Five remarkable books about refugees
Great writers tell the stories of people who fled war, tyranny, sex slavery, and more worldwide
My native New Brunswick, New Jersey, was once called “the most Hungarian city in America.”
Early in the 20th century, great waves of immigrants from Hungary passed though the city, my paternal ancestors among them.
Nearby Camp Kilmer welcomed tens of thousands of refugees from the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as part of the humanitarian relief and resettlement program called Operation Safe Haven, also known as Operation Mercy.
I benefited immeasurably from all of it. My worldview is less America-centric because I heard the refugees’ language, went to school with descendants of Freedom Fighters, and learned of hardships the immigrants had faced in the “old country.”
Today there is no mercy and no safe haven for millions worldwide who are trying to flee war, tyranny, persecution, and unfathomable terrors such as sex slavery.
Only 2% of refugees are able to settle in a new country or voluntarily return home, Serena Parekh writes in No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford, 2020). The rest often spend years in squalid refugee camps or other temporary accommodations, trapped in a political or bureaucratic limbo. Only the latest example turns up in the more than 10 million Ukrainians who have fled their country since the Russian invasion and haven’t been able to return home.
Perhaps because my family tree is rich in immigrants—from Hungary on my father’s side and Scotland on my mother’s—as a critic I’ve often gravitated to nonfiction books about refugees: not just from other countries but from internally displaced groups like Native Americans.
Among the hundreds I’ve read, here are some of the standouts.
1 Cloak-and-dagger escapes from North Korea
The book: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick (Random House, 2010).
North Korea “faded to black,” people said, in the early 1990s.
Without the old Soviet Union to prop up its economy, the country lost most of its electricity and went dark at night. People couldn’t read, watch TV, or go to movies in the evening, and hundreds of thousands died in a famine that some survived by eating grass or ground bark.
Barbara Demick, the first Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Korea, views that disaster though the lives of six people who escaped to South Korea, aided by forged passports, bribed border guards, or other cloak-and-dagger efforts. Her extraordinary reporting has earned national and international honors, including the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy, also a finalist for National Book Award.
2 Rape as a weapon of war in Serbia and beyond
The book: Our Bodies, Their Battlefields: War Through the Lives of Women by Christina Lamb (Scribner, 2020).
Rape is “the cheapest weapon” of war, writes Lamb, a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London. Yet—perhaps because most war correspondents have been men—few books have plumbed its enduring impact on its victims around the world.
Lamb steps into the breach with a stellar exposé of rape as “a systematic weapon of war.” She traveled worldwide to talk to women who had fled—or tried to flee—its terrors: Nigerians kidnapped as girls by Boko Haram, Yazidi women used as sex slaves by Islamic State captors, and Muslim women raped all night, every night, at a “rape camp” run by Bosnian Serbs. She tells their stories with exceptional skill in Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, a finalist for the Orwell and Baillie Gifford prizes, two of the world’s most prestigious nonfiction awards.
3 A clash of Hmong and Western traditions
The book: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman (FSG Classics, 2012).
A cascade of medical misunderstandings unfolded when epilepsy struck a young girl after her parents fled to California from Laos, fearful of the occupying North Vietnamese.
Lia’s doctors believed she needed Western medicine. Her parents preferred traditional Hmong treatments.
Without taking sides, Fadiman shows eloquently how the tragedy played out throughout Lia’s life. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, her book makes painfully clear that even the best-intentioned medical care can harm when doctors and patients stand on opposite sides of a cultural divide.
4 The grief of Cambodians, Native Americans, and others
The book: The Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins by Alex Tizon, edited with an introduction by Sam Howe Verhovek and a foreword by Jose Antonio Vargas (Temple Univ., 2019).
Alex Tizon believed that everyone has an “epic story” to tell.
Faithful that view, the late journalist looked for remarkable lives as a reporter for the Seattle Times, where he became the first Filipino-American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Lives in the Margins collects 24 of his best articles for that newspaper or other media.
They include a heartrending account of a Cambodian widow who saw her parents disemboweled by the Khmer Rouge and the American psychiatrists overmatched with the depth of her grief and trauma.
One memorable story tells how descendants of a Nisqually chief fought successfully fought for the exoneration of an ancestor hanged by white authorities. Another, written for the Atlantic, centers on the woman who raised Tizon and his siblings under de facto indentured servitude.
5 Human trafficking in Japan and Qatar
The book: Slaves Among Us: The Hidden World of Human Trafficking by Monique Villa (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).
Only about a third of the victims of human trafficking worldwide are used for sex, writes Villa. The other 70 percent are trapped in modern-day slave labor.
Some victims were conned by employers who hired them from afar and then forced them to give up their passports or otherwise keep them from escaping their misery. One of Villa’s stories involves a dancer from Columbia forced into prostitution in Tokyo after being assured by a trafficker of fame there. Another tells of a Nepalese man who had to surrender his passport when after arriving for a contract job in Qatar but couldn’t leave when his employer refused to pay him the agreed on salary.
A journalist turned CEO of a human rights foundation, Villa brings their brutal plight out of the shadows in a well-documented global overview. Her book lacks the drama of books like Nothing to Envy and Our Bodies, Their Battlefields but is an excellent resource for nonprofits and others focused on global fight against slavery.
What can ease the global refugee crisis?
During the Cold War, countries earned political goodwill by welcoming victims of upheavals, as the U.S. did after the Hungarian Revolution and the Vietnam War.
That’s changing as new waves of refugees come from countries like Syria and Sudan and anti-immigrant sentiments grow, Serena Parekh writes in No Refuge. Shifting views have created “a second refugee crisis,” Parekh argues in a dense and rigorous work of scholarship, and the world has a moral responsibility to help solve it.
An effective response must consider both refugees’ need for dignity and the challenges faced by asylum providers, she says. Those needs are growing more urgent as climate change brings the potential for new calamities, such as famine or rising seas, likely to cause more people to flee their homelands.
You might also want to consider First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks by Habiburahman with Sophie Ansel, translated from the French by Andrea Reece (Scribe, 2019).
Known as Habib, its author fled the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in 2000 by a serpentine route he describes in his memoir. Nine years later, Habib arrived by boat in Australia, where he spent 32 months in detention centers and founded the Australian Burmese Rohingya Association (ARBO). His memoir resembles creative nonfiction more than the journalism, history, or scholarship of the books above. But it’s a rare first-hand account by someone who lived through the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, and it has had financial support from the PEN Translates program.
Jan is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, and other national media. Her reviews of books about the Russian invasion of Ukraine include her story “All Quiet on the Ukrainian Front.”