As Russian forces bludgeoned their way across the Ukrainian border, a rush of civilians pushed west into neighbouring Poland. They had very few possessions and no way of knowing how long their exile would last.
This is how the writer Arnold Zable found them. Newly minted refugees, but stamped from a centuries-old mould — displaced, dispossessed and discordant.
A veteran human rights activist, Zable did what he does: He offered them an ear and a hand, but not hope. Never hope.
"[For] people in desperate circumstances, 'hope' is not the word.
"You can't say to them; my prayers are with you and my hope is with you. I mean, they just want to know how to get out of the place."
Hope can seem as if it's in short supply in a world pockmarked by conflict and suppression in Myanmar, in Syria, in Hong Kong, in the Palestinian territories, in Afghanistan and Yemen and even in Europe.
Zable recalls a conversation he had with jailed asylum seeker, Farhad Bandesh.
Bandesh spent more than seven years in an Australian immigration detention centre. Zable calls him a "resistance fighter".
"I said, 'What is it you want to hear?' And he said, 'For us to survive we can't hope anymore, because we're talking about an indefinite situation. We want you to say 'I am fighting with you and alongside you to find a way for us to get out of this horror'."
Realism and purpose
Bronwyn Birdsall's novel Time and Tide in Sarajevo is based on her personal experiences of living and working in the historic capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
She describes a city still traumatised by the conflicts that tore the former Yugoslavia asunder in the 1990s. The residents of Sarajevo endured a four-year siege – the longest in modern history.
"I struggled with the word 'hope' for a very long time," Birdsall says.
"My world view was really shattered by my years in Bosnia. As amazing as this country is, and as generous as people were to me, the stories that I was surrounded by every day really shattered my sense of hope."
Birdsall's book deals with the legacies of conflict: residual anger, frustration and a sense that life will never be what it once was.
After the siege, she says, feelings of optimism slowly soured.
"It moved from this sense of transition into a permanent state of stasis.
"And every time that I go back, you see that this beautiful, warm, welcoming city is actually really suffering under the corruption and the political stasis that has now become the norm."
"In the first half of 2021, around 80,000 people left the country. And when you think of a population of three million, if 80,000 people are leaving, it's a generation, practically, going."
When learning that Birdsall was writing a novel, a former student told her that she had a duty to include a sense of hope in her book.
"I found this frightful because at that point my novel was quite bleak, and I wondered about this for a long time."
Inspiration, Birdsall says, came in a quote from Vaclav Havel, the Soviet dissident who eventually became the president of a democratic Czech Republic.
"Hope isn't optimism which expects things to turn out well," Havel wrote, "but the belief that there is still good worth working for."
'A civic sense of identity'
As difficult as life remains for ordinary Sarajevans, there was an actual end to their conflict, as perhaps there will one day be for the people who have fled Ukraine.
Yet for those who live with no end to uncertainty in sight, the task of finding a practical alternative to hope becomes much more complex.
Like Arnold Zable, Louisa Lim believes in the value of collaboration and a shared sense of action.
Her recent book, Indelible City is subtitled Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong.
The former China correspondent for the BBC grew up in the city, but she understands, like so many Hong Kongers, that she can never go back. In fact, that she will never be allowed to return under the dictatorship of Xi Jinping.
By necessity, she veers away from notions of geographic identity, embracing instead what she describes as the common values of the city she can no longer call home. A once determined and outspoken city that fought so vehemently against Beijing's enforced submission, albeit in vain.
"It's a civic sense of identity," Lim says. "A sense of belief in values that is so strong that you are willing to leave the place that you are from in order to protect those values.
"There was this really moving speech that I heard during a protest which was given by an activist who went into exile. He said being a Hong Konger is an identity that exists nowhere but in our minds. And I just thought that was such a powerful idea."
Still, she admits, it is hard not to be pessimistic.
"It's incredibly traumatic to watch a place being transformed before your eyes and there is nothing that you can do about it."
The place beyond hope
Lim's contribution comes through her writing. She says she now feels a responsibility to continue telling the stories of those she met and interviewed during her years in China.
Fortunately she no longer has family in Hong Kong that Beijing can threaten in order to silence her.
But the task of witnessing is difficult when the recent past is actively being erased and rewritten.
"And so what we see in Hong Kong, which is quite extraordinary, is a nostalgia for the present because things are changing so fast, people want to hold on to every second."
From his long experience in dealing with refugees and people in exile, Arnold Zable understands this all too well. He uses the term "luftmenschen", a Yiddish expression meaning "people of the air".
"Originally it features in the novels of Sholem Aleichem, the great Yiddish writer," he says.
"He had characters living at the turn of the 19th, 20th centuries in the towns and villages of eastern Europe, and they had so many restrictions on their lives, they had to use their wits. They had to make a living out of the air."
Zable adapted the term to mean people who have been running from one place to the next for so long that they eventually become uprooted and can no longer feel the ground beneath their feet.
To do justice to their stories, he says, it helps to view such people's lives not simply as tragedy, but as a three-act drama.
"Act one is the time before: 'Once I had a village, once I had Bialystok, once I had Ithaca, once I had Kurdistan, or whatever. And I loved it'."
Act two, he says, is the time of severance, which can last not just years, but for generations: Think of the permanent Palestinian refugee camps of Jordan or the Rohingya in the border areas of Myanmar and Bangladesh.
The final act he describes as "the time after".
"A rollercoaster between nostalgia and an intense longing for the place you left behind, and then moments where you begin to feel grounded again in the new place," Zable says.
For those who experience it, this drama is re-enacted again and again.
"I like bearing this in mind because it means that when you engage with people, you engage with the fullness of their life," he says.
"Very often we get stuck in the victimhood stage or the stage when the trauma occurred, when it's a far bigger picture you should be looking at."
Ultimately, Zable explains, it's about finding strength and direction in adversity — a place beyond hope.
"You've got to get to a point of acceptance. And then, okay, where do I go from here? And how do I move on?"
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