In 1959, the woman who brought me into this world bundled me in a basket and placed me in a Hong Kong stairwell near Sai Yeung Choi Street, a bustling region of the British colony. I was 4 days old. A passerby called the police, who transported me to St. Christopher's Home, the largest non-government-run orphanage on the island.
Carlos described his return home as a journey filled with memories of familiar neighborhoods and voices, yet he felt a quiet distance from them. Years spent in Tampa reshaped his identity, altering how he spoke and related to others. He recognized everything around him but felt a disconnection, as if the bond between his place and self had loosened over time.
There is nothing more dangerous than an enforced disappearance. Think about the word for a moment: disappearance. Imagine waking up to find that a relative has vanished without a trace, or that you've been torn away from your family with no explanation. When you're disappeared, anything can happen to you, from verbal humiliation to physical torture or even death.
She said she stood in her new kitchen, which had radiant floor heating and a view of the fjord, and cried because the bread smelled wrong. She'd moved from São Paulo for a man she'd met at a data science conference. The apartment was beautiful. The healthcare was extraordinary. The man was kind. And the bread smelled wrong, and that wrongness cracked open something in her she hadn't known was load-bearing.
Laime Arold, a 26-year-old Haitian, buys energy bars at a small shop on the side of the Pan-American Highway in southern Chiapas, Mexico. Jose Adan, a Honduran, prays aloud in a park in Tapachula, asking God to protect him from kidnappers and the police along the way. Gerardo Aguilar, a Venezuelan, travels at 60 miles per hour, lying across two seats on a bus headed for Guatemala. The three all have something in common: they are in Mexico and they are migrants. None of them are heading north. They are heading south.
Jesus usually came home from school to a raucous scene: the family TV blaring, his mom loudly cooking dinner and his two young sisters fighting about nothing in particular. When his dad came home from work, they'd all gather around the kitchen table for dinner. But this day was different. Everything was eerie and quiet and dark, he recalled. All of the lights in the home were off. The television was silent.
Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.
Two or three weeks ago, I would've thought that Iran might be free by the time I was 90, and I could die there. I had this vision of me walking through the airport with a cane. Now, at age 48, I can see myself making a trip back to Iran within the next year, and potentially living there permanently within the next five.
In Cologne, the family is greeted with a small but comfortable new home, and Israa enters a school where her classmates and teachers seem kind and curious to learn more about her. Over the years, however, things change. Israa begins to feel the prying eyes of others, and she begins to react against her family, in particular her father, Tarek, with whom she was once incredibly close but who now seems like a man out of time and place, wedded to traditions left behind.
The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.
They are known, as it were, from the neck up. The cellular memory of facts and experiences, however, connects mind and body: My body recalls that showing my true feelings in childhood led to a put-down. A slammed door meant that Dad was home and drunk. The specific fact/event may be forgotten, but the bodily reaction remains: Any slamming noise may induce terror.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
The number of Jewish Holocaust survivors alive worldwide has fallen to around 196,600, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference). That's down 220,000 survivors from a year ago - an 11% drop, the Claims Conference said. The median age of survivors is now 87, with many now in their 90s and older, numbers show. Nearly all Jewish Holocaust survivors (97%) are "child survivors" who were born in 1928 or later.
The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.
Four years on from the invasion, we talk to the Ukrainians who have settled in Co Kerry, why they chose to come here, the heartbreaking stories from their homeland, and dealing with the 'small percentage of haters'
Throughout many immigrant experiences, stories collected from family members can be a starting point for migrants. The memories gleaned from parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles-who crossed dozens of borders at great risk and with immense pain-can settle into the consciousness of new host communities for decades. For the migrants, these stories and memories represent the first step into a new world and contain lifelines with the potential and promise to build new, resilient identities and a sense of belonging in often hostile environments.
Of these, 3,678 of them have already gone back to their home country. For German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt, this is proof of the migration policy that he has been promoting: "Those who have no prospect of staying receive targeted support for their voluntary repatriation." This "targeted support" includes the cost of the flights and 1,000 (ca. $1200) per adult and 500 for minors.
