Hannah Rich explores the question of ‘who is our neighbour’ in the context of our often problematic refugee narratives. 06/04/2022

On a recent trip to Paris, I went to an exhibition of the work of female war photographers. There was wall upon wall of haunting images of atrocities, child soldiers and the aftermath of human violence. (The cyclical nature of such atrocities as history repeats itself in today’s front page images is a story for another piece.) But one image – or rather, its caption – seemed initially so incongruous that it has stayed with me: Gerda Taro’s ‘Refugees from Málaga’.

Taro, born Gerta Pohorylle, was a German Jewish photographer famous for her coverage of the Spanish Civil War. She was herself a refugee, her whole family having been forced to leave Germany in the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power. Her parents and siblings scattered to new lives across Europe and Palestine and never saw each other again. She ended up in Paris, where she met and fell in love with a fellow Jewish refugee, the Hungarian photojournalist Endre Friedmann. Together they took on pseudonyms and thus began her career as Gerda Taro, the ostensible agent to Friedmann’s Robert Capa. She died in Madrid in 1937, aged 26, and is considered to be the first female photojournalist to have died while documenting the frontline in a war.

Taro’s series of photos depict women and children displaced by fighting and naval bombardment in Málaga. Around 150,000 refugees left the coastal city during the Civil War, thousands of whom were massacred on the road to Almeria as they fled. And yet, without historical context, Málaga is not somewhere synonymous with refugees. For most Brits, it is more famous for cheap flights, package deals and, perhaps, historic architecture than for being the epicentre of conflict. Until recently, the same might also have described another city a few thousand miles north; Odesa was also a thriving seaside resort prior to the Russian invasion, albeit less well known in the UK than the Costa del Sol.

Here is the fallacy of much of our public discourse around refugees: that they are people whose lives are so disconnected from our own, so much outside of the norm, that we cannot relate to them. People in boats, people from places we’d never choose to go, rather than residents of popular holiday destinations. The conflict in Ukraine has caused the scales to fall from many eyes about this. The way the juxtaposition of ‘refugees’ and ‘Málaga’ in the caption to Taro’s photo in the museum jarred for me proves I am not completely immune from this either.

Many have noted the disparity of attitudes in Britain towards Ukrainian refugees and those from other parts of the world, and the undercurrent of disguised racism this hints at. The government response has been swifter, with the establishment of the Homes for Ukraine scheme, although bureaucratic hurdles remain. No similar scheme was forthcoming for those fleeing Afghanistan; indeed, local community groups sponsoring Syrian refugees have had to raise funds themselves for the privilege, rather than being paid by the government.

This is reflected in public attitudes too. Polling by YouGov found that 63% of the population were in favour of introducing a scheme to resettle some Ukrainian refugees fleeing the invasion, a figure that rose to 76% within a week of the invasion. By contrast, 52% responded affirmatively when asked a similar question with respect to Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban last August.

In her new book My Fourth Time We Drowned, journalist Sally Hayden documents in agonising and assiduous detail the lives of migrants and refugees fleeing, and often dying, on boats between North Africa and Europe. These stories are real and heartbreaking, and bear the compassionate telling Hayden affords them, but while they represent the totemic stories of refugees in the 21st century, they are not the full picture.

Black American theologian and civil rights leader Howard Thurman, in his 1949 book Jesus and the Disinherited, wrote that every person is potentially every other person’s neighbour because “neighbourliness is nonspatial; it is qualitative.” In other words, it should not matter a bit to someone’s humanity whether they are from a far–flung country or one closer to home. The moral imperative is the same because a neighbour is a neighbour is a neighbour. Furthermore, Thurman continues, “a man must love his neighbour directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between.”

We might substitute ‘refugee’ for neighbour in Thurman’s words: “refugee status is nonspatial; it is qualitative.” The call is to love directly and clearly all those seeking refuge, permitting no barriers between them. The moral imperative remains the same because a refugee is a refugee is a refugee.

Yet Thurman’s words are discomfiting for our realisation that we often feel a stronger sense of connection to those who are more like us and with whom we have more in common, culturally, historically, geographically, maybe even physically. There is something spatial about our sense of neighbourliness, in as much as proximity matters to our ability to be in relationship with others and to know them as neighbours. But neither is it confined by space; our love of neighbour is not contingent on the constructs of nationality or fully conditional on geography.

Neighbourliness is also, in some ways, random. Even those we see as proximate physical neighbours are that merely because of the quirks of fate by which our lives have interacted, rather than by choice. It is by the same quirks of fate and geopolitics that refugees become refugees, and to which none of us should see ourselves as ultimately impervious.

The epitaph on Gerda Taro’s grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris reads, “so nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world”. We also ought not to forget the unconditional nature of neighbour love in our quest for that better world, nor to forget that as Taro knew well, refugees can be people from Málaga.

Interested in this? Share it on social media. Join our monthly e–newsletter to keep up to date with our latest research and events. And check out our Supporter Programme to find out how you can help our work.