Famousrefugees

Athens (AFP) - Hollywood star and UNHCR goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie turned the spotlight of celebrity Wednesday onto the plight of thousands of refugees crowded in camps in Greece.

After visiting a makeshift camp in the port of Piraeus, Jolie said the refugees were stuck in a "deteriorating humanitarian situation" and needed help.

The 40-year-old actress, dressed in a black T-shirt and trousers, spent around 30 minutes at the port, speaking to UN staff and refugees coming to Piraeus from the islands facing Turkey.

Some 4,000 people are packed in terminals and tents there. They are just a fraction of the number of people who are stranded in Greece after the so-called migrant trail, heading from the Balkans up to northern Europe, was closed off by national border controls.

Edward Norton – The American actor and filmmaker launched a Crowdrise campaign to help raise funds for a Syrian refugee who lost seven family members, after reading his story on Humans of New York.

Amal Clooney has described how her family were forced to flee to Europe as their homeland was ravaged by civil war during a meeting with Syrian refugees.

Amal and her husband George Clooney met with Syrian refugees living in Berlin to mark the fifth anniversary of the Syrian conflict, which has displaced at least 4.8 million people internationally and six million internally. They have repeatedly urged Western governments to act in the crisis and met with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel in February to back her open door policy on refugees.

Amal, a leading human rights lawyer, recalled how her own family were forced to flee violence when she was three, leaving their home in Beirut, in Lebanon, behind.

“My own family is from Lebanon,“ she said. "They also ran away from a war and was lucky enough to be accepted by a European country in 1982 when the violence there was really bad. Many years later, my family is doing well. My father has returned to Beirut.

“I hope you will be able to go back to a safe and free Syria.”

George also explained how his family were Irish descendants and criticised the US for “forgetting who we are”.

“I'm of Irish descent and in America, 100 years ago, we were refugees, my family.

Irish were treated terribly in America for a period of time and not accepted, and America learned to accept all of these ideas. It’s what our country is, a country of immigrants.”

Speaking directly about the Syrian crisis, he went on: “You forget that these are people who didn't just leave their country for no reason at all. These are people who left because a terrible tragedy.

'We always look around at the end of these tragedies and say if we knew, we would have done something and the reality is, of course we know.

'What is shocking to me is not that it happened but its continuing to happen for five years."

Isabel Allende was born on August 2nd, 1942 in Lima, Peru. She says she’s felt like a “foreigner” for most of her life. Her parents divorced when she was three, and her mother moved with her and her two brothers from Peru to Chile. Her mother married another Chilean diplomat, which meant Isabel moved with her family to Bolivia and Lebanon. Isabel returned to Chile when she was 15, got married in 1962 at 20, to a Chilean, Miguel Frias, and had two children. She and her family moved to Venezuela, where she lived until she immigrated to the United States in 1987. She says, “When you leave, and I left many years ago, you are cut away from that standard family. You lose the roots.That is a terrible thing for most people, but it is also good because it forces you to look at yourself and see who you really are. And it brings out strengths and skills you never thought you had because you never had to use them.When you live as a foreigner with no money and no help, you have to bring that out.”

J.K. Rowling – The Harry Potter scribe often uses social media as a microphone. In September, she devoted her Twitter account to raising awareness about the refugee crisis using the popular hashtag #refugeeswelcome. In a series of tweets, she asked UK policymakers to accept more refugees.

The cinematic icon and legendary cabaret singer rose to fame in Germany in the 1920s. She left to pursue a career in Hollywood in 1930 and watched with horror as the Nazis proceeded to seize power in her homeland. She rejected overtures from Hitler's regime to return to Germany, became an American citizen and performed for Allied troops during World War II.

Ora was born in Pristina, Yugoslavia (present-day Kosovo) to Albanian parents.

Her family left Kosovo for political reasons, because of the persecution of ethnic Albanians initiated with the disintegration of Yugoslavia. They relocated to England in 1991, when she was a year old, settling in London.

Susan Sarandon had an unusual Christmas. The Oscar-winning actor skipped the family dinner, packed her bags with emergency blankets and booked a flight to Lesbos, Greece, for a week-long visit. “I wanted to learn from the refugees, take their stories and somehow put them on the internet,” Sarandon told the Guardian. “My main goal was to humanise the issue and have them be real people, not politicise it.”

Alkinoos Ioannidis supports World Refugee Day 2014

Well-known singer and song-writer Alkinoos Ioannidis joins his voice with celebrities from around the world in a series of video messages supporting World Refugee Day 2014 Over twenty celebrities from around the world, including best-selling author Khaled Hosseini, actress Yao Chen, actress Diane Kruger, singer Juanes and singer and songwriter Alkinoos Ioannidis, have released a series of 30 second videos supporting refugees ahead of this year’s World Refugee Day on 20 June.

At a time when conflicts are forcing record numbers of people to flee their homes UNHCR is working with its Goodwill Ambassadors and other high profile supporters to tell refugee stories of courage and survival in a bid to bring more attention to the devastating impact of war on families.