What defines an & eacute;migr & eacute; scholar? Drawing on personal correspondence between members of the Unity of Science movement, this article emphasizes the contingency of the category by reconstructing the social and material conditions that shaped academic life under fascism. When scholars became refugees, they had to find ways to move their knowledge with them. Antisemitic discrimination restricted their access to libraries, conferences, and publishing contracts: the very things they needed to continue their work and secure jobs abroad. Would-be & eacute;migr & eacute;s attempted to compensate by relying on their interpersonal networks for information and support. This response exacerbated existing hierarchies. Junior scholars, in particular, struggled to secure the connections they needed. Some academics managed to flee but lost their careers in the process. Others were murdered in the Holocaust. Putting them in the same narrative avoids the teleological pull of successful escape stories, providing a fuller, more accurate picture of how fascism and the Second World War reshaped academia.
This article examines the role of children's homes in socialist Czechoslovakia as temporary humanitarian spaces for child refugees fleeing the Greek Civil War (1946-1949) or the Korean War (1950-1953). It challenges the conventional ideological framing of socialist residential care as a tool of social engineering. Instead, it examines the everyday agency of refugee children, as manifest through their experience of space and time. The analysis draws on archival materials, oral interviews, and refugee literature to illuminate the personal choices and coping strategies of these children in the context of socialist education. The refugee children's homes are conceptualized as socially constructed spaces that required a healthy political and physical environment for the children's presumed successful development. By situating these facilities geographically and spatially and contextualizing them historically within a broader continuum of care, the analysis elucidates the underlying issues associated with the postwar reconstruction process.
