This article analyses the complex interplay between pity and gratitude, as part of a larger spectrum of memory and emotions that migrants from the Global South experience in their journey towards becoming integrated as citizens of ‘Western’ countries like Germany. Beginning their lives with anxiety and gratitude about being accepted, migrants gradually imbibe new emotions of citizenship like pride, learned from host society members, as part of their integration process. It is this personal pride that welcomes and tolerates new migrants, based on memories and emotions of the past, that become the core of a lived humanitarianism. In this article, I argue, that it is not memories and emotions per se, that constitutes a third space, but its commemoration by citizens that produces humanitarianism, transforming it (the commemoration) into a positive third space of hope for new migrants.