One of my favourite authors is Thomas Mann. Reading his novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain), I once completely lost track of all my surroundings. I was reading the book while riding the tram. Not only did I miss my stop, I missed the following stop, and the stop after that. I missed the last stop. When I looked up from the book, I found myself in an empty car in the tram depot. No other book has ever done anything like that to me. Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. A few years later, he fled Germany after the Nazis rose to power and went on to live in Switzerland and the United States. He was a refugee.

One of my favourite scientists is Carl Djerassi, who died earlier this year. He received his PhD in Chemistry at 22, and went on to develop the first version of the contraceptive pill. Later, he became a professor of chemistry at Stanford University. He also had a whole additional career as a novelist and playwright, often exploring the complicated relationship between science and society. His amazing career unfolded in the United States, where he had arrived as a teenager in 1939. He was a refugee.

One of my favourite social scientists is Marie Jahoda. Her 1933 study about the long-term unemployed in the Austrian village of Marienthal explored in great depth the psychological consequences of economic hardship. It also set new standards in research methodology, combining a range of qualitative and quantitative methods to generate a dense and rich picture of the situation. A political activist as well as a scientist, she was jailed for nine months by the Austro-fascist regime in 1937, after which she fled to the UK. She was a refugee.

Here is a book by Sir Karl Popper (a refugee): The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Here is a picture by Marc Chagall (a refugee):

Here is a song by Kurt Weill (a refugee) and Bert Brecht (a refugee), sung by Lotte Lenya (a refugee):

I could go on, of course. All those people, all their stories, their talents, their contributions to the world. But where am I going with this?

Hundreds of thousands of people have come to Europe as refugees over the last weeks and months. They have fled a war-torn country, they have left their houses and their riches and their friends and their jobs behind, they have risked their lives marching overland or crossing the sea in flimsy boats. They are facing obstacles and walls and fences and bureaucracy, and hate-speech by politicians who, frankly, should know better.

Now, am I saying that each and every one of them is going to be a Nobel-winning novelist, or a brilliant scholar or a fantastic artist? Of course not.

But I think it would help us, in thinking and speaking about those hundreds of thousands of refugees, to recall the stories of other refugees. Refugees whose life stories we know. Most often, the stories of refugees that we know are those passed down in families, and those of famous people who also happened to be famous people. They make us understand that each and every refugee has interests and talents and things to offer to the world, is not only a refugee, but a daughter, a father, a science enthusiast, an avid reader, a lover of plants, a soccer fan, is, in short, a person with a story to tell. And we should find ways to listen to those stories.