Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Refugee, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Coming of Age
Injustice and Cruelty vs. Empathy and Social Responsibility
Hope vs. Despair
Family, Displacement, and Culture
Invisibility and the Refugee Experience
Summary
Analysis
One year after arriving in France, Josef, Ruthie, and Rachel are hiding in a tiny schoolhouse in Vornay, trying to avoid the Nazi soldiers and gunfire. The only refugees from the St. Louis who are still safe are the ones who had made it to England. Josef, Ruthie, and Rachel are trying to get to Switzerland in the hope of finding refuge there.
Even though the St. Louis was able to bring Josef, Ruthie, and Rachel to a new life, they are still unsafe. Thus, the decisions of Cuba and the United States to turn them away ends up being extremely harmful, again emphasizing the necessity of recognizing others’ humanity and empathizing with them rather than sending them away to be dealt with elsewhere.
Themes
Josef looks out the window and sees Nazi soldiers entering the building. He breaks a nearby window and helps Rachel and Ruthie out, glass ripping through his coat and into his skin. The Nazis spot them, and they start to shoot. Josef, Ruthie and Rachel avoid the bullets. They try to run to a nearby country house, but when they pound on the door begging for help, no one comes to the door.
In addition to looking at social responsibility on the scale of governments, Gratz also explores empathy on a small-scale here. The fact that the people living in the country house do not let Josef and his family enter is not only an injustice at the micro level, but also exemplifies the broader failures of society to protect them along the way.
Themes
The Nazis catch up to them, and search Rachel’s coat for papers. The Nazis see that they are Jewish, and tell them that they will be taken to a concentration camp. Josef wonders why the Nazis don’t let them keep going, if they want them gone so badly. Rachel tries to bribe the guard with money she keeps hidden, but they say it is not enough. Then she rips the seams of Ruthie’s coat and pulls out two diamond earrings to give them.
Josef’s thoughts echo Mahmoud’s from the chapter in Hungary, which shows not only the indifference but the cruelty with which refugees are often treated. The Hungarian soldiers and the Nazis could easily let Josef and his family go, but they view them as subhuman and not worthy of living a free life.
Themes
The Nazi soldier examines the earrings, then tells Rachel that they are only enough to buy freedom for one of her children. Josef understands: the Nazis don’t care about how much money they can give them. He is playing with them, “like a cat playing with a mouse before he ate it.” The soldier tells her to choose which child to allow to go free.
Gratz again shows the intentional cruelty of the Nazis as they dehumanize Josef, Rachel, and Ruthie and treat them like animals (a cat playing with a mouse)—just as Aaron describes the drowned man as being treated like a fish.
Themes
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