10 Bigger Tragedies

A chart of ten (mid-20th century) mass migrations larger than those resulting from the 1947–1949 war initiated by the Arab League.

Selective Memory

The mid-20th century was not defined by one displacement, but by many. Today, it’s almost impossible to grasp. Tens of millions were uprooted across the world. China alone saw internal displacement numbers 10 to 60 times larger than anything that occurred in Israel–Palestine. South Asia experienced one of the fastest and bloodiest mass migrations in human history. Germany, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Korea, and the Soviet Union all underwent forced population transfers that reshaped borders, identities, and lives.

And yet, no one today holds weekly protests demanding reparations for expelled Germans. No international movement insists that the grandchildren of repatriated Japanese civilians remain refugees. No global campaign treats the descendants of Partition survivors as permanently displaced persons entitled to return generations later. These events are studied, mourned, and acknowledged as tragic. But they are understood as historical outcomes of wars, not as open moral wounds requiring perpetual international arbitration.

Only one case is treated differently. Only one produced a hereditary refugee status, maintained exclusively for descendants. Only one is frozen in time, keeping the whole world in the 1940s.