- Happened on a massive scale to African slaves taken to America or elsewhere, Made a Slave and in all likelihood never seeing their continent again.
- In the Ottoman Empire Greek and Roman slaves as well as the Europeans, Africans and Indians abducted by the Ottomans and Made a Slave had an extremely unlikely chance to ever go home.
- In the late 1990s, numerous US Army, Air Force, and Naval bases throughout Europe and the United Kingdom closed down, often becoming the property of the home militaries of those countries in which they were located. You want depressing? Try this: the children who grew up on some of those bases would be turned away by armed guards if they tried to visit their old home-towns.
- The children that grow up in most Army, Air Force, or Naval bases will get turned away by armed guards if they try to visit their old hometowns; you need a current military ID, or an escort with current military ID, and simply being the offspring of an Enlisted individual or Officer won't get you a current military ID past the age of 21.
- Reversed in cases where the former base is annexed by the surrounding town and added to the local housing stock. Then, the trick becomes figuring out where the gates used to be.
- It's not just the military brats – the "Diplobrats" (a.k.a children of diplomats) often have the same feelings. You live in so many homes, but you don't own them; the government does, or you rent. They're not your home, and going back would just emphasize that point.
- This happened on a ecosystem-wide scale with Africa. The Sahara used to be lush and green several thousands of years ago, but everything changed when Earth's Axal tilt increased temperatures and decreased precipitation five thousand years ago. As the sun got hotter in the Sahara, it caused a massive drought and famine that killed off almost all of the vegetation in northern Africa and forcing the animals that weren't pre-evolved to live in hot climates to migrate southward of the continent where it was cooler in order to escape the heat.
- Many people find themselves displaced from their homes due to political turmoil, often losing, in the way, their nationality. One noteworthy case was Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian national who ended up having to live in an airport terminal lounge for 18 years because his refugee papers were stolen. It's said he eventually made a sort of life for himself there
and wouldn't leave even when he could. (Years later, he returned to living in the airport a few months prior to his death in 2022.) - This frequently happens to victims of natural disasters. These are more cases of No Home To Go Back To. Floods, fires, earthquakes, and other events can destroy whole countries. Even if you can physically return to where you house once stood, your house and neighborhood may no longer be there. This trope is especially the case when there are a lot of fatalities because not only is the physical location gone, but so are the people.
- Hurricane Katrina left tens of thousands with no homes (or jobs) to return to. The vast majority of them have managed to make new homes in Texas or further inland in Louisiana. A large number simply returned to New Orleans.
- Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of New Jersey and New York. Houses were completely washed away, or irreparably damaged. Even when people moved back in to less damaged houses, the surroundings have changed completely and is no longer truly home.
- In 1990, lava flows from Kilauea leveled the towns of Kalapana and Kaimu.
- The Last Days, a film that featured interviews with concentration camp survivors from Hungary who revisit. For one of the women interviewed, it was especially painful coming back to the town where she had lived and seeing her old house. She and the other survivors had moved elsewhere, often to America, after getting out of the camps.
- Several of the original American colonies were settled by the losers of seventeenth-century religious and political brawls in Europe.note The colonies of course hung on even if a reversal of the fortunes of war meant that they now COULD go home again.
- The Jacobites, the White Russians, and many others who have lost a civil war. White Russians had their own neighborhoods in Paris, Istanbul, Shanghai, and other cities. They would often become mercenaries or spies, or similar such things.
- In some cases it did mean they finally went home to a place they never knew. Baron Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim was a Finnish Noble with a Swedish name who was in the Russian military for nearly 30 years and forgot how to speak Finnish, due to lack of use.note He became Regent of Finland but found Finland strange. He lost his bid for president after helping to set up a new government. He spent most of the next 20 years semi-retired until World War II when he was Field Marshall and was later elected president.
- At the end of the Second World War the borders of Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia were altered by the Soviets. Nearly ten million people were forcibly relocated, many leaving behind villages where their ancestors had lived for generations. Particularly heartbreaking for POWs who were released and suddenly found their homes didn't exist anymore.
- Because Poland was now Communist, virtually all of the Polish Army in Exile remained in exile for the rest of their lives.
- When the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to complete the "Iron Curtain", those who found themselves in East Germany had to stay there. Not that it stopped some of the more determined ones.
- Some of the Soviet Union soldiers during World War II who were captured as POWs by the Germans risked a few years in prison by returning to the Soviet Union after the war. This was because failure to fight to the death against the Nazis was seen as a potential sign of cowardice (or worse). Many either stayed in Germany living in Displaced Persons camps, or migrated elsewhere.
- The book One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich demonstrates quite well what happened to POW's who tried to return, as the main character was sentenced to ten years in The Gulag for being a suspected "spy" for the Germans.
- The foreign volunteers of Waffen-SS after World War Two. Germany had lost the war and they would have faced trial of high treason in their native countries. Many of them found their only solace in French and Spanish Foreign Legions. It is said the majority of the French forces in Vietnam consisted of former Waffen-SS soldiers.note
- This was averted with Swedish volunteers, as shown in Frostbite. Almost none of the surviving volunteers where jailed. The few who were punished were simply punished for avoiding drafting.
- In 1958, a Virginia interracial couple-Richard and Mildred Loving-were arrested for leaving the state to get married in Washington D.C. and then returning to Virginia to live as a married couple. The judge sentenced them to a year in prison but suspended the sentence for 25 years on the condition that the Lovings never return to Virginia together or at the same time. Eventually, the Lovings did return home after winning a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Loving v. Virginia. The case not only overturned their convictions, but also legalized interracial marriages across the whole country.
- The village of Imber, in the middle of Salisbury Plain, was evacuated in 1943 to allow planning and training for the Normandy landings. The population were not allowed to return even after the conclusion of the war, and their families are still only allowed to return for an annual church service.
- Similarly, villages, towns and occasionally cities are wiped off the map for large structural projects or mining pits, ranging from some villages being removed in Germany to facilitate brown coal mining to moving 1.3 million people for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and Reservoir in China. It means that not only does your home no longer exist, even its location has completely vanished.
- One of the more brutal examples of this is the flooding of the Welsh town of Capel Celyn by the Liverpool Corporation in 1960. The town was a center for Welsh culture, and one of the last towns where the entire population could speak welsh fluently. Capel Celyn, Wales, was flooded to provide Liverpool, England, with water. The action was brought to parliament by the Liverpool City Council. Every Welsh elected official from every party in Wales voted against the plan, as well as a good handful of Scots, but the plan was pushed through largely on the strength of English votes. It led to mass protests, the rise of the modern Welsh Nationalist movement, and a spate of bombings by a Paramilitary Organization known as Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru. The issue still isn't settled, with the Liverpool City Council issuing an insulting nonapology in 2005, which mentioned all the wonderful things Liverpool has done for Wales. When it isn't, you know, destroying parts of the country.
- The Lost Villages in Canada can be included on that list. Most of them were abandoned, the others relocated, to allow for the building of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Building foundations and sidewalks can still sometimes be seen when the water level is low. Other than those brief glimpses, and a memorial park, the villages have disappeared beneath the water.
- Another Canadian example was the resettlement of much of coastal Newfoundland; the population of hundreds of tiny and isolated fishing communities were concentrated in more accessible areas. Played with because many families physically removed their houses from the foundations and literally towed them overseas to their new communities. See the song Out From St Leonards.
- One of the more brutal examples of this is the flooding of the Welsh town of Capel Celyn
- Similarly, villages, towns and occasionally cities are wiped off the map for large structural projects or mining pits, ranging from some villages being removed in Germany to facilitate brown coal mining to moving 1.3 million people for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and Reservoir
- The inhabitants of Pripyat and towns near the Fukushima nuclear power plant won't be able to go back to their homes for a very long time due to catastrophic nuclear meltdowns. However, in the last few years, towns across the exclusion zone in Fukushima Prefecture have started reopening as cleanup efforts continue, with people being allowed to stay for periods ranging from just the daylight hours to permanently. For those who can, and those who want to, they can go home at last.
- Americans who renounce their citizenship often find their ability to stay in their country of origin severely limited. For example, Terry Gilliam, an American who became a British citizen, is only allowed to visit the U.S. for 29 days a year, much lower than most U.K. natives are allowed to visit. On the other hand, people who do this in theory don't want to go home again.
- Centralia, PA. It was more or less condemned after a coalmine fire started in 1962, and the government moved everyone out, and only five people remained by 2020. The old inhabitants and their children won't be able to come back here for a very, very long time, as the fire is still raging deep underneath the town.
- The town of Wittenoom in Western Australia was a case of this in the 1960s. The town was located around Australia's only asbestos mining site and when the dangers became apparent, the entire place was condemned and most of the residents relocated. By 2022, no one remains in the town, which receives no government services, has been erased from maps and signs, and has all roads leading to it permanently blocked off with demolition of remaining structures on progress in 2023.
- Similar to the American and Australian Settling the Frontier examples above, for any planned manned trip to Mars or any other celestial body, the colonists would have to plan to stay there for a very long time— long enough for a Hohmann transfer orbit back to Earth to be feasible, which could take about another half a year. This, and considering that they'd have to drag along a substantially larger volume of fuel and oxidizer to perform the maneuver, it's presently predicted that our first manned trip to Mars will involve doing away with the return trip, and the astronauts will have to stay on the red planet for good, dedicating their lives to helping build the infrastructure for more people to follow them.
- Elon Musk has drafted a proposal for colonizing Mars that actually argues it's necessary that the first manned trip to Mars have the option for its astronauts to return to Earth because if the spacecraft can't return to Earth, then there would be a perpetually growing graveyard of spacecraft husks sitting abandoned on the outskirts of every manned Mars colony. His proposal is to send unmanned craft to Mars initially to begin the production of the fuel that would propel the first manned craft's return to Earth.
- This might also be the case with Time Travel-we've only figured out how to go to the future, not the past.
- During the Edo period, Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate enacted its sakoku policy that largely closed the country off from foreign (especially Western) contact for over two hundred years. Among the edicts was a proclamation that common Japanese civilians were forbidden from leaving the country upon pain of death if he were to return, even those shipwrecked and rescued by foreign ships.
- As Cracked points out here, being a Presidential candidate and losing the race can cause this in several ways. For example, he who gains enough support to be nominated as his political party's candidate is often viewed as no longer competent enough to have a role in the party if they lose. Generally resulting in said politician going back to whatever he or she did before they entered politics."Even if they were complete duds on the big trail, politicians like Rick Perry and Bill Richardson entered their presidential campaigns after decades of service and effort. And when they came back out of it, the states that had backed them for so long decided they didn't have a use for their enduring leaders anymore. By going for that juicy presidential fruit, they essentially got tossed out of the states they represented. There's no looking back once you go in the big race, unless you want to be turned into a pillar of salt."
- Michael Franzese was a former caporegime of the Mafia until his arrest in 1986, after which he retired from crime. As a result, he claims that he can't go back to New York without getting killed.
- Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani is banned from returning to and working in Iran since 2009, for having played in Body of Lies (seen by Iranian authorities as "collaboration with American propaganda") and for appearing nude in several films and magazines. She resides in France ever since, and has dual citizenship.
- Many Russian artists and creators have gone into exile for opposing the mass scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (it's now been declared a crime there to oppose the so-called "Special Military Operation"), such as director Andrey Zvyagintsev (who now resides in France).
- Many unmanned spacecraft that are sent to explore other planets are often unable to return to Earth (and in some cases like both Pioneers, both Voyagers, and New Horizons, unable to reenter the Solar System) once their mission is finally complete.
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