WASHINGTON — “In the first place, we don’t like to be called ‘refugees,’” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1943. She was in New York by then. A decade previously, the philosopher had fled her native Germany, without papers. After years in Paris as an “undocumented immigrant” (or, in another register, “an illegal”), she was sent with other Jews to an internment camp. She escaped, and made it to Portugal, then to the United States.

But in 1943 she was still stateless, and in her mordant, indispensable essay “We Refugees” she tried to fathom her place in a flood of displaced innocents, so traumatic that even those fleeing would rather not talk about it. “Hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees,” Arendt wrote. “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings — the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes, and in internment camps by their friends.”

Today the United Nations estimates that there are 25.9 million refugees worldwide, the highest number recorded since Arendt and countless others fled their homes during World War II. That figure is double the total from 2012, and may undercount the recent, huge displacements of citizens of Venezuela. More than half the refugees are children. If you include people forced from home who remain within their national borders, the number of displaced people is more than 70 million.