Luxembourg minister tells her Jewish family’s refugee story to students

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Luxembourg minister tells her Jewish family’s refugee story to students

January 31st, 2021

Awake Goy

“It is not because you ran away that you are a poor person.”

“Some of [the refugees] had normal lives: a job, a family. They didn’t want to run. They had to.”

It was in these words that Luxembourg’s Integration Minister Corinne Cahen spoke to high school students from around the world, explaining to them the need to help asylum seekers, taking her own Jewish family’s refugee story during World War II as an example, the Luxembourg Times reported.

“Last summer, we went to where they stayed. My aunt is 85 and she wanted to return before she dies. So I took my family there and these people who lived there said they didn’t know what a Luxembourger was,” Cahen said, describing how in 1941 her father’s family, which was Jewish, fled occupied Luxembourg for Auvergne in France.

“There was no Google at that time,” she continued. “They said they didn’t know what a Jew was but they were people who needed help and they helped them.”

Luxembourg was occupied by the Nazis in May 1940. Before the war, the Grand Duchy was home to approximately 3,500 Jews. It is believed that only 36 of the Jews deported by the Nazis survived the Holocaust, according to estimates from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Speaking at the opening of the Global Issues Network conference that focused this year on the theme “Caring for humanity, our duty,” according to the Luxembourg Times, Cahen addressed the students by advising them all to volunteer with refugees in Luxembourg.

“Volunteering is the most important factor in integration. You can only integrate into a society when people take you out of your foyer and say ‘come with me and make music,’ for instance,” she said, explaining that volunteering could entail anything from donating unwanted clothes to spending time with refugees.

“We’re in a nice position where we have too many volunteers and we don’t know what to do with all of them,” Cahen said, as a large number of people have offered their time and services to work voluntarily with asylum seekers and refugees in Luxembourg.

She also encouraged the students to go out and make meaningful connections with refugees in Luxembourg, encouraging them to get rid of any prejudices they might have about them.

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