The Long Road Home

by Ben Shephard

Overview

At the end of World War II, long before an Allied victory was assured and before the scope of the atrocities orchestrated by Hitler would come into focus or even assume the name of the Holocaust, Allied forces had begun to prepare for its aftermath. Taking cues from the end of the First World War, planners had begun the futile task of preparing themselves for a civilian health crisis that, due in large part to advances in medical science, would never come. The problem that emerged was not widespread disease among Europe’s population, as anticipated, but massive displacement among those who had been uprooted from home and country during the war.

Displaced Persons, as the refugees would come to be known, were not comprised entirely of Jews. Millions of Latvians, Poles, Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs, in addition to several hundred thousand Germans, were situated in a limbo long overlooked by historians. While many were speedily repatriated, millions of refugees refused to return to countries that were forever changed by the war—a crisis that would take years to resolve and would become the defining legacy of World War II. Indeed many of the postwar questions that haunted the Allied planners still confront us today: How can humanitarian aid be made to work? What levels of immigration can our societies absorb? How can an occupying power restore prosperity to a defeated enemy?

Including new documentation in the form of journals, oral histories, and essays by actual DPs unearthed during his research for this illuminating and radical reassessment of history, Ben Shephard brings to light the extraordinary stories and myriad versions of the war experienced by the refugees and the new United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that would undertake the responsibility of binding the wounds of an entire continent. Groundbreaking and remarkably relevant to conflicts that continue to plague peacekeeping efforts, The Long Road Home tells the epic story of how millions redefined the notion of home amid painstaking recovery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307595485
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/22/2011
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Ben Shephard was born in 1948, studied history at Oxford University, and is the author of the critically acclaimed A War of Nerves and After Daybreak. He was producer of the U.K. television series The World at War and The Nuclear Age, and has made numerous historical and scientific documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. He lives in Bristol, England.

Table of Contents

Map ix

Author's Note xi

Introduction: "An Enormous Deal of Kindness" 3

1 Feeding the War Machine: Foreign Labor in Germany, 1940-1945 13

2 Food and Freedom: Preparing for the Aftermath of War, 1940-1943 33

3 "The Origin of the Perpetual Muddle": Experience with Relief, 1943-1945 43

4 "Half the Nationalities of Europe on the March": Germany, 1945 62

5 The Psychological Moment: Repatriating the Refugees, 1945 78

6 The Surviving Remnant: Jewish DPs, 1945 97

7 "Feed the Brutes?": German Refugees, 1945 120

8 Dollars or Death: UNRRA in Germany, 1945 138

9 "You Pick It Up Fast": Wildflecken DP Camp, Germany, 1945 165

10 "Even if the Gates Are Locked": Jewish DPs, 1946 180

11 "Skryning": Repatriating DPs, 1946 203

12 "Save Them First and Argue After": La Guardia and UNRRA 229

13 "We Grossly Underestimated the Destruction": The Food Crisis in Europe in the Winter of 1946-1947 and Washington's Response 248

14 "Dwell, Eat, Breed, Wait": Life in DP Camps, 1947-1950 271

15 "The Best Interests of the Child": Child Search in Germany, 1945-1950 305

16 "Good Human Stock": Resettling DPs, 1947-1950 328

17 "We Lived to See It": Jewish DPs and the Creation of Israel, 1947-1949 349

18 Americas Fair Share: The United States and DPs, 1947-1950 368

19 Legacies: How DPs Made New Lives 384

Notes 415

Bibliography 453

Acknowledgments 471

Index 47

Editorial Reviews

…highly readable and moving…
—The New York Times

Richard Toye

In the vast literature on WWII, scholars have largely ignored the 10 million to 15 million displaced persons who confronted the Allies in 1945. British writer and documentarian Shephard (After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945) tells a fascinating story of their ordeal. Although concentration camp victims made headlines, their numbers were hugely augmented by millions of foreign workers and slave laborers later joined by millions of destitute Germans expelled from former conquered nations. Aid planners expected a typhus epidemic, but generous use of DDT prevented this. They expected to repatriate everyone only to discover that many objected to returning to Soviet rule; Shephard describes American soldiers dragging terrified Russians and Ukrainians to assembly points. Despite relief efforts, in 1947 a million refugees lingered in dreary camps; Germany remained devastated. Matters only improved after the Marshall Plan's massive infusion of money and supplies, sold to a reluctant Congress as an anticommunist program. Shephard reveals that however well planned, post-WWII relief also produced shambles. His masterful account mixes history, colorful personalities, and moving individual stories. 8 pages of photos; 1 map. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"[A] highly readable and moving book of postwar relief efforts...Shephard raises an important point about the writing of history, which so often dwells on spectacular evil at the expense of pedestrian virtue...With this book, [he] has made a significant contribution to redressing the balance." --The New York Times Book Review

"This is an epic book, beautifully written and astonishingly well-researched." --The Wall Street Journal

"Thoughtful and sobering." --New York Journal of Books

"Masterful...With its thorough and compassionate depiction of the DP era as a whole, The Long Road Home establishes beyond question the period's pivotal importance...[It] should be required reading for anyone who seeks to obtain insight into the capacity of ordinary individuals to confront and, for the most part, overcome the consequences of persecution and dire devastation." --The Washington Post 

"A welcome and much-needed analysis of the refugee crisis in post-war Europe." --The Christian Science Monitor

"Shephard manages to integrate the experiences of major military and political figures with that of ordinary residents of the camps, deftly weaving quotations from his sources into his narrative...A highly readable, solid study." --Richard Breitman, Washington Independent Book Review

"A splendid account of the refugee crisis, moving seamlessly from compelling personal stories to the larger historical and political context, The Long Road Home is remarkably -- and refreshingly -- candid." --Tulsa World 

From the Publisher

Most books on postwar Europe are about the political and military division of the continent, without accounts of the social, cultural, and human turmoil. Shephard helps fill the gap with this study of what happened to the war's millions of displaced persons (DPs) and refugees. This is also a history of the official relief administration efforts as the Allied bureaucracy tried to bring order out of mass chaos and rebuild a devastated continent. Shephard intersperses descriptions of particular personal experiences to illustrate some of the conditions the DPs faced. Hanging over so many were memories of the aftermath of World War I, the challenge of what to do with Jewish refugees, and the looming start of what would become the Cold War. Shephard's book is a fine choice for general and scholarly audiences.

Library Journal