Vhils’ WWII Refugee Mural in Lisbon was installed in 2023 near the Rocha Conde de Óbidos Maritime Terminal, in connection with the 136th anniversary of the Port of Lisbon and with efforts to recall Lisbon’s role as a point of departure for refugees escaping Europe during the Second World War, many of them Jews.

The mural is based on a wartime photograph by Roger Kahan, a French Jewish refugee and photographer who passed through Lisbon in 1940. Rather than inventing a symbolic image from scratch, Vhils reworked a documented refugee scene connected to the port itself. The image chosen shows a refugee beside a post box before departure, and the mural was placed next to that same surviving post box at Rocha Conde de Óbidos.

Its importance lies in the precision of that connection between image and place. The mural fixes refugee memory in the exact port landscape through which these departures took place, using an image made by someone who was himself part of that history.