Rithy Panh Quotes

Well, you know, I left Cuba as a kid when I was 6 years old back in 1971.

So that when I came from Panama... my family was exiled in 1973 and they went to Miami.

We live in the age of the refugee, the age of the exile.

Most human experience has been that of statelessness.

My parents left Germany in a very, very precarious way.

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family - me, my brother, and my parents - escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

I escaped from my home country, Bulgaria, to Czechoslovakia and then to the West.

When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

I grew up acutely aware of the exile and distance caused by war.

After the outbreak of war, in April 1940, we left Geneva with our three children aged 4 years, 2 years and 2 weeks only to become part of the disordered refugee crowds fleeing across France from the German army.

When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.

The banishment [of Russian Jews], whether by direct decree or by not less certain indirect methods, of so large a number of men and women is not a local question. A decree to leave one's country is in the nature of things an order to enter another—some other.

If I hadn't left Czechoslovakia, I would have been dead.

People traverse the dangerous journey to the US because of deep fear. They are often escaping brutality, even life-or-death situations.

As a teenager I became a boat person - a refugee - as I made my way to Palestine.

My grandparents were very well-educated people, but in the Jewish tradition. They knew everything about the Bible. And then they had to come to Brussels, to run away from Poland, because there was too much anti-Semitism. They lost everything they had.

My family is originally from Palestine, who came here to the United States, you know, from an occupied land to find a better life and find security and safety.

I grew up learning firsthand what it was like to flee communism and oppression.

I'm out of Russia and have no plans to go back.

When I was in Switzerland, I still had the fantasy I could have saved my parents and family if I'd stayed in Germany. All nonsense. If they had not made the sacrifice to send their only child to Switzerland, I wouldn't be alive.

My parents sent me to Switzerland on a Kindertransport.

Leaving southern Sudan as a child was terrifying. It was 1985, and my family and I were trying to escape to Khartoum, the capital in the North, to safety.

Educate yourself, learn about what refugees face when they don't have homes, after they have lost everything.