For as long as there have been humans, there have been people forced from their homelands. In the ancient world, thousands of people fled east Europe after their lands were invaded by enemy tribes. In the 1600s, some 20,000 people made the perilous journey from England across the Atlantic Ocean so they could practice their Protestant faith freely in the New World. And in the 1840s, about 2 million people left Ireland to avoid starvation because of famine.

It was World War II, however, that brought a refugee crisis on a scale the world had never seen. When the war ended in 1945, much of Europe was a wasteland, with once shining cities like London and Berlin burned and bombed to ruins. At least 80 million people were dead. There were 40 million refugees in Europe alone. These men, women, and children had lost their homes, their livelihoods, their way of life.

The crisis was too big for any one country to handle on its own. And so the international community came together to establish an organization with one purpose: to help. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was meant to operate for three years, just long enough to help the refugees of World War II get back on their feet.

But in the following years came more conflicts, more wars, more famines—in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Crisis after crisis drove millions of people from their home countries. It became clear that the UNHCR needed to be permanent and that other nongovernmental organizations needed to help too.

Today, thousands of aid workers from the UNHCR and countless other aid groups dedicate their lives to helping refugees like Bilan, working in some of the most dangerous places on Earth.