anyone can turn into a refugee

When I visited my mother last month for the Pegasus half-marathon, celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the D Day landing were starting in Normandy. And she talked with us of the days around the event, when as a 5y old she had to flee (under German occupation troops’orders) her family house in Saint-Lô, that had been hit by Allied shells and stay with other refugees in the nearby countryside, for several weeks, eating meat from cows killed during the combats and the few products the local farm was able to provide. When the Allied troops managed to push further inland, they returned to the house, which had been mostly looted, and decided to move to my grandfather’s birthplace, 50km away, by foot and with a wheelbarrow to carry the 5y and 4y old girls. They arrived to find that my great-grand-mother’s house had also been destroyed, by a bomb this time, but that she was alive and leaving with relative in the countryside, which is where they spent the remaining months of 1944, before settling for 35y in another small western Normandy town… During this conversation, she repeatedly mentioned how strongly she was relating with the victims of the current refugee crises, both in Ukraine and Gaza, in that she knew from experience how quickly and irremediably one could become a refugee thrown on the dangerous roads of a war zone, with hardly any remaining belongings…