ABSTRACT
In the mid-nineteenth century, the residents of the Black Sea city of Constanţa in the Ottoman Empire (today in Romania) included the Austrian subject Janko, the Prussian subjects Ernest and Christian Joseph, who was from Danzig. They had all moved hundreds of kilometers from their homes to accumulate riches in the Ottoman realms. 1 As the economic conditions in the region changed and new opportunities emerged elsewhere, by the late nineteenth century many residents of Eastern Europe were headed west, either to Western Europe or across the Atlantic. In the early twentieth century, young Jews in the Pale of Settlement faced hard economic times, persecution, occasional pogroms, and the draft. They were disinclined to serve a country that showed little regard for their rights: “Bein’ you such a handy boy and you want to be saved [from the draft], it’s goin’ to be a terrible war, so you should go to the United States,” Moshe Lodsky of Lublin was counseled. He sailed to New York alongside many “Polacks” and Jews in 1912. 2 As the horrors of military conflict engulfed the region, many prepared to emigrate in search of security and stability; others were forced to do so as a result of international treaties sanctioning population exchanges, such as the Muslims of once-Ottoman Salonica (today in Greece) who wept as they were leaving their native city: “We’re used to living freely and in honor, but seeing how they seize our fields and even enter our homes, we feel life has become impossible.” 3 In July 1945 as millions of German-speakers were being forcibly removed from countries across the region the Allied leaders attempted in vain to control the situation and prevent a humanitarian disaster. Winston Churchill made it clear that British authorities were not eager to accept the expellees into their zone of occupation in postwar Germany citing pragmatic concerns. 4 Migration picked up once more after the collapse of communism – whether people were crossing the Bulgarian-Greek border illegally to pick olives, going on a trip from Poland to the United Kingdom with the intention of staying, or fleeing the attempts of paramilitary bands to round up young men in war-torn Yugoslavia, the inhabitants of East Central Europe were on the move again.
