Introduction

        “Who says the Berlin Wall has fallen? What do we mean the Berlin Wall has fallen? Did we see the Berlin Wall fall? Is there a big hole there?”
        Frank Crepeau was holding a little slip of paper.  It was a dispatch that had just come in from Berlin.  It was filed with what was known as a flash priority, which was pretty much reserved for, say, the assassination of an American president or an invasion from outer space.  It was a single sentence, unattributed, too remarkable to be real.  It simply said that the Berlin Wall had fallen.
        I was a copy editor on the foreign desk of a wire service, The Associated Press in New York.  Frank Crepeau was the assistant foreign editor.  He’d worked in Moscow and Berlin and Prague, among other places, back in the days when nations were constructed to keep their citizens caged.  I sat in the slot, the center of a horseshoe-shaped collection of desks, and he sat off to the side, waiting to pounce on the mistakes that the rewrites and the filers like me inevitably made during the chaos of deadline.  So when something akin to science fiction popped up on the little printer at my right elbow, I handed the printer slip to him.  And he looked at it with the incredulity of someone who had personally felt the chill winds of the Cold War.
        He called the bureau in Berlin.  East Germany’s government had, indeed, lifted travel restrictions.  The wall, technically, was open.  Frank was satisfied.  I pressed a key on my computer and put a bulletin on the wire.  It was Nov. 9, 1989.  The Berlin Wall had fallen, and nobody could quite believe it.
        Five months later, mostly by coincidence, I was sent to East Germany, and from there I took assignments to Moscow, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, Bosnia and many other places.   And it seemed as though most of the stories I wrote in some way included a large number of people who had been forced to leave their homes, their jobs, their countries, their particular place in the world.  Whether it was a Tutsi teen-ager on the road in Rwanda or a Togolese computer expert fleeing across the Sahara, every event seemed to have a sizable population of displaced people attached to it.  But it wasn’t until I came home five years later, after I’d left behind the little pieces of different places, that I realized how much all of these people were part of the same story.
        In September 1995, during one of the many events held to mark the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, a group of diplomats, writers and humanitarians convened at Columbia University in New York to discuss a phenomenon that policy analysts refer to as forced migration.  The purpose was to bring together people with a knowledge of the topic to discuss what to do about the multitude of refugees spawned by the porous borders, ethnically retooled homelands and overhauled ideologies that emerged when the Soviet Union quit the Cold War.
        At one point, the discussion turned to the apathy that people in the wealthy West in general and the United States in particular had for what seemed to be the same faceless mass of wanderers, distant and anonymous and perpetually in need of a handout.  And it dawned on me that perhaps that was the overlooked element that should have made their  stories compelling: the shared voyage, their participation in a phenomenon so large and complex that most people can see it only as small pieces that look wearisomely alike.
        An estimated 50 million people were either driven from their countries or uprooted within them by the mid 1990s, roughly one out of every 100 people on earth.  Counting those who emigrated for what were viewed as dire economic reasons, the figure more than doubles.  The impact of this great migration has been enormous.  It has compelled U.S.-led armies to intervene in faraway wars.  It has led to a reactionary wave of restrictive immigration laws around the world.  And it has planted the seeds of countless future conflicts.
        This book doesn’t seek to join the sometimes insular debate about the future of U.S.   policy in the post-Cold War era, but to perhaps move some aspects of it to slightly broader precincts, to put a few faces on the aftermath of one era and the rough beginnings of another, to detail how individual lives have been changed forever by abstract events.  This book is a visit to a misunderstood world, a veritable refugee nation, a shadowland of outlanders that overlaps uncomfortably with our own world, but which exists very much in a different dimension governed by its own rules for survival.  The inhabitants are motivated by varying degrees of two basic impulses: a desire to escape danger and a yearning for a life that comes closest to the one that we live.  If we take a big enough step backward to see this world, if we study its contours, it is clear we are moving through one of mankind’s greatest migratory disturbances, one with the power to shape our future.
        I’ve tried to write an intimate portrait of the opening moments of this great migration.  The goal is to shed light on the primal struggle a human being must endure when he or she travels the same treacherous road, the one that leads from home.  This is the tale of the contemporary refugee, orbiting the earth, of different people from different places sharing essentially the same remarkable odyssey across landscapes reshaped by the end of the Cold War.  It is a chronicle of escape and pursuit, pilgrimage and exile.  It is a postcard from oblivion.