Alan Gratz's Refugee is a young-adult novel about three young refugees from different eras: Josef Landau, a German Jew displaced from Nazi Germany; Isabel Fernandez, a Cuban fleeing her starving country in 1994; and Mahmoud Bishara, a Syrian escaping civil war in 2015.
The story is told through short chapters that alternate between the three protagonists' points of view. The first storyline follows Josef, a Jewish boy living in Nazi Germany during the 1930s, who escapes on a ship bound for Cuba with his family in 1939. When the MS St. Louis is turned away and they are forced to return to Europe, Josef and his mother and sister find temporary refuge in France before the Nazis invade and they must go on the run again. The second story is about Isabel, a Cuban girl whose family is caught up in the turmoil of the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis. When her father is nearly arrested for taking part in an uprising, Isabel's family and her neighbors board a makeshift watercraft and attempt the crossing to Florida. They escape capture by the US Coast Guard, but Isabel's young neighbor dies during the journey. The third storyline follows Mahmoud, a Syrian boy whose family flees when their apartment is destroyed by a bomb several years after the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War. Alongside countless others, the family makes their way through Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Hungary, and Austria, finally finding refuge in Germany. The three stories insect when the narrator reveals that Isabel's grandfather was one of the policemen responsible for turning away the MS St. Louis and that Mahmoud's German host is Josef's younger sister, who survived the Holocaust because Josef volunteered to be taken to a concentration camp instead of her.
Exploring themes of trauma, survival, perseverance, hope, and self-sacrifice, Refugee weaves together three refugee stories that depict the universal need for safety amid destabilizing crises. News coverage of the ongoing Syrian Civil War influenced Gratz's decision to write the novel, which draws on real-life refugee experiences and bases several characters on historical figures, such as Gustav Schröder, the German sea captain of the MS St. Louis. In his author's note, Gratz writes that some of the proceeds of the book will go to UNICEF to support relief efforts with refugee children.
