IN THE summer of 1943, the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki and his wife, Teofila, escaped the pogrom in the Warsaw Ghetto. Soon afterwards, they found refuge with Bolek, a Protestant typesetter, who agreed to conceal the persecuted pair in his cellar if they earned their keep by rolling thousands of cigarettes. Thanks to both food shortages and the constant fear of betrayal, this arrangement proved extremely stressful for all concerned. But then, one evening, Marcel offered to entertain Bolek and his wife, Genia, with a story. Years later, in his memoir The Author of Himself, he described how, every night for months afterwards, he wove tales “of girls in love, young princes and old kings, winter’s tales and midsummer night’s dreams”.

For the cultural historian Marina Warner, Marcel’s recollections prove the power of storytelling: by forging bonds between the two couples, these tales kept the Reich-Ranickis safe until they were freed by the Russian army in September 1944. Indeed, she argues, stories provided this embattled quartet with a form of sanctuary — a concept that has today largely lost its significance (being mostly associated with wellness and luxury), but that once offered real protection to some of the most vulnerable members of society.

In the classical world, Warner explains, sanctuaries welcomed fugitives from injustice, such as the athlete-turned-rebel Cylon, who sheltered at the Acropolis of Athens in the seventh century BCE. A similar system operated in medieval Europe, where the law allowed criminals who were both penitent and unarmed to take refuge in a church for up to 40 days. Over time, however, sanctuary rights came to be seen as a threat to both justice and royal authority; come the Reformation, they were mostly eradicated. But perhaps, Warner suggests, a revival of this ancient concept could help to tackle one of today’s most pressing problems: the migrant crisis.

As one might expect of a scholar who has spent decades arguing for the relevance of ancient stories to modern lives, Warner offers neither a practical plan nor a straightforward history of a concept. Instead, Sanctuary provides a freewheeling exploration of a theme, centred on a series of erudite but digressive essays about stories of migration, memory, and home. Some, such as the chapter on the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, have obvious relevance to her central thesis. But elsewhere, the links feel more tenuous — as, for example, when Warner describes the miraculous transportation of the Santa Casa from the Holy Land to Loreto as “a very thoughtful expression of the deep longing to take your home with you”.

Having explored what we can learn from these traditional narratives, Warner turns her attention to the modern world, asking how the ancient notion of sanctuary can be applied to the contemporary refugee crisis, and how stories might help to forge connections between migrants and their often reluctant hosts. Narrative, she argues, plays an important part in the lives of displaced peoples — who are obliged to relate their personal histories in order to cross borders or claim asylum, but can also maintain links with their lost homelands, as well as find new communities, by spending time in “the country of words”.

Though Warner makes a thoughtful and compassionate case for the importance of “intangible artefacts” such as stories and songs (which are now protected by the United Nations’ 2016 ruling that cultural heritage is a human right), many readers will surely be left wondering how all this applies in the real world. In a moving coda, Warner describes her own work with the Palermo-based Stories in Transit project, which offers sanctuary to young migrants by giving them space and resources to create and perform their own stories. Such efforts can only ever, she admits, make a tiny contribution to a global problem. And yet, like the stories that Marcel Reich-Ranicki told in a Warsaw cellar, they offer a glimmer of hope in our increasingly unsettled world.

Dr Katherine Harvey is Research Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck, University of London.

Sanctuary: Ways of telling, ways of dwelling
Marina Warner
William Collins £22
(978-0-00-834754-3)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80