In honor of International Women’s Day we are devoting all of our blog content for this month to amazing women in our community and around the world!
Today, we’re focusing on 4 refugee women who changed the world:
Anne Frank was born in Germany in 1929. Her family fled to the Netherlands in 1934 when the Nazis took control of Germany. In 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands, stripped all Jews of their German citizenship and began rounding them up and sending them to concentration camps. Anne and her family went into hiding for the next 4 years, and it was during this time that she kept her diary that would go on to become one of the most read books about the Nazi persecution. Anne and her family were arrested in 1944 and sent to a concentration camp where she died a few months later. Anne dreamed of changing the world through writing—which is exactly what she did.
“I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that’s why I’m so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that’s inside me!”
Nadia was born in 1993 in Kojo, Iraq. She and her family are members of a persecuted religious minority called the Yazidis. In 2014, the Islamic State gained control of large areas of Iraq and Syria and began committing genocide against the Yazidis. They attacked her village, killing hundreds of men—including much of her family—and taking the women and children captive. During her captivity, she was subject to horrible sexual violence, but she managed to escape and made her way to Germany as a refugee. Since, she has become an outspoken advocate for victims of human trafficking and genocide, telling her story before the United Nations and working to help prosecute Islamic State commanders in international court. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018.
“Deciding to be honest was one of the hardest decisions I have ever made…and also the most important.”
Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to two Jewish parents. Her family fled to the United Kingdom when she was just a small child to escape Nazi occupation and hid their Jewish identity to avoid persecution. After the end of the war, they returned to their country where her father took a position in the foreign service for the Czech government. But when the Communist Party took over in 1948 with help from the Soviet Union, her father was forced out of his job and threatened with political persecution if he didn’t embrace communism. Under threat, he brought his family to the US when Madeleine was 11 years old. There, the family was granted political asylum and the chance to make a new life for themselves. Madeleine Albright went on to become a US ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman US Secretary of State.
“It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.”
Ilhan Omar was born in 1982 in Mogadishu, Somalia. Her mother died when she was two, so she was raised by her father and grandfather. When the Somali civil war intensified in 1988, her family fled as refugees to Kenya and lived in the Dadaab refuge camp near Nairobi for 4 years. In 1992, they had the opportunity to come to the US and eventually settled in Minnesota where her father found work as a taxi driver and then a postal worker. He stressed the importance of education and raised Ilhan to be engaged in civic activities from a young age. She was elected to the Minnesota State House of Representatives in 2016 and the US House of Representatives in 2018. She and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan were the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.
“This country gave us hope. This country allowed for us to develop our own identity and to create our own home. And we should not look down on the next person that is trying to do that.”
These women inspire us with their courage, boldness and leadership—but we know their accomplishments will pale in comparison to those of the generation of young women who are coming up right now. Here, in Northwest Arkansas alone, we see young refugee women daring greatly and dreaming big: dreaming of careers as firefighters and doctors and engineers. We see girls leading their soccer teams to victory and mothers starting businesses out of their homes. We see women teaching each other how to drive and getting organized in support of one another.
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