****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
British author Ben Shephard has written a masterful look at the post-WW2 people migrations in his book, "The Long Road Home". It's a story not often covered in the history books, which often go from Allied victory in May, 1945 right into the Cold War.Millions of people survived WW2 in different locations than they had begun the war. Not only Jews, but hundreds of thousands of European Christians were either forcibly taken from the captive countries to work in Germany or volunteered to do so. After the war, these people were on the move across Europe. Also, of course, Jews who survived the Nazi concentration camps were freed. Prisoners of war - both Allied and Axis - were finding their way home, as well.But what was "home" and did it exist anymore? Boundaries had been redrawn, countries that had existed before the war noceased to exist, and countries, like Poland, that had been split in half during the war - half-German, half-Soviet - once again appeared on the European map as a single nation. But if borders were redrawn, the advent of the Cold War also turned people against each other. Those Christian Poles, for instance, now, in many cases, chose not to return to Soviet-run Poland. Where were they going to go? Added to this mass of humanity on the loose in post-war Germany were the ethnic Germans who had lived in Czechoslovakia for years (and were the pretext, of course, for the annexation of Czechoslovakia by the Germans in 1938). They were abruptly expelled from Czechoslovakia after the war without, in many cases, any property. Homeless and propertyless, they joined the mass of humanity called "Displaced Persons".The victorious Allied powers, recognising the mistakes they made after WW1 which led, in some part, to the rise of Nazism and WW2, decided to handle the post-WW2 period differently. The new organisation, UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) moved into the mess of post-war Germany - amid the ruins of most German cities - and tried to provide leadership. Released survivors of concentration camps were often put into DP camps, sometimes, as with the case of the DP camp Belson, in the same area as the concentration camps the survivors had just left. Schools and hospitals and small cities were established in the DP camps. Relief workers helped the DP camp inmates (a strange word to use in this case, I think) with every day living and plans for "what next". In the period right after the war, starvation was staved off due to the efforts of UNRRA workers and the occupying forces - the US, France, and Great Britain. Britain had its own troubles with post-war food and energy supplies.Shephard writes beautifully of both those caught in the post-war morass and those who set about to help. He examines both the greater politics of relief as well as the lives of those who were the recipients. Those millions of people, milling around, trying to make new lives for themselves in the aftermath of a terrible war.
