The 90-year-old using sports to change the lives of refugees

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Claude Marshall: I was born in Germany. My parents were refugees. Took me with them at four years old.

Almost all refugees come out of violence. Could be a tribe next door who want what you have on the ground.

What do you think climate change is going to do in the refugee world?

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. This week: we hear from a man who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and has spent his retirement working for refugees around the world - using sport as a way to help them overcome unspeakable trauma.

Claude Marshall: All of a sudden you have given them an interest in waking up tomorrow. They've lost their old crowd. They have to have a new one. And sports does it.

Robin Pomeroy: Now in his 90s, Claude Marshall is still raising funds from sports organisations to get organised sport happening in refugee camps - vital, he says, for boys and girls

Claude Marshall: And she said, "I want them to have sport just like those boys out front. The girls are no different. They need sport. They have to get out of their skin and laugh. They need a new life and sport will do it."

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts where you will also find our sister podcasts, Meet the Leader, Agenda Dialogues and the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast.

I’m Robin Pomeroy, Podcasts Editor at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at refugees, sport, and volunteering in your 90s…

Claude Marshall: Don't close your eyes.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

Around the world there are well over 100 million people who have been forced to flee their homes, and of them about 35 million are refugees - people who have fled to another country.

Put yourself in theior shoes. What would you hope to find once you reached the relative safety of a refugee camp? Shelter, food, but what else?

Today’s guest is someone who has been a volunteer consultant to the UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, since 1993, raising funds for refugees aimed at providing them with sports facilities.

Now 90, retired businessman Claude Marshall tells us why sport is so important for refugees and compares the prospects for refugees today with those of the 1930s when he himself fled the threat of annihilation as a Jew living in Nazi Germany.

I spoke to Claude when he came into the World Economic Forum office in Geneva, the city where he lives, a few weeks ago, and started by asking him how he first got into volunteering for the UN refugee agency.

Claude Marshall: It's a long story and I'm going to make it short.

I was born in Germany. My parents were refugees. Took me with them at four years old. We came to the United States.

My education was totally in the United States. I'm an engineer by education, and I got a job as an engineer with General Electric. And then quickly, sounds strange, with an advertising public relations consultancy in New York that had a lot of clients who made technical products. So they wanted somebody who understood even a low degree of technology. Most of my colleagues had no science background whatsoever, and I did that.

And one day my boss said to me, "We're going to move you to Geneva because you speak German. Your wife is German."

But I said, "Harold, Geneva speaks French."

He said, "French, German. It's all the same."

But of course, he wasn't so dumb about that. He did it to pull my leg. And anyway, I came to Geneva and I worked in the advertising agency, public relations agency business for 30 years and had offices around Europe that I had to do with.

And I was travelling all the time. My wife was somewhat ill. I said to myself one morning, getting up, you know, I have to change this. And I said, I don't have to work. I can live off the shares where I own the firm and can live the way I've been living, so I'm going to resign.

But then I said, And what am I going to do? I was only, I was 62. Now I'm 90. So that's 30 years ago almost. And I said to myself, I have to do something. What should I do? And I said, I've got to do something to do with refugees.

What do I know about refugees? I mean my parents were refugees. I was a refugee. And then I saw that Sadako Ogata, who at the time, a Japanese diplomat, was the High Commissioner for the UN Refugee Agency, and I saw that she was giving a talk to a group that I belong to, had nothing to do with refugees.

And I heard her speak and I said to myself, That's what I'd like to do. I'd like to join that.

And serendipity moved in. I went to a dinner party and Mrs. Ogata was sitting next to me. Well, you know, I asked a question. "You don't remember my asking question at your speech, but I was very interested. I would like to work for you."

And she said, "Well, tell me about your background." So I gave her my background. And then she started to talk about what I might be doing. And she looked at me and said, "And what kind of salary requirements do you have?" And I said, "None." She said, "You're hired."

And I said, okay. And that was like a Friday. And on a Monday I started work with UNHCR. So that's how I became a voluntary consultant. The beauty of being a voluntary consultant is that when the weather is nice out and it's a nice afternoon and I want to play tennis at the local club here, I don't have to ask too many people if I can leave. If I do my work.

Robin Pomeroy: On the days you are doing your work, what is it that you actually do over those 30 years? What kinds of things have you done with the UNHCR?

Claude Marshall: The first thing that Mrs. Ogata said to me, she said, "Go to the geographical bureaus, the offices that run regions of the world for refugees and see what they have in projects that corporations, foundations, wealthy individuals might want to support."

So I did that. And of course, 99.9% of our income came from states, governments, and the idea of private sector fundraising was totally new to all these people I spoke with.

And so I looked through education, and I see that they had to build four schools for X amount of money. And I said, maybe I could convince a corporation to support one school.

And then on the way out they said, Marshall, get us some money for sports. I said, Get you money for sports. Don't the kids do sports anyway? Yes. Sports and play. Play is natural, so they run around. Yes, But there's nothing organised. And that's what I'm talking about, they said to me, we're talking about organised sport, safe sport in a safe place.

From that moment on I said to Mrs. Ogata, I said, I have a new job. She said, You're no longer in, don't want to do fundraising? Yes, I do. But now I'm going to concentrate only on trying to build sports. There was no sports department at UNHCR. So the management who heard about what I was doing said, Do it, we need it, the kids need it. And it's missing because we use all our money we get from states to keep refugees alive and comfortable to a degree. And sports has always been an extra. So if you can get money for sports and get the sports organisations of this world to do something for us, that's what we want.

Again, a long story short, I went along this beautiful lake and from Geneva down to Lausanne there are many athletic federations whom I knocked on doors and said, we need volleyball courts, we need volleyballs, nets, go to the basketball federation - we have camps that have mud, but no cement for outdoor court. Can you supply it? Yes.

Robin Pomeroy: What difference do you think sport makes to refugees to have that in refugee camps?

Claude Marshall: It's very simple.

Most of the refugee youth have not been in the camp very long. Some have, but many have not. You talk to these young people and they are totally at loose ends. They have gone through hell to get to the safety of a UNHCR refugee camp.

If it's one thing they are it's safe. They've lost their parents. They are maybe eight, nine, ten-years-old, and heads alone toward another place that's going to take him or her two or three days to get there. And when they get to the camp, as I said, they arrive, their framework of life is gone. So they're totally at loose ends.

And a sport programme where they meet other kids their age group, and they get together and they play football or they play basketball or play volleyball, taekwondo or judo. It depends on the kind of teachers that are around. You've made a new life for them.

Not that they are going to become sports people, but all of a sudden you have given them an interest in waking up tomorrow. They've they've lost their old crowd. They have to have a new one. And sports does it.

Robin Pomeroy: So you've spent time with some of these children. What impression have they made on you? Can you think of some places or some individuals who've made a real impression on you?

Claude Marshall: Well, they make an enormous impression on me.

I was in a situation when the Olympic Committee funded to take the boulders out of the field, and then they gave us money to get some volleyball or make a football pitch out of it.

They had organised with us a bunch of boys of different ages to play these sports from nine in the morning till five at night. This was in Kenya.

The Olympic Committee people that I work with asked me could they come down and look? So they came down and we watched these boys playing all day long.

All of a sudden, I got a tap on my shoulder by a young woman and she said, "Mr. Marshall, Miss Gladys would like to see you. Miss Gladys is a refugee from South Sudan and she is in charge of teenage girls."

We came into a hut and in the middle of the hut was a round table. And there were about 8 to 12 youngish girls. And the girls were knitting, sewing and crocheting. So after two or three minutes of dead quiet, she looked at me, Miss Gladys did, and said, "Mr. Marshall, what have you heard here?"

I knew I was being set up for some kind of a jab. She said, "Did you hear the girls talking to each other?" Not a word. She said, "They have arrived in the camp in Kenya from three or four weeks ago to, three or four months ago. And you guys in Geneva using an NGO that supplies knitting, sewing and crocheting equipment, you think you're doing the girls a favour because that's a girl's occupation.

"These girls sit there and sew and they don't have to talk to each other and they don't talk to each other. Because what goes through their mind is the sheer hell that they have been through."

And she said, "If I asked any of these girls to tell you what they'd been through to get to this camp, you wouldn't sleep for a month. I want them to have sport just like those boys out front. The girls are no different. They need sport. They have to get out of their skin and laugh. They need a new life and sport will do it."

Robin Pomeroy: Can I ask you about your own experience as a young boy? Do you remember being four years old and fleeing Nazi Germany?

Claude Marshall: No, Actually I don't.

Robin Pomeroy: Was that something that your parents talked to you about?

Claude Marshall: Oh, yes. Yes. My father had three sisters. They were very close-knit family. We all lived in New York City for a while. The family got together and they talked a lot about their refugee life.

You know, I don't remember anything that I could say, I know this or that made me consider refugee things.

But I learned to listen to my papa. And he told the story that stayed with me for the rest of my life. He was walking down the street in 1935 in a town called Wiesloch, near Heidelberg, and here comes Hans walking in his direction. All of a sudden, Hans walks across the street to the other sidewalk.

My father yelled across at him, "Hans, what are you doing?" And Hans said, "I won't walk down the same sidewalk with a Jew."

And from that, he called a family meeting. And he said, "Now I want you to understand the circumstance. I knew this boy since before we could talk.

"And Hitler came to power in 1933. And by 1935, Hans believes this propaganda. Now, if Hans believes this propaganda, and he could say this to me, where do you think we're going in this country?

The first Marshall that we found was in 1747 in a cemetery. So we were in this town from, let's say, 1750-on, right? About. And my father said to the family, we have got to leave this country.

In '35 or '36, he could get visas a lot more easily then a few years later. He sold everything that he could. And we got on a boat and we found not just visas, but to get to the United States, you had to have a financial guarantee. And he found a guarantor who took care of some of the family.

Robin Pomeroy: Is there something that links the experience of all refugees?

Claude Marshall: Yes. I tell you what, my biggest takeaway from refugee camp visits are not only the children, but the mothers.

70-plus percent of all refugees are women and children. And when I see mothers with children, I don't see a difference between a mother in Geneva with her children, her interaction with the kids, it's the same.

And then I have met some refugee women who are heroes - it's the real word.

I know a fellow who came out of the Congo and he ran for his life. He was a teenager. He was about 16 or 17. Terrible violence in his village. The instigators of the violence came to his village. They grabbed his father. They set fire to his hut and they threw his father in.

And the mother was around and she said, "Beat it!" to the kids.

So this boy ran to save his skin and he got to this camp. He found sports that gave him a new life.

But then one of the boys said to him, after three or four weeks. "My mother wants to talk to you. Come with me. To my hut." He had two or three siblings. Mother was alone and his father wasn't around any longer. And he introduces the young man, introduces his new friend, the new refugee to his mother. And the mother says, "Welcome." She says, "I want you to eat with us." And the end of the meal, she looks at him and said, "Not only that. I want you to live with us. I'm your mother now."

And he broke up. He tells the story. He was weeping. As were most of the listeners.

So this is the kind of woman that you run into in the refugee world. These are heroines. They're they beyond the call of what you would expect. And they they live a difficult life and they have to make a life do.

And then you run into... I was with the president of the Olympic Committee in Ethiopia in a camp, and there was a, I'd say, 13, 14-year-old girl cooking a meal for two of her very young siblings. And he said to the girl, "Do you want to also do some sports?" She said, "I would like to, but now I'm the mother for my two siblings because we have no mother."

That's what you hear and see.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you think the world is a safer place for refugees now than it was in the 1930s or a more dangerous, difficult place?

Claude Marshall: Now, of course, a refugee camp run by the U.N. Refugee Agency, or the equivalent international organisations, of course it's safe-er.

I would say there are more than 110 million people are forcibly displaced since last May, 110 million. It's a population of France and Spain together.

Robin, It's not even necessarily a war. Refugees, almost all refugees come out of violence. Could be that a part of a tribe next door who want what you have on the ground. What do you think climate change is going to do in the refugee world?

Robin Pomeroy: Is there any reason to be optimistic?

Claude Marshall: No. I would say there's no reason to be optimistic. I'm not optimistic about the future.

Yes, there are more opportunities. I mean, today you can do only three things for a refugee.

They can go home to where they came from. You can't force them home. There's an international treaty. If they can't go home, 90% of refugees want go home. They don't want to be a refugee someplace else.

Second thing you can do, if they are in a developing country in a refugee camp, you can hope that the national government, where that camp is will allow you, UNHCR, to help integrate the refugees with the local population. Of course, you have to have the cooperation of the national government. It's a solution and a good one.

And the last thing you can do for a refugee is to resettle them in a first-world country as immigrants, not as refugees, to live in that country on a permanent basis. That's happening now. Not near enough the numbers that we would like, but at least it's happening now. It didn't happen in the '30s.

Robin Pomeroy: The sentiment towards refugees is often not great. There's a reluctance to take in refugees irregular migration across Europe or north into the United States. People who live in those places are often resentful. They want to send people back.

What would you say to those people, who maybe have understandable concerns as well? What would you like them to know from your experience, both as a refugee yourself, and from the work you've done around the world with refugees?

Claude Marshall: I would tell these people there's very little you can do about it. We are living in a world of people movement. And it will continue. And it will get more and more.

Climate change will make a difference. We'll have more refugees.

A population in a wealthy world, which we live in, will have to accept the idea that you're going to have an immigration of refugees, not migrants, but refugees who had to flee for their lives in order to be saved. Migrants are another story. But they will have to be accepted.

Plus, you have to talk about the pluses.

These are people who have much to give to the civilisation of that country. Most countries today have been made up of refugees. Look at Switzerland. You have an ageing population in most of the Western world. You need people to work. The refugees want to work.

You can spread all kinds of lies about refugees. And if no one challenges these lies, they stay.

People will say, Well, there are criminals. The crimes of refugees against a national population, based on population numbers, is considerably less with refugees than it is with the national population. They're not criminals. They don't want to be criminals. They want to work. And they want to contribute.

And they usually are pretty happy people. So they're not down on anything. They want to be accepted. If you don't want to accept them, maybe you'd better move yourself some place in the middle of the woods. You're going to have them. They're going to be there. They're going to be a different religion than you. Different skin colour. They will come from another background. But you could use that as a positive aspect of this person.

They have something to give. Don't close your eyes because you open your eyes and they will be there.

Robin Pomeroy: Claude Marshall who volunteers for the UNHCR.

Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review on whichever app you use to get podcasts. And you can find me talking about podcasts on the World Economic Forum Podcast club -- look for that on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was written and presented by me, Robin Pomeroy. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production was by Gareth Nolan.

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.