‘We’ve seen this in Europe, just not in our lifetimes’
TFP revisits a conversation with Mark Hetfield, president of the refugee agency HIAS, from the shocking first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Three and a half years into Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine—its people, its language, its culture—and Russia continues its brutal assault, this week bombing a hospital and a prison killing at least 25 civilians and injuring scores more.
As of May 31, the U.N. conservatively estimates the number of civilian deaths in Ukraine at 13,341 since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion. The war has killed as many as 60,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 250,000 Russian forces, claiming over a million causalities and creating, astonishingly, some 6.9 million Ukrainian refugees.
At the start of the war, I reached out to an old source and friend, Mark Hetfield, a man who has devoted his life to finding safe places for refugees fleeing war and the threat of violence. Hetfield is president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency founded in 1881 as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Originally established to aid the millions of refugees who fled the anti-Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe during the mid- and late-19th century, HIAS began resettling refugees from all nations, faiths and ethnic groups after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the surge of Southeast Asian refugees.
“It’s deep in our tradition to welcome the stranger,” Hetfield told me in our Feb. 28, 2022, conversation about the escalating Ukrainian refugee crisis, the history of HIAS, and why he chose to devote his life to resettling the displaced.
I’m republishing our conversation now, in the wake of President Trump’s executive order in January suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), and a February court ruling that blocked the order.
The Trump administration has to date defied that court ruling, and the fate of over 12,000 refugees already conditionally approved for relocation whose travel to the U.S. was cancelled—including those who assisted U.S. forces in Afghanistan—remains in limbo.
“We challenged President Trump’s unlawful suspension of USRAP because it not only hurts refugees—it hurts our country,” Hetfield told reporters. “Refugees are a blessing to our country, not a burden.”
I’ve reached out to Hetfield for an update on the global refugee crisis—including the mass civilian deaths, displacement, and widespread starvation in Gaza—and hope to publish our next conversation soon.
Until then, here is our first TFP conversation, taking place just days after Russia’s invasion, about Ukraine’s refugees, the history of HIAS, and why Hetfield chose to devote his life to resettling the displaced.
—MJ
Michael Judge: Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
Mark Hetfield: Good, Michael. How are you?
Alright. Kind of a crazy day . . .
Yep. Every time you think the world can’t get any worse . . .
Exactly.
. . . it gets a lot worse.
I’m looking at The New York Times online headline right now, and it reads: “Russian Rockets Batter Ukraine: 500,000 Have Fled.”
Yeah. That’s about right, probably.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I know you’re extremely busy.
Yeah. I can't lie to you. I am.
So why don't we just dive in? I wanted to tell you that I’ve been in touch with this Ukrainian writer; her name is Kateryna Babkina. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with her since the invasion started and things in Kyiv, her hometown, got much worse. But today, I saw she had posted on Instagram that she was in a line at the Polish border with her 14-month-old daughter and mother . . . a line of cars that will take days to get to the border, she said.
Oh my God.
So is that what you're seeing from your end? Where are all these people going, the displaced people in Ukraine? Do they still feel western Ukraine might be safe? Or are they going mostly out of the country?
It’s interesting because, to be honest, this is far beyond the worst-case scenario the U.N. had envisioned with its contingency planning. I think they were primarily thinking that there would be more displacement in the east with advanced aggression there, right? But not this four-front, national attack. And so they didn’t really anticipate huge refugee flows. They expected huge internally displaced person flows. But the massive outflow of refugees was something of a surprise.
The good news is Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia have all opened up their borders, at least for now. They’ve offered temporary protected status, which is something that’s existed in the EU since 2004, but they’ve never actually used it. Now they’re using it. So at least they're opening up.
But again, Ukraine’s a huge country with 45 million people. And if all the women and children flee, that's going to be an awful lot of people to even give temporary refuge too. And it already is. It’s likely already in the millions. The only reason it’s being reported today as about 500,000 is because of those long lines that you’re talking about. There will be far more.
And all this is happening in a modern country like Ukraine, with thousands upon thousands of people fleeing a major European capital, Kyiv. It seems bizarre that all of a sudden, in 2022, we’re dealing with a massive refugee crisis in Eastern Europe that we’re more accustomed to seeing in Afghanistan, Sudan, or Syria.
We’ve seen this in Europe, just not in our lifetimes . . .
Well, I guess we saw it during the Bosnian War in the 1990s.
Yes, but I’m thinking this is more on the scale of World War I or World War II. We thought that was behind us, but obviously it’s not.
How much more stress does the Ukrainian crisis put on the refugee system as a whole? Obviously the Afghanistan and Syria crises were already putting a great deal of stress on HIAS and other refugee resettlement organizations.
Good question. We’re already under incredible stress and feeling incredibly helpless because when you look at what we're going through right now—we have the Syrian refugee crisis, the Venezuelan crisis, the Sudanese crisis, the Ethiopian crisis, the genocide of the Rohingya and their expulsion from Burma, and of course the massive Afghanistan crisis—and none of these are getting solved, right? None of them have gotten any better. They’re just kind of eclipsing each other. One after the other. Sadly, the international community isn’t stepping up to the plate. So people remain in limbo or in danger and have to continue living as refugees. And it’s really global, right? I mean, the refugee crises that I just rattled off, I didn't even mention Central America.
And now we have Ukraine, which is like the mother of all crises—a nuclear superpower chasing people out of one of the largest countries in Europe. And to top it all off, we had the Trump administration, for four long years, doing everything it could to eviscerate our humanitarian capacity. Those were four years we could have spent building up our response to these kinds of crises and improving the way we receive refugees or assist refugees overseas. But instead, we had to spend all our time just keeping the refugee program alive and trying to protect it from basically being torn to shreds.
So we’re not in a good position to address these crises. As for Ukraine, many in the U.S. believe this is something that Europe will take care of. And I think that’s largely true. But we’re not going to be able to just stand by and not respond. Poland and Hungary and Slovakia and Moldova are simply not going to be able to take in, even temporarily, the huge number of refugees that are coming. The U.S. will have to get involved. Many Ukrainians have relatives here. So we’re going to have to at least prioritize those people and bring them here, in addition to giving Europe whatever assistance we can.
So what is HIAS doing in Ukraine right now? I know some time back HIAS helped launch an independent Ukrainian refugee organization called Right to Protection, or R2P. Can you explain a little bit about how long HIAS has been in Ukraine and why R2P was launched?
Yeah. It’s an interesting story. I don’t know if you saw it. But I wrote an article that ran yesterday in The Jewish Forward.
I’ve got it right in front of me.
Well, that tells the story of how we started R2P. We were already in Ukraine helping resettle Jews after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2001, the U.N. approached us to help them facilitate the development of civil society and deal with asylum seekers, refugees and stateless persons.
In 2013, a new organization, R2P, was formed. Then Crimea was seized by Russia in 2014 and the conflict in the east broke out. And we were really the only NGO in Ukraine that had expertise in forced displacement. So R2P grew rapidly. It now has 150 staff in 10 different locations across Ukraine, most of whom are displaced persons themselves. Most of their funding comes from the U.N. and from the EU and other donor governments. But HIAS works closely with them. We actually just helped them evacuate their entire staff to safer places, but all within Ukraine, and they intend to continue operating.
I know HIAS has been involved in Europe a very long time, helping Jews flee persecution. During World War II, a great deal of your efforts were focused on getting Jews out of Germany during the Holocaust, were they not, and out of other European countries where they were in danger?
Absolutely. That was what we tried to do. It was difficult because at that time there was no international law protecting refugees. There was no obligation of states to take in refugees and they were free to push them back and they did. So it was a really tough job until at least in 1948 with two developments. One was the founding of the State of Israel, which finally ended the Jewish refugee problem by giving them a homeland. And then there was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which finally recognized the right to seek and enjoy asylum. And that was followed by the Refugee Convention in 1951, which required that states could not turn away a refugee to a place where he or she would be persecuted.
I see.
But for the first half of HIAS’s history, that didn’t exist.
I wanted to tell you: I have a dear friend from New York, Deb Stein, whose mother, Ruth, was sent in 1937 by her parents from Nazi Germany at the age of 12 to live in St. Louis. She and her brother were helped by HIAS when they arrived and awaited their parents’ arrival in 1938, just before Kristallnacht. Ruthie was full of life and lived to be 95 years old. And now, 85 years later, her daughter, an amazing writer and artist, has written a beautiful piece about her mother, who passed away in 2020, that I’m publishing.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that is interesting.
For those of us who aren’t experts on Jewish history, how do you explain Putin’s argument that he invaded Ukraine, in part, to “denazify” the country?
Sadly, Ukraine does have a long history of antisemitism, especially Soviet and pre-Soviet Ukraine. As I wrote in my Forward article, I was just in Ukraine last October to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first massacre at Babyn Yar, when 33,771 Jews were shot dead one by one and pushed over a ravine, men, women, and children, in just two days, in September 1941.
Putin is relying on that awful history, rather than the present time, to justify his invasion. The reality is there are only two democratically elected heads of state that are Jewish in the world right now—one of them is Ukrainian. So it’s a little hard to use that argument right now. He’s got to come up with something new. That's not going to hold water. But, interestingly, he used the same argument when he invaded Crimea in 2014. He cited antisemitism. He even had one of the chief rabbis in Moscow with him when he made the announcement, supposedly to demonstrate the support he was getting from the Jewish community.
On a more personal note, how did you get involved with HIAS? I know you worked for HIAS in Rome many years ago.
When I was in school, I tutored Central American refugees and just really fell in love with the migration issue. And I was a Soviet studies major. So when I graduated from Georgetown, I had an opportunity to work with Soviet refugees in Rome; it was a perfect kind of coalescence of all my interests. In this line of work you make such a difference every day with every family that you work with—it’s very hard to leave it. It’s very addictive to work with refugees when you’re able to make a difference.
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting that you said Soviet studies, because there are some things that I’ve just learned recently that I think a lot of the world doesn't know about the Great Famine or the Holodomor, for one.
Yeah, that’s right.
In Soviet Ukraine, in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, between four and five million people were starved in the course of what, just two years, 1932 to 1933? So a lot of people don’t know how much the Ukrainian people have suffered at the hands of the Soviet system, but also as a direct target of Russian aggression.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
So you think that helps explain . . .
That's one of the reasons why many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis, which is a whole other story. It wasn’t so much that they were welcoming the Nazis as they were happy to get rid of the Soviets after that experience.
In Forward, you write about how, on your trip to Ukraine last October, you were “grateful to witness . . . lives being saved through the humanitarian work of R2P in Kyiv and Slavyansk.” But you also write: “As Zelensky warned, if we don’t provide military assistance, it is only a matter of time before this crisis knocks on our own door. The United States can support Ukraine’s European neighbors by welcoming the women, children, elderly and vulnerable people who have close family in the United States to join them here.”
Right.
Ideally you stop Hitler before the genocide begins. Right?
Right. It’s above my pay grade to talk about those things. But the fact is, this all started with the lack of reaction when Putin went into Crimea in 2014. Actually, I was just in Israel last week and we met with Natan Sharansky—just before Russia’s full-scale invasion—and he brought it all back to Obama’s “red line” in Syria. When Assad crossed that red line, we did nothing, Sharansky said. And that emboldened Putin to go into Crimea. We did nothing. And that emboldened him to stir up conflict in the east. We did nothing. And now here we are.”
Indeed. Thank you for your time, Mark.
Thank you, Michael. Take care.
TFP IS A PROUD MEMBER OF THE IOWA WRITERS COLLABORATIVE
Tough to read but necessary. Thanks.