The MS St. Louis, the ship that left Hamburg in 1939 carrying 937 Jewish refugees before being turned away by Cuba, the United States, and Canada, had been covered by books, films, plays, and an opera. What it lacked was anything written for young readers. That gap was Gratz’s first entry point, and his answer to it was simple.

Alan Gratz

there wasn’t a book for you guys, for young readers. So I decided, I will write this book. [paraphrased from audio]

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Alan Gratz, “Refugee Book Talk with Author Alan Gratz”

That first impulse set him researching the 1939 crisis, but a family vacation to the Florida Keys broke the project open entirely. On the beach, Gratz found an abandoned raft made of wood and sheet roofing, with spray foam plugging the cracks, a tractor engine bolted on, and wet clothes and empty water bottles left inside. No one was on it. The physical object forced a question that reshaped what he thought he was writing.

Alan Gratz

I realized, wait a minute. Why am I writing a book about refugees 75 years ago, during World War II, when there are refugees right here, right now, that I could be writing about, and maybe should be writing about? [paraphrased from audio]

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Alan Gratz, “Refugee Book Talk with Author Alan Gratz”

Home from the Keys and watching nightly news coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis, he now had three separate books demanding to be written. The solution came on a walk, when he started tracing the geography: German Jews bound for Cuba, Cubans crossing to America, Syrians heading to Germany. The connections were not coincidental. They were the book.

Alan Gratz

Finally I realized — what if I wrote a single book about all three, linking the families across the ages and across the globe? That’s how Refugee was born.

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thewingedpen.com, “NYTimes Author Alan Gratz talks about REFUGEE and BAN THIS BOOK”

Underlying all three story threads was a specific problem Gratz had watched play out in public debate: the way statistical language about refugees strips individual people of their particularity. Fiction, he argued to Publishers Weekly, was the tool that could undo that.

Alan Gratz

A refugee is now a person with a name, a face, and a story; they go from being statistics or nameless faceless immigrants coming to take our jobs to becoming individual stories of people that need our help.

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publishersweekly.com, “Q & A with Alan Gratz”

Gratz outlined all three stories completely before writing a word of prose. Josef’s MS St. Louis narrative, the most documented of the three, he built from library books. Isabel’s 1990s Cuban crossing had fewer books available, so he supplemented with magazine articles and videotaped interviews with Cuban refugees who had made the actual journey. Mahmoud’s Syrian story was the hardest: the conflict was still active while he wrote, and he relied entirely on real-time reporting from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, NPR, the Guardian, and Al Jazeera. Once all three outlines were complete, the writing itself followed a strict sequence.

Alan Gratz

I outlined each separately, all the way out — first Josef’s story, then Isabel’s, then Mahmoud’s — although Isabel’s story was created knowing what happened to Josef, and Mahmoud’s knowing what happened to the other two children. Once I had all three stories outlined, then I wrote the book linearly. That is, I wrote Josef’s first chapter, then Isabel’s first chapter, then Mahmoud’s first chapter, and so on and so on.

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carolbaldwinblog.blogspot.com, “Carol Baldwin’s Blog: Behind the Scenes of REFUGEE: An Interview with Alan Gratz and Giveaway-Part II”

The structural decision to link the three families across time went through its own evolution. Gratz knew from the start that he had three stories. What he did not immediately see was that the parallels could become a literal connection across generations, and that discovery was the thing that turned a concept into a novel.

Alan Gratz

I knew I was going to write a story about three different kids in three different time periods when I began researching and outlining the book. That decision — to tell three stories — took a while to come up with on its own. But as soon as I realized I could not only show parallels between each story, but actually link the three main characters and their families across time, that’s when I knew I had a novel!

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carolbaldwinblog.blogspot.com, “Carol Baldwin’s Blog: Behind the Scenes of REFUGEE: An Interview with Alan Gratz and Giveaway-Part II”

The death of Iván, Isabel’s best friend, was the manuscript’s most contested scene. His editor did not want it. Gratz’s counter-argument was historical: an estimated three out of every five Cubans who attempted the raft crossing in the 1990s died at sea, and an account where everyone survived would misrepresent the stakes. He won that argument, and his reason for choosing Iván specifically came down to what the loss would cost the reader.

Alan Gratz

I wanted you to care about whoever it was. I needed it to be a character that you loved and that you cared about so that you understood how dangerous this was and how people that other refugees loved died at sea. And I wanted you to feel that. [paraphrased from audio]

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Alan Gratz, “Refugee Book Talk with Author Alan Gratz”

The open endings scattered across the other two storylines worked the same way. Gratz left multiple fates unresolved because real displaced people often never receive those answers, and he wanted the reader to sit inside that uncertainty rather than escape it.

Even after the manuscript was finished, one section of the book refused to stabilize. The political situation his Syrian and Cuban stories were embedded in kept shifting as American policy changed, and the author’s note had to track those changes in real time.

Alan Gratz

The Author’s Note went through many more revisions than the book, as I tried to stay on top of all the changes happening in American politics and policy — both for the Syrian story AND, to my surprise, the Cuban story!

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carolbaldwinblog.blogspot.com, “Carol Baldwin’s Blog: Behind the Scenes of REFUGEE: An Interview with Alan Gratz and Giveaway-Part II”

Of the three protagonists, Josef, a thirteen-year-old aboard the MS St. Louis in 1939, carries the most direct piece of Gratz himself. Gratz described in his book talk the specific detail he transplanted from his own childhood into the character.

Alan Gratz

Josef is the one who wants to grow up and be a writer. And I used a lot of my own passion about wanting to grow up and be a writer when I was a kid, when I wrote Josef. So a lot of what he talks about — how he wrote a newspaper for his street and how he wants to be a journalist when he grows up — those are things that I actually thought about doing too, or that I did or thought about doing. [paraphrased from audio]

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Alan Gratz, “Refugee Book Talk with Author Alan Gratz”

That same instinct to make the distant personal shaped the book’s larger purpose. Years as an eighth-grade English teacher had shown Gratz how young readers respond when they encounter a character whose interior life they recognize. His goal across all his books, and in Refugee in particular, was to close the distance between a reader’s world and someone else’s entirely different one.

Alan Gratz

The biggest thing I’m trying to do with my books is to help young readers understand how other kids live — their hopes, their struggles, and their motives — so that the readers see them as human beings, not statistics or sound bites.

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mackincommunity.com, “Alan Gratz: Building Empathy Through Historical Fiction”

Gratz built the book’s three-story architecture to make a specific argument: that Josef’s 1939 experience, Isabel’s 1994 crossing, and Mahmoud’s 2015 journey are not three separate crises. They are the same crisis, recurring because the same institutional failures keep producing the same outcomes. In a video for The Kids’ Bookshelf, he stated the argument directly.

Alan Gratz

This isn’t multiple stories, it’s one story, it’s one human story, it’s the story of us all. And that if we don’t fix what we did yesterday, the mistakes we made yesterday, then mañana, tomorrow is going to be the same as today. [paraphrased from audio]

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The Kids’ Bookshelf, ““War Games” and “Refugee: The Graphic Novel” by Alan Gratz”

That argument required readers to viscerally understand what Gratz’s own family had encountered on a Florida beach: a crisis that was physically present but publicly invisible. The book’s explicit goal was to close that gap for young readers who had no equivalent encounter with a raft or its contents.

Alan Gratz

I want young readers to see refugees. My family and I knew refugees were risking their lives to come to this country officially and unofficially every single day, but because we don’t live on the front lines of that struggle, we didn’t see it every day. Out of sight was definitely out of mind. I hope that Refugee does for young readers what that raft on the beach in Florida did for me and my family: make the invisible visible again.

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thewingedpen.com, “NYTimes Author Alan Gratz talks about REFUGEE and BAN THIS BOOK”

One of the most persistent misconceptions Gratz wrote against was the idea that refugees form a single, identifiable category of person: one religion, one origin, one face. In a video for the Texas Bluebonnet Award, he named what he most wanted readers to walk away knowing.

Alan Gratz

The big one, I hope that people learn, is that refugees don’t have one face. They don’t have one face, they don’t have one religion, they don’t have one skin color, they don’t have one point of origin. Refugees are regular people from all over the world, from all different time periods, who have to leave their countries because of political persecution or religious persecution or racial persecution, or bombs are falling on their head, or a natural disaster hits. They are regular people like us who need our help because they’re in trouble. [paraphrased from audio]

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Texas Bluebonnet Award, “Alan Gratz Author Interview | Refugee”

For Gratz, changed perspective was never enough on its own. The ideal reader closes the book and then does something. In a video for AdLit, he was specific about what that something could look like for a young person: find a local refugee aid organization and volunteer. And if there are classmates who are immigrants or refugees, the instruction was even simpler.

Alan Gratz

Just go and be their friend. Just go watch TV with them, play video games with them. [paraphrased from audio]

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AdLit, “Author Alan Gratz Talks About How Kids Can Help Refugees and Immigrants in Their Communities”

That instruction, stripped of abstraction, is also the book’s quiet argument: that proximity is where empathy actually starts, and that a child who has read Josef’s, Isabel’s, and Mahmoud’s stories has already taken the first step toward it.