The article presents five hotels whose buildings survived wartime upheaval and became part of the history they witnessed. Rather than remaining neutral spaces for travellers, they were used by occupying forces, government authorities, refugees, prisoners and returning survivors, giving their later lives as luxury hotels an unusually weighty historical significance.

Raffles in Singapore was occupied by Japan during the Second World War and renamed Syonan Ryokan, while Paris’s Hotel Lutetia first sheltered refugees, was then requisitioned by German forces and later served as a repatriation centre for concentration-camp survivors. The excerpt also introduces Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, which housed British Mandate administration and became a centre of political violence; together, the examples show how hotels can shift dramatically from places of comfort to sites of occupation, repression or rescue.