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The sentencing trial for Nikolas Cruz began Monday, starting with jury selection. In October 2021, Cruz pleaded guilty to killing 17 people and injuring 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

This trial will decide whether Cruz is imprisoned for life or receives the death penalty.

Because this case is such a high-profile case, jury selection will work differently, said Gerard Albert III, WLRNs Broward reporter.

It will be done in segments, with the couple dozen jurors selected this week moving on to another round of jury selection next month. They will be asked more specific questions by the lawyers regarding the death penalty.

This process will go on with more groups, with Broward County Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer aiming to go through two to three groups of about 40 to 60 potential jurors a day. A dozen or so from each group goes on to the next round.

In the courtroom, it isnt as dark as the judge thought it would be, he said.

The scheduling questions come out and people talk about their personal lives and open up It is lighter than youd imagine, and I think people might do that on purpose because they also feel a little stressed out, he said.

Day 2 of jury selection nearly saw a mistrial, as Scherer released 11 jurors who said they would not be able to follow the law. This means that they would not be able to sentence someone to the death penalty.

They were released without further questioning. However, the defense argued that with further questioning they mightve been able to change their stance. The next day the defense did not motion for a mistrial, which they couldve.

Scherer is going to try and call those 11 back for questioning in the following weeks.

There are many variables to this case that have heightened the medias attention. Not only is this case a high-profile one, it is also Scherers first capital case. The lead prosecutor, Michael Satz, is also a highly experienced attorney. He spent 44 years serving as Broward Countys State Attorney. He has tried many death penalty cases.

Until the end of May, we will see more jury selections, with Thursdays and Fridays being reserved for more depositions from the lawyers.

Increase in Cuban migrants at the southern border

More Cubans have arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border between October and February than they did during the entire previous fiscal year 47,000 arrivals.

This is the fastest pace since the Mariel boatlift in 1980. But this time instead of thousands taking to the Florida Straits, many are hoping to come to the U.S. overland at the Mexico-U.S. border.

Cubans are making it to the border by going through Nicaragua. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega made it easier for Cubans to visit without a visa. This has made Nicaragua a more convenient stop for Cubans who want to get to the U.S.s southern border through South America.

There is a theory that the Nicaraguan and Cuban governments are actively working to create an immigration crisis at the U.S. southern border to make it harder on President Biden. WLRNs Americas Editor Tim Padgett said there is historical backing behind this theory.

The Cuban government, whether it was todays regime or the regime that Fidel Castro ran when he was alive and in power, it often used migrant crises like these to sort of get back at the U.S. for some slight or some crisis that was going on in the bi-lateral relationship, he said.

He cited the 1994 Balsero crisis, when Castro got angry at the U.S. and allowed Cuban citizens to leave the country without hindrance. He said that whether this theory is true or not, you cant discount it.

Padgett said this situation is also more of a regional reflex, not an intentional effort. Every country going through hard economic times in Latin America has used this mass immigration as a social and political release valve, he said.

When it comes to the difference in handling immigrants at the land border and Cubans at sea, Padgett doesnt think anyone has come up with a complete answer to this. He believes it has to do with the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Thats the law from 1966 that allows Cubans, if theyre able to get into the United States, it allows them a fast track toward the U.S. residency and eventually citizenship, he said.

When Cubans get interdicted at sea they get sent back. But if theyre able to make it to the U.S. southern border on land, Padgett said that its more likely they are able to take advantage of the asylum application system.

Taking advantage of this application system allows them to enter the U.S., and then the stipulations in the Cuban Adjustment Act begin to activate.

Padgett hopes that there isnt a difference in treatment between Cuban immigrants on sea and land. He believes that making that distinction would reflect poorly on the U.S.s treatment of any immigrants from anywhere.

Those in the Cuban diaspora want to see certain services and policies put back into effect. Padgett said the biggest concern among the diaspora is how to start getting those legal processes resumed and active again so Cubans can come to the U.S. legally.

North Miami Beach apartment building evacuated

Dozens of people living in Bayview 60, a North Miami Beach apartment building, were moved out of their homes this week. The evacuation was ordered after the building was deemed structurally unsafe by an engineer.

The foundation of the building was found to have shifted, compromising the integrity of the building.

Bayview 60 is a five-story, 50-year old building built in 1972 with 60 apartments.

It is the second building in North Miami Beach in the past year where residents have been ordered to leave because it's dangerous to stay. And these evacuations come after the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside in June.

North Miami Beach City Manager Arthur Storey said the owners of the building stepped up. They gave every renter their security deposits and April rent, and paid for three nights of housing for them.

Everybody in that building has been introduced to the Homeless Trust, as well as a couple other nonprofits that would offer solutions if they had a hard time finding lodging after those three days, Sorey said.

The city is not monitoring every individual renter, but they do have a hotline open to assist should they need it.

For now, the building is closed and will remain closed. The city is moving through one floor at a time, moving heavy furniture out. After talking to engineers about the building, Sorey does not see it being salvaged. He believes it will have to be torn down.

Nobody will live back in the building until someone comes and says this building is safe to live in, he said. I just dont anticipate that happening.

State Senator Jason Pizzo represents Surfside and North Miami Beach. He said building safety will not be added to the upcoming special legislative session on redistricting.

He believes that the legislature should focus more on building safety following these situations in Surfside, Crestview and Bayview 60. He pushes for residents and tenants of condos and other buildings to inquire about where they live, and he believes the state is critical in possible building safety reforms.

As a condo owner, and probably the only senator living in a condo according to him, he is frustrated to see such petty partisanship.

I said very very early shortly after the June 24th partial and then obviously the collapse of Champlain, I didnt think the governor had any appetite whatsoever to engage in condo reform, he said. As youve seen over the past few sessions, the governor exerts his influence on my colleagues to pass things that very infrequently have anything to do with saving lives.

If his colleagues cant get it done, then hell get it done, he said.

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Cruz's sentencing trial, increase in Cuban migrants, and an apartment complex evacuated - WLRN

Separately, The Telegraph can also disclose that protests by Extinction Rebellion at fuel depots threaten to pile even more misery on holidaymakers hoping to fly abroad this Easter.

Aviation industry leaders held crisis talks with government officials late last week after Birmingham Airport scrambled to avoid running out of aviation fuel.

Jets were asked to land at the airport with extra supplies so that they did not need to refill following the obstruction of deliveries at a nearby depot.

Airline and airport representatives are understood to have on Tuesday held fresh talks with Border Force officials amid concerns over the return of holidaymakers from their Easter break.

Border Force staff were reassigned from airports to deal with other issues such as the English Channel migrant crisis during the pandemic after most flights were grounded due to travel restrictions.

One senior industry figure said: "There were some concerns that a lot of Border Force staff had been taken out of airports and whether we would get them back again."

Long queues at airports showed no signs of abating on Tuesday as operators struggled to cope with large numbers of passengers, many of whom were going abroad for the first time in two years. More than 1,000 flights have been cancelled since the start of the Easter school holidays.

Industry leaders have pointed the finger at Whitehall. They say it is taking up to twice as long to complete security vetting procedures.

A spokesman for Airlines UK said: We are working closely and productively with all parts of Government to ensure we have the right levels of resource across the sector, including at the border. We knew things would be bumpy for the travel sector ramping up its operations from virtually nothing and are working hard to ensure things are back to normal as quickly as possible.

We are not apportioning blame to anyone, rather trying to work constructively across industry and with Ministers to resolve the problem.

A spokesman for the Home Office said: Those travelling in and out of the UK over the busy Easter period may face longer wait times than usual due a high number of passengers and as we ensure all passengers are compliant with the security and immigration measures put in place to keep us safe.

Border Forces number one priority is to maintain a secure border, and we will not compromise on this. We are mobilising additional staff to help minimise queuing times for passengers and will continue to deploy our staff flexibly to manage this demand.

Birmingham Airport insisted the fuel shortages had not led to cancellations. Andrew Holl, director of airfield operations for Birmingham Airport, said: The protests at Kingsbury depot caused minor delivery problems but our operations were largely unaffected because we sourced fuel from other depots and some incoming aircraft were asked to come with enough fuel on board for their return trips.

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Priti Patel was warned about Easter travel chaos a month ago - The Telegraph

Amid the churn of recent headlines about inflation and the war in Ukraine, you might have missed whats happening right now on the southwest border not the ongoing border crisis, but something very much related to it. For the past few days, commercial traffic between the United States and Mexicohas ground to a halt.

On Monday, Mexican truckers blocked north and southbound lanes on the Mexico side of the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge in Pharr, Texas. They did it to protest Texas Gov. Greg Abbotts decision last week to order state troopers to inspect all northbound commercial trucks, something usually done by federal authorities. The state inspections immediately caused massive delays at ports of entry all along the border, triggeringa second protest by truckers waiting to cross into El Pasoon Monday afternoon, with trucks blocking both northbound and southbound lanes in Juarez.

This is no small thing. The volume of international traffic in question is massive. At the port of entry in Laredo, Texas, about 20,000 commercial trucks cross the border every day. Hundreds of billions of dollars in trade flow over the Texas-Mexico border every year. The entire system is a well-oiled machine. Throwing a wrench into it, even a minor one, could create a different sort of crisis at the border. But it might be worth it.

The backstory here is that Abbott issued those inspection orders last week in response to the Biden administrations plans to cancel Title 42, the public health order invoked by then-President Trump at the onset of the pandemic. For the past two years, Title 42 has enabled federal authorities to expel illegal immigrants quickly amid an historic surge in illegal immigration. Its not too much to say that Title 42 is the last remaining tool the federal government has to control record-high levels of illegal immigration.

Every other policy the Trump administration implemented to secure the border has been rescinded or neutered by Biden, and on May 23, Title 42 will be gone too. As my colleague Jordan Boyd hasexplained in some detail, the border will then be effectively open to almost anyone. Instead of arresting 150,000 or 200,000 illegal immigrants a month, federal authorities will be dealing with a half-million migrants or more each month, possiblyas many as 18,000 a day.

Those are numbers far beyond the federal governments ability to detain or even process. The only choice federal officials will have in that situation is to immediately release migrants they catch crossing illegally, or not detain them in the first place, rendering the border effectively lawless.

Whats coming, in other words, is a border surge of historic and almost unimaginable proportions, and it is happening as a direct result of Bidens policy choices. The crisis about to unfold is 100 percent avoidable, and 100 percent Bidens fault.

Abbotts response to Biden ending Title 42 was toissue a series of executive orderslast week that seemed designed to gin up headlines and media coverage rather than actually secure his states 1,200-mile border with Mexico. The order that got the most attention wasnt the inspections that have snarled commercial traffic on the international bridges but Abbotts plan to charter buses and flights to transport migrants released from federal custody to Washington, D.C. Evacuating them, as the order puts it.

Federal government wants to open the border? Fine, let those fat cats in Washington deal with the illegals! So goes the thinking, if not the rhetoric.

Abbotts busing order is quite obviously a stunt a cheap shot at Biden that makes no effective use of his considerable powers as governor of Texas. It will almost certainly not result in even one migrant showing up in Washington who was not already headed in that direction, especially given that transport to the nations capital must be voluntary.

Such stunts are to be expected with Abbott, though. I saw first-hand late last year how his sprawling Operation Lone Star, which purports to use state law enforcement to secure the border in the face of federal inaction,is almost entirely political theater. Dont get me wrong, its expensive and logistically complex, but given the narrowness of its scope and the legal constraints the Abbott administration has imposed on its application, Operation Lone Star hasnt made a dent in the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border into Texas, and it never will.

So too with this unserious busing scheme. If Abbott were serious about securing the border, he wouldnt announce a plan to transport migrants to Washington but a plan to take them back to Mexico. Inthese pages yesterday, Ken Cuccinelli argued that Abbotts busing gimmick is nothing more than window dressing that amounts to a taxpayer-funded sideshow to pay for optional vacations 2,000 miles away at a time of record gas prices instead of turning these illegal migrants around and sending them two miles back across the border.

Cuccinelli, who served as deputy secretary of Homeland Security and director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Trump administration, is among those who have rightlyarguedthat the border crisis amounts to an invasion under Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. In the face of federal inaction, he argues, states like Texas have the authority to arrest and remove illegal immigrants, securing the border entirely with state law enforcement.

Under normal circumstances, immigration enforcement of course falls entirely under federal purview. States, even border states like Texas, have a limited role in it. But these are not normal circumstances.

The relevant section of the Constitution that Cuccinelli and others point to says this: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.

Those last two phrases are what Cuccinellis argument hinges on. Indeed, theres a strong case already that Texas is being actually invaded and that the situation will not admit delay. When a half-million migrants show up on the border in June after Title 42 is gone, there will be no question that the state is being actually invaded and that the situation will not admit delay.

Theres almost no chance, however, that Abbott will ever agree with such an interpretation of the Constitution or even seriously consider taking action based on it. Too bad, because it would not only focus Bidens attention on the border but also force a reckoning over an important constitutional question: if the federal government is derelict in its duties, do states have the right to act on their own?

But Abbott could dodge that reckoning while still challenging Washington to address the border crisis. The complete shutdown of commercial traffic on the border this week presents an opportunity for Abbott, if he can seize it.

By ordering state inspections of commercial trucks coming in from Mexico, Abbott has demonstrated the leverage he could have over policymakers in Mexico in much the same way Trump did in May 2019, when he threatened a 5 percent tariff on all Mexican imports unless Mexico cracked down on illegal immigration and intercepted the large migrant caravans trekking toward the U.S. border. Mexican President Andrs Manuel Lpez Obrador responded immediately to avoid the ruinous tariffs, and illegal immigration quickly plummeted.

Admittedly, forcing commercialtraffic between the United States and Mexico to grind to a halt will also harm the Texas economy just as Trumps threatened 5 percent tariff on Mexican imports would have in 2019 but it will hurt Mexico worse and more quickly, which means it has a chance of working, by motivating Mexican officialdom and by forcing the Biden administration to engage.

But it will only work if Abbott comes out like Trump did and explains what hes doing and why. Given the protests and the delays at the ports of entry, which were already up to 12 hours at some crossings on Monday, Abbott should hold a press conference later this week and explain that the entire situation is entirely of Bidens making, and that all the president needs to do to reopen international trade along the U.S.-Mexico border is to reverse course on the cancellation of Title 42, which he could do with one phone call. He could also call on Lpez Obrador to put pressure on Biden to keep Title 42 in place.

Abbott has real leverage here, and he should go out of his way to ensure that everyone knows it. He could say, Because Biden will not secure this border, as governor of Texas I have a duty to protect the people of this state, so Im shutting it down. Something like that. He might even enjoy it.

If Abbott wants headlines, that will do it. It might also help secure the border.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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To Secure The Border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Should Shut It Down - The Federalist

About six months have passed since the Taliban overran Afghanistan and took control of the capital, Kabul, in the midst of a hasty retreat by an international coalition mired in purposelessness and the usual pains of propping up fragile post-conflict regimes.The ensuing violence and transformations within the country have rightly triggered the international communitys punitive isolation of the Taliban regime. Unfortunately, they have also fueled a humanitarian disaster that began with a severe drought, prior to the violent Taliban takeover, and has only intensified with each passing day.A collapsing economy and the reemergence of harmful actors under a mostly ambivalent Taliban regime are the least of the concerns among most Afghans. After all, even if a harsh winter is about to end, the combined effects of the suspension of all international assistance and humanitarian aid to the country, the COVID-19 pandemic and a famine have left nearly 9 million people on the verge of starvation.Meanwhile, an unperturbed Taliban persists with its human rights violations and crackdowns targeting women, girls, human rights activists and journalists. This has left many people facing persecution and has compounded the woes that have already forced some to flee the country to survive, or at least to strongly consider doing so.Unfortunately, even though the challenging circumstances Afghans face are well documented, many desperate refugees and asylum seekers are yet to receive the generous support and assistance for resettlement they need, particularly from the coalition of nations that were involved in the intervention in Afghanistan.After that two-decade-long intervention, during which more than 2 million people from other countries served in Afghanistan, the current malaise betrays the propensity for links and connections between the Afghan people and the US, along with some of its allies, that other conflict zones simply do not have.A number of Western countries have an almost personal affinity with Afghans, and are more cognizant of the Central Asian countrys woes than they are of problems in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Libya. It is these very ties, and an extraordinary level of commitment and dedication by numerous countries around the globe, that resulted in a massive influx of attention, aid and support last August.Private donors, philanthropists and nonprofit organizations led or joined remarkable evacuation efforts. Countries stepped forward with offers to host Afghans, while Western governments coordinated arrivals, vetting procedures and makeshift resettlement initiatives.It was a strange model for preempting what could have been a disastrous refugee crisis but it worked, and its relative successes can be used as a basis on which to formulate adaptive responses to similar crises in future.

Granted, necessity, self-preservation and the need to save face might have been the main motivations for this kind of unprecedented alignment of interests after a humiliating conclusion to a costly, two-decade-long intervention. After all, Western societies appeared fairly evenly split on the question of whether to exit Afghanistan completely or deploy more boots on the ground to halt the Taliban advance and protect what little gains had been made.Regardless, the result was a positive demonstration of what the international community can accomplish when humanitarian needs supersede calls for disengagement in a fragmenting global order at a time when more countries are embracing insularity at the behest of populations wary of costly, rudderless overseas interventions.However, the apathy, division, hostility and confusion that have overtaken discourse on the continued resettlement of refugees are incongruous with the Wests highly touted humanitarian commitments and accomplishments, and what soon awaits beleaguered Afghans as a result is a horrifying tragedy.

Punishing desperate Afghans and denying them aid is not only unsustainable, it is a harbinger of the worst-case scenario.

Hafed Al-Ghwell

It is a far cry from similar, relatively successful efforts dating as far back as the middle of the Cold War, when the aftermath of the Vietnam War and other conflicts in Southeast Asia resulted in nearly 3 million refugees who were eventually resettled between 1975 and the early 1990s in the US, Canada, Europe and parts of Asia.Several other programs have also been quite successful but beginning in the mid-2010s, the global resettlement order appears to have become severely atrophied and crippled in its ability to absorb a massive influx of arrivals, a situation not helped by the growing list of trouble spots in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, parts of the Middle East, and Southwest Asia.Western responses to refugee or migrant crises in many countries are now susceptible to changing national political tides that favor less involvement overseas and more of a focus on shoring up domestic priorities.Worse yet, newly resettled, and even well-established, migrant communities are increasingly the scapegoats for escalating socioeconomic ills amid intensifying culture wars promoted by contrarian, anti-immigrant political forces.These shifting tides continually discourage governments and lawmakers from initiating or fully participating in refugee-resettlement programs because the political costs of doing so increasingly outweigh any potential benefits of accepting new arrivals.This unsettling reality that is taking root in developed countries is contrary to decades of research and documentation about the ways in which refugees and migrants enrich societies, enhance productivity, stimulate economies and complement labor markets.It is, therefore, unsurprising that 85 percent of the more than 84 million forcibly displaced people in the world are hosted by middle-income or developing countries such as Turkey, Colombia, Pakistan and Uganda. Appallingly, in a world where one in every 95 people have left their home countries as a result of conflict or persecution, the contribution of the West to stemming these flows is barely noticeable.The commendable efforts to assist Afghan evacuees and refugees last year, and Ukrainians this year, demonstrate clearly that there is no shortage of international goodwill, capacity or willingness in the world to provide safe havens for those fleeing violence and persecution.A lot of work still needs to be done, however, and the current intransigence is simply unacceptable when it is clear that responding generously and well to the extraordinary challenges in Afghanistan is in the best interests of an array of actors, including interventionist NATO members and neighboring countries that are now hosting large numbers of Afghans.The ongoing Afghan refugee crisis is an opportunity for far-off powers to demonstrate their determination to honor stated commitments or to use their positions of leadership to corral support, in particular Germany, which currently holds the presidency of the G7. It is also an opportunity for the EU to demonstrate moral leadership and show its generosity, to preempt a potential repeat of the European migrant crisis in 2015 should desperate Afghans attempt the dangerous trek northwest in search of hope.The international community must not rest on its laurels after Afghanistan or simply laud its responses to the crisis in Ukraine. It is paramount that it reinvigorate global refugee resettlement processes to better tackle the flow of Afghan refugees and those from any future conflict-related migration crises.Host countries must prioritize safety, education, financial stability and community-building for refugees, which are key to any successful resettlement program, especially if they are tailored to better address the differing priorities among those seeking permanent relief.On a broader level, the international community must also address well-known barriers to successful resettlement and enhance international cooperation, not only to absorb an influx of arrivals but to preempt such crises through smarter interventions.Clearly, more boots on the ground have proven ineffectual at countering violent escalations of conflicts, especially when the government structures they prop up simply collapse within days of the inevitable withdrawal. Similarly, while measures such as punitive isolation, the halting of aid and the conditionalizing of humanitarian assistance might work as leverage in some conflict-prone areas, so far in Afghanistan they have served to compound humanitarian woes more than to nudge the Taliban toward tolerance of certain compromises that would be palatable to the West.Punishing desperate Afghans and denying them aid is not only unsustainable, it is a harbinger of the worst-case scenario which is strange because the world is clearly well prepared to deal with the current crisis but remains unwilling to do what is necessary as the clock runs out.

Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view

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Dealing with the Afghan refugee crisis - Arab News

Berlins most haunted street is the Stresemannstrasse: a ragged artery that was once a bustling avenue for arrivals, adjacent to the cavernous Anhalter train station. The station was a main departure point, too, for countless German Jews, communists and others who, from the 1930s on, fled the ever-tightening Nazi net. From May 1945, the station was the end of the line for ethnic Germans fleeing from eastern territories in modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic.

The ruined front portal is all that remains of the Anhalter station, but a new museum directly opposite has just opened its doors with a portentous message. The flow of people we are seeing today from Ukraine, or in 2015 from Syria, is the rule, not the exception, in human history.

Berlins Documentation Centre for Displacement, Expulsion and Reconciliation is the right idea at by tragic coincidence the right time.

Berlin is filled with museums about the Nazi dictatorship, but this new institution tells the story of what happened afterwards, when the postwar wave of German refugees fleeing the Red Army turned into something much, much larger. In total, up to 14 million Germans and German speakers were forced to leave their homes across central and southern Europe in what historians describe as the largest movement of people since the Book of Exodus.

At least 500,000 people died along the way of exhaustion, malnutrition or worse as neighbours turned on them and borders shifted the wrong way. For decades this loss of lives, homes, culture and land has been a contested source of pain and shame in Germany (irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/back-in-bohemia-the-sun-shines-on-a-return-to-the-sudetenland-1.1867276) and a massive blind spot in Europes postwar narrative.

Two objects at the heart of the exhibition sum up the documentation centres main aspiration. One is a battered wooden hand cart, the kind used by countless women to transport their belongings from East Prussia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland. Adjacent, a simple nylon rucksack carried by a Syrian arrival during the 2015-2016 refugee crisis that brought more than one million people to Germany.

For director Gundula Bavendamm, the centre is an attempt to move Germanys postwar remembrance culture beyond the victim-perpetrator model to acknowledge the ambivalence of our history and of history in general.

Our exhibition is not about national navel-gazing but rather aims to contribute to a more mature culture of remembrance, one that weights our history in a responsible, nuanced way and puts it in a European context, she says.

In airy, modern new 6,000sq m (64,600sq ft) exhibition spaces the first floor takes a broad historical approach to the theme of forced migration. It focuses in particular on how the rise of the nation state in the 18th century opened the door to nationalism which, when exaggerated to create an idealised sense of identity, has served as kindling for mass murder and countless wars.

Providing this broad context as a foundation, before moving on to the specific German case, was a long and controversial battle but has, Dr Bavendamm suggests, found tragic confirmation in Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The need to homogenise a society, or to make a societal minority part of a majority, is something you can see today in Putins rhetoric, such as him offering Russian passports to people in eastern Ukraine, she says. Our exhibition has a lot to say about how often citizenship has been used to extend and revoke rights from people and thus to engineer the relations between individuals and a society, a state or a nation.

Visitors move up a spiral staircase to the second floor where, with restraint, curators let hundreds of authentic exhibits tell their own tales of lives interrupted. Like a white cloth with the half-finished hand-stitched text: Let your heart be as pure as your kitchen. In addition to the exhibition spaces, a library allows visitors to explore more than 12,000 reports of eye witnesses.

In todays terms, historians say the postwar expulsion pushed by Germanys neighbours but organised by the victorious Aallies would be classified as ethnic cleansing.

The millions of mostly women, children and the elderly arrived on foot or in cattle wagons of the sort previously used to transport European Jews to their death. With curious accents, traditions and outfits, many were an alien sight, and an ideal scapegoat for other Germans guilt and frustration as they struggled to feed their families and rebuild their lives.

There was little compassion or capacity to help the army of new arrivals and discrimination was rife. And when, eventually, Germans began to deal with their Nazi complicity, the suffering of the expellees soon became subordinate to the primary victims of Nazi genocide. Efforts by expellee groups to keep their lives and losses in the public eye grew more desperate, sometimes tipping over into revanchism, and were sidelined by many in Germany as revisionist and relativist.

It was only a decade ago that the first major scholarly study of this era appeared:, Orderly and Humane, written by US-based historian Ray Douglas.

Born in Derry and raised on Dublins northside, Prof Douglas remembers his book tour through Germany as an exhausting series of encounters with grateful survivors and particularly shocking for him their deeply traumatised adult children.

At a signing in Munich a very distinguished psychiatrist came up to me, dropped her book and started weeping into the soaking shoulder of her husband, he recalls. She was born on an expulsion train from Silesia in December 1946 and, though she was a psychiatrist, she was unable to put the trauma of her past behind her.

Prof Douglas is impressed at how, after two decades of emotional debate, the Berlin centre has finally opened its doors, even if the pandemic means that many people including himself have not yet managed to visit.

As the world faces ever-growing numbers of displaced people, he says it has never been more important to build resilience and counter racism among Germans, and other visitors, by reminding us that all people have a shared migrant past.

People being moved around by exposure to conflict is seen by many as a foreign concept, in every sense of the word, but the numbers of displaced people are growing exponentially, he said. This museum is coming at a marvellous time. As the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: the past hasnt happened yet.

f-v-v.de

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New Berlin museum reminds visitors of shared migration history - The Irish Times