World Refugee Day: Brazilian artist Marina Amaral's photos bring refugee stories to life

The Second World War, which left millions of people homeless, 13 million ethnic Germans were expelled over the following months from the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

This photograph, believed to have been taken in the autumn of 1949, shows a family from Czechoslovakia who were housed at the Delmenhorst camp for displaced persons near Bremen, Germany.

They travelled to Italy in January 1950 and left a few weeks later aboard the USS General Heintzelmann to start their new lives in Melbourne, Australia.

The photo may even have been set up by the crouching man, Jaroslav Patetl, who was a photojournalist.

(Image credit: UNHCR)

The Algerian war of independence, which began in 1954, was a humanitarian crisis that demonstrated how mass displacement was becoming a global challenge, not one limited to Europe. It also showed the potential for coordinated and effective international action to protect and assist refugees.

In the Algeria crisis, for instance, UNHCR worked closely with the League of Red Cross Societies, through local Red Crescent organizations.

The Refugee Agency’s support for Algerian refugees in Morocco and Tunisia, and its help with repatriation at the end of the war, marked the beginning of a much wider involvement in Africa.

(Image credit: Stanley Wright/UNHRC)

The power struggles, ethnic tensions and communal violence that marked the end of colonial rule and the start of independence in Rwanda sparked the large-scale flight of Rwandan Tutsis in the early 1960s – events that would find a horrifying echo three decades later, when those simmering tensions erupted into genocide and a massive humanitarian disaster.

This image shows Rwandans waiting for the distribution of rations at a refugee centre in Uganda’s Oruchinga Valley.

(Image credit: William McCoy/UNHRC)

The Assyrian people are an ethnic group who traditionally inhabited parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye. A predominately Christian minority, they have had to flee conflict and persecution on multiple occasions over the past century.

By the late 1960s, thousands of Assyrians, many of them stateless, had found refuge in Lebanon, including this mother and child living in a housing settlement for Assyrians near Zahlé, in the Bekaa Valley. Regrettably, many would be forced to flee again after Lebanon’s civil war erupted in 1975.

(Image credit: Stanley Wright/ UNHRC)

In the 1960s, UNHCR’s mission expanded well beyond the boundaries of Europe, notably to sub-Saharan Africa as the colonial era ended.

As Angola’s war of independence intensified in 1967–68, around 3,300 Hambukushu people fled across the border to Botswana. The refugees shown here are waiting to receive daily rations in the Etsha settlement.

Ultimately, the fortunes of the Hambukushu in Botswana would prove to be one of the most successful refugee integration stories of the 20th century.

(Image credit: E. Schlatter/UNHRC)

In August 1972, the military despot Idi Amin told the country’s community of Ugandan Asians, who had been living there since the turn of the century, that they had only 90 days to leave.

Many held British passports and were consequently resettled in the United Kingdom, but thousands more were left effectively stateless.

UNHCR appealed for help with resettlement, and Austria was among a number of states to take them in. Here, a few are arriving at Vienna airport.

(Image credit: N. Schuster/UNHCR)

Cyprus became an independent republic in 1960 but tensions between its Greek and Turkish communities turned violent. In July 1974, Turkish forces invaded northern Cyprus in response to a Greek military coup that aimed to unite the island with Greece. The island remains divided to this day.

This photo shows Greek Cypriot children in a refugee camp in Strovolos, a municipality of Nicosia, which at the time had a population of around 1,600.

(Image credit: Jean Mohr/UNHRC)

The mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees began after Saigon fell to Communist forces in 1975. Despite the dangers, including the threat of pirates, tens of thousands of so-called boat people took to the sea.

This image shows members of a group of 162 refugees who arrived in Malaysia in December 1978. Other photographs taken on the same day show their vessel approaching in the distance – and then sinking a few metres from shore.

(Image credit: Kaspar Gaugler/UNHRC)

At the end of the war in Viet Nam, which had spread to neighbouring countries, a new Communist government took power in Laos. Several thousand people, many of them ethnic Hmong who had fought alongside US forces, found themselves in grave danger once the Americans left.

Of those who fled Laos most found a home in the United States, but smaller numbers settled elsewhere, including these children in Argentina. Nearly 40 years on, we caught up with Kykeo Kabsuvan, the boy in the foreground striking a karate pose. 

(Image credit: Alejandro Cherep/UNHRC)