This contribution is based on a project that involved a multilingual research design to explore the meaning of faith and religion with regard to the resilience of children who have experienced flight to Germany. In keeping with the theoretical understanding that children are social actors, we employed strategies that children use to cope with the linguistic challenges of lacking vocabulary, the cultural challenges of communicating meanings and the emotional challenges of narrating traumatising events. Our findings highlight the benefits of multilingual-intercultural interviews – that is, through creative language acquisition and modification, children are able to communicate their experiences using vocabulary that may be less emotionally charged than are their native languages. In addition, language reveals children’s social positioning and offers them the creative capacity to subvert dominant meaning structures.