fund. The official position was that the task of providing humanitarian aid to refugees was to be assumed by voluntary organisations. In reality, the War Refugees Board 65 EL-ENANY PRINT.indd 65 02/01/2020 13:38 (B)ordering Britain was increasingly under the management of civil servants and reliant on state funding.144 Over a million people, almost one-sixth of the Belgian population, were forced to flee Belgium following attacks by the German forces. Half
Matthew Buck on the treatment of Belgian refugees in 1939–40 confirms these findings,13 as does an examination of the reception of the French. At best, British plans for the welcoming of refugees of all nationalities in 1940 were tardy, illconceived, lacking in goodwill and badly implemented. These preparations had begun reluctantly in 1936 when mounting international tension concentrated government minds on the possibility of a general European war. Given the experiences of the First World War, it was widely appreciated that any handling of refugees could not be left
. Garrett Fawcett’s 1924 autobiography, What I Remember , reviewed her experiences in war and peace and drew an explicit link between women’s war-time contribution to the care of Belgian refugees, voluntary nursing and infant welfare work (all of which her National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies had helped to organise), and the right – and necessity of – women
, zig-zagged by paths and bisected by the Folkestone–Dover railway. Passing the remains of a Roman villa on the cliff above East Bay, and three Napoleonic Martello Towers, the England Coastal Path descends from here past Sunny Sands into the town's harbour. During World War I, thousands upon thousands passed through this harbour. Some were on their way to the Western Front, others arriving to seek a new life away from the turmoil of the continent. From autumn 1914 onwards, the sight of crowds of hungry and emaciated Belgian refugees alighting on the harbour arm was a