EIGHT DECADES after the event, Janis Cecins cannot know whether the Soviet train guard who transformed his family’s destiny was being kind or dim. Either way, the soldier allowed Mr Cecins’s parents—a young Latvian couple being forcibly transported to the Soviet zone in occupied post-war Germany—to leave his train one night, on a promise to return in the morning. Mr Cecins’s parents skipped that appointment, and eventually found their way to an Allied-run camp for displaced persons (DPs). The pair were among a million or so civilians with no wish to return to their pre-war homes. The fate of those DPs led in time to the creation of the modern asylum system, including the Geneva convention of 1951, which bars states from returning refugees to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.