Tens of thousands of refugees fled a war. They journeyed across the Eastern Mediterranean, a trip filled with peril. But the promise of sanctuary on the other side was too great.
No, this is not the plight faced by Syrian refugees, desperate to escape the desolation of their homeland and find a safer, better life in Europe. Rather, it's the curious and now mostly forgotten case of thousands of people from Eastern Europe and the Balkans who were housed in a series of camps across the Middle East, including in Syria, during World War II. [...]
A British-led scheme known as the Middle East Relief and Refugee Administration, launched in 1942 and facilitated by officials based in Cairo, helped provide for some 40,000 Poles, Greeks and Yugoslavs. (By 1944, the initiative would be subsumed under the auspices of the "United Nations," the formal term for the Allied alliance.) The refugees were spread out between camps in Egypt, southern Palestine and Syria — yes, Syria. Aleppo, an ancient and thriving metropolitan center, was already a veritable hub of emigres, exiles and spies in the 1940s.
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