Famous Refugees
Home country: Sudan
Career: Fashion model
These days, Alek Wek, 34, is one of the most sought models for runways and photo spreads in the fashion world. But when she was 14, Wek’s family fled southern Sudan for the U.K. to escape a brutal civil war. Six years later, she became the first African model to grace the cover of this magazine. She makes a line of designer handbags called "Wek 1933."
Home country: Haiti
Career: Musician
Wyclef Jean’s refugee story inspired his music from the very beginning. He may have left when he was 9 years old, but his native Haiti is never far from his mind. The 41-year-old entertainer’s urgent tweets appealing for aid helped raise millions after 2010’s devastating earthquake. Watch him discuss fundraising efforts through his Yéle foundation. Wyclef even flirted with a Haitian presidential bid.
Home country: Germany
Career: Physicist
His name has practically become synonymous with “genius,” and almost anyone on the street can name Einstein’s most famous discovery, even if they can’t explain what it is. Hitler’s rise to power forced the professor to flee his native Germany in 1933 and accept a teaching post at a well-known university until his death in 1955.
Home country: Germany
Career: Former US secretary of state
He’s best known for serving as America’s top diplomat, but the man who negotiated the end to the Vietnam War and helped send this president to China was actually born overseas. A teenage Heinz Alfred Kissinger, who is now 88, and his family fled Nazi persecution in 1938.
Home country: Germany
Career: Actress/Singer
One of the original superstars of the silver screen, the gender-bending Dietrich shot to worldwide fame as the cabaret singer in a 1930 film. She fled Nazi Germany and went on to earn this recognition.
Home country: Sri Lanka
Career: Singer
Born in London to Tamil parents, M.I.A.’s family returned to their native Sri Lanka when she was an infant. Her father’s political activism in favor of a Tamil homeland forced the family into hiding, and her early years were marked by the violence of the Sri Lankan civil war. The escalation of the conflict forced her mother to bring the family back to London when she was 11.
Home country: Austria
Career: Neurologist
The father of psychoanalysis, Freud is probably best known for his work on the unconscious and a short-lived belief in the healing powers of cocaine. He spent most of his life in Vienna, as part of the city’s rich pre-Nazi Jewish intellectual community, but was forced to flee in 1938.
Home country: Czechoslovakia
Career: Former secretary of state
The first woman to head the State Department was born in Prague. Albright’s parents converted from Judaism to this religion before they fled to London ahead of World War II. Albright, 74, starred as a child refugee in a wartime film aimed at promoting sympathy for all war refugees in London.
Home country: Romania
Career: Olympic gymnast
As a member of the Romanian Olympic Team in 1976, Comaneci won worldwide acclaim when she became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10. She went on to win several medals over the course of her Olympic career, but later defected to the West in the waning days of the Communist regime. Post-retirement, Comaneci became active with the association for this disease and the Special Olympics.
Home country: Tibet
Career: Religious leader
The political and spiritual leader of Tibet has been living outside his homeland since the Chinese army brutally put down a nationalist uprising in 1959. The Dalai Lama turned the northern Indian city of Dharamsala into his home base for his travels around the world preaching compassion, forgiveness and tolerance.
Home country: Cuba
Career: Actor
He earned an Academy Award nomination for playing an Italian mobster in this film, Andy Garcia, 55, born in Havana. After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, a 5-year-old Garcia left Cuba for Miami, where the family set up a successful perfume business. Garcia speaks out regularly on behalf of Cuban political prisoners and in favor of democratic change on the island.
Home country: Romania
Career: Author
Born to a Romanian Jewish family, Wiesel survived the horrors of Auschwitz in World War II and eventually settled in the U.S. His memoir, “Night,” about his time in the camp, has been translated into more than 30 languages, and his work as an activist for peace and forgiveness earned him this acclaimed award.
Home country: Sudan
Career: NBA player
The 6-foot-9 Chicago Bulls forward looks right at home on a basketball court in the Windy City, but his original home is half a world away, in Sudan. A member of the Dinka ethnic group, Deng’s family fled the violence of the Sudanese Civil War and eventually settled in Britain.
Source: msn
