Vienna-born Gertrude, who has lived in Portugal for 65 years, was 15 when she left her country for the first time in 1948. She was among more than 3,000 unaccompanied minors who disembarked in Lisbon as part of an initiative by the Catholic charity Caritas International. Gertrude was reunited with a sister who had been in Portugal since 1946.
“My father had returned from the war, after two and a half years detained in an American concentration camp,” she says.
A childless couple in Elvas in the Alentejo took Gertrude in. Some while afterwards she returned to Vienna but before long she returned to Portugal, where she married a Portuguese national in Coimbra.
“I wouldn’t change Portugal for anything,” says Mohammad Pourfarzaneh, 53, a native of Teheran who now runs a dental clinic with his wife in Oliveira do Hospital in northern Portugal. “No one could get me out of here.”
Hamid, as he is known to his family and friends, was 21 when he fled Iran in 1983 together with a childhood friend, with the help of Pakistanis who gave them fake passports.
The pair’s initial aim was to get to the US but they studied at the University of Oporto after securing provisional residence.
“My integration was extremely pleasant and I had no problems with xenophobia - on the contrary,” he stresses.
The Cold War and police repression of demonstrations against the arms race were what prompted German Detlef Shaft to come to Portugal. Now a professional clown and director of a theatre company in Lousã, the 60-year-old says he “did not feel at all well” in West Germany as it was at the time but found it “very easy” to integrate into Portuguese society.