The final amendments of this book were made in November 2016, a week after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States of America. Isolationism and the attack of the ‘enemy within’ and the ‘enemy without’ in the form of the illegal/criminal ‘alien’ were major features of Trump's propaganda, as they were in the equally successful ‘Brexit’ campaign in the UK some months earlier. These happenings, alongside the rise of nationalist–racist parties to power in Hungary and Poland and the growth of far right anti-migrant groups in western Europe, make this a bleak and frightening time to write about refugees of the Nazi era and their relevance to today. The very future of liberal democracy in the west seems far less certain than at any point since 1945. Moreover, anti-migrant rhetoric has become socially and politically acceptable. And yet in 2015 there was collective shock at the death of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, who was washed up on a tourist beach in Turkey and came for a time to represent the migrant crisis. It prompted one of the most remarkable post-war responses to a refugee crisis, spearheaded by Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany. That most other European countries failed to follow her lead and that there has been, at this point in time, a limited backlash in Germany itself does not take away from the moral stance of Merkel and millions of ordinary Germans who have offered help and support to these refugees. It is a hopeful message and example at a time when cultural and political despair among progressive forces is all too easy. Yet, however understandable, pessimism has to be resisted and all our energy placed into making the world a safer and more caring place.

The refugee crises with which each of the parts of Journeys from the Abyss concludes are ongoing and will no doubt intensify further. Indeed, 2016 has witnessed more migrant deaths at sea than the previous record years – a reflection of the clumsy and increasingly grotesque ways in which restrictionist measures are impacting on the ordinary people who are trying to make a better life for themselves free from persecution, oppression, and poverty.