Halinka Rubin can still recall the sad, empty, lonely feeling as she stood on a platform at Gdanski railway station in September 1968, about to leave her country without a passport but with a travel document that said not what she was but what she was not. Valid for three more days, it declared she was no longer a citizen of Poland.
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The 29-year-old microbiologist had held herself together when saying her goodbyes, but was overcome by a sense of panic once inside the train compartment.
“I realise that what I have done is irreversible, [that] this is a one-way journey,” she wrote in a memoir. “The moment we close the window, I begin to cry.”
Ms Rubin is among some 620,000 refugees who have come to this country since Australia became one of the first signatories to the refugee convention. She loved - and still loves - her country of birth, but had to leave when anti-Semitism became intolerable.
“One day, when listening to the news, I heard the roar of the crowds chanting, ‘Jews go home! Jews go home! Jews go home!’ It felt like a witch-hunt, and it was.”
She came to Australia several months after her journey began because she had cousins here, but recalls an uneasy transition, mostly because she was grieving for what she had lost: the family, friends, environment, culture and sense of belonging. That is the bond she shares with the others who have come from countries including Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Cam Nguyen was among the first wave of non-European refugees to come to Australia with her husband and four children, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. She went on to establish the Vietnamese Women's Association to help other refugees.
She returned to Vietnam as a tourist for the first time in 2000, travelling to parts of the country she had never been to before. It was too emotional for her to re-visit her home town of Saigon until two years ago.
“I couldn't think of going back there because when I left, my father and a lot of relatives were living in Saigon," she said. "But now there's no one.There's no one left."
Hussein Almosawi fled Iraq in 1999, having been kicked out of university and told to join the army, which he believed would force him to become one of Saddam Hussein’s personal assassins.
He reached Australia by boat from Jakarta, with 474 other people, after two failed attempts - his boat capsized the first time; the crew lost its way the second.
“It’s not about only running away and trying to get a better life in Australia. The government back then was really bad ... In Indonesia you cannot stay. You are illegal. Indonesia is not a country that can accept refugees," he said. “We cannot go back, we cannot go forward, so we have to cross the ocean. We have no choice.”
Following 14 months in detention, a bus dropped him off at a Brisbane church with only $200 and a Medicare card to help him start again.
After the Tampa episode of 2001, Ms Rubin began writing to asylum seekers detained indefinitely on Nauru and became close to several who were ultimately resettled in Australia.
She is especially disturbed by the parallels between the treatment of Jews fleeing countries under Nazi control before World War II and of Muslims fleeing persecution now. “We haven’t learned anything,” is how she put it.
“Any of us can become a refugee,” she added. “And I’d like to think that if I’m again a refugee, someone would open the door for me and offer me hospitality. And, God forbid, if it happens to my child, I hope that she won’t be left alone and so devastated as so many asylum seekers still are, frightened and threatened.”
