The journeys of refugees and other forced migrants remain black boxes in historiography. Throughout the twentieth century, refugees traveled long and circuitous routes that could take weeks, months, or, if longer stopovers were involved, sometimes years, with the ultimate destination often unforeseeable. The proposed panel session foregrounds transit as a human experience as well as a spatial and temporal phase worth exploring as a historiographical subject on its own. It presents transit research as a new direction in the history of migration and refugee movements. Moreover, by bringing together scholars working on the history of Jewish transit and exile with researchers from the broader field of flight and forced migration in the twentieth century, it aims to initiate a dialogue between researchers in two historical fields that have not yet engaged in much scholarly exchange.

The session will reveal the analytical value of approaching transit as a phenomenon whose meaning extends beyond the practical question of getting from A to B and the dichotomy of emigration and immigration. Migration in general was rarely linear; legally and practically transit has been the norm (Tony Kushner). The dynamics and contingency of transit could change the routes, experiences, and even life plans of refugees and other forced migrants. In their papers, the four panelists adopt actor- and group-centered approaches that explore transit by following those who have endured it. This allows them to shed light on the strategies that migrants developed during various phases of transit and to highlight the relationship between knowledge, emotions, and ways of coping with transience, uncertainty, and unpredictability. The papers will also address the importance of categories such as gender, class, age, religion, and nationality/ethnicity, and will pay specific attention to the importance of generational cohorts and family/kin networks. Conceptualizing transit in a broader sense, the organizers and participants of this panel also argue that it was potentially open-ended as it could affect the lives and memories of people even after they arrived and settled at a certain place. The emerging scholarship on transit has demonstrated the analytical value of considering subjective transit experiences and narratives as well as different strategies of self-empowerment and identification. Yet it has also pointed to the need to dig deeper into the relationship between individual experiences and agency, on the one hand, and wider structures or changing power relations shaping migration en route, on the other. The panelists argue that tracing actors in transit can also serve as a lens that allows us to see the social networks, infrastructures, bureaucracies, forces, and bordering practices that affected trans-migrants locally and on larger, national, transregional and global levels. Their papers present case studies from British Kenya, the US, Turkey and Germany, as well as Colombia.