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The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War Paperback – Illustrated, 14 February 2012
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Groundbreaking and remarkably relevant to modern emergency relief efforts, The Long Road Home tells the epic story of how the mammoth refugee problem in the wake of World War II was painstakingly solved.
While the war was still going on, the Western Allies began to plan for the humanitarian crisis they knew would come when the shooting stopped. Haunted by memories of the chaos and loss of life at war’s end a generation earlier, they were determined to get it right this time. But what faced aid workers in 1945 was not what they had planned for—Jewish survivors of the concentration camps and a mass of “displaced persons” from Eastern Europe—Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Yugoslavs—who did not want to go home. It would take five years to find them new countries—in Israel, the United States, Canada and Australia. Ben Shephard has drawn on a mass of materials, including newly discovered diaries and journals, to bring out the human reality of this story.
- Print length512 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication date14 February 2012
- ISBN-109781400033508
- ISBN-13978-1400033508
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"[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
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Product details
- ASIN : 1400033500
- Language : English
- Paperback : 512 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781400033508
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400033508
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This book, not yet finished fills in the spaces my parents never ever talked about, nor did their friends, except in very light ways. Too many many men drank, and too many many men died, while the ladies died inside.
I wanted to know my personal, and our human history because our very shallow, at times, human minds, tend to forget much of that which bothers us, and much of that which has formed us.
A great book, for me, personally.
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.
Determined not to repeat the mistakes of the First World War, when disease and famine had stalked a devastated Europe and in many ways contributed to the chaos and disruption that gave rise to Hitler, the Allied powers tried to cooperate in strategies to stabilise conditions and repatriate the many millions living in camps across Europe. A civilian agency was created, UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency), to take over responsibility for the DPs (displaced persons) from the military and bring some humanity and compassion to the treatment of these shocked and traumatised masses.
But what to do with them was a logistical challenge for the Allies every bit as daunting as the war itself. Saving only America, most of the Allied powers had difficulty feeding their own populations, let alone the DPs and the starving Germans; indeed, it was in this period that for the first time bread began to be rationed in Britain. Many of the DPs were ethnic Germans expelled from newly-Soviet Poland and Czechoslovakia; many others were citizens of those latter countries who refused to return to homelands under the communist boot. The vast majority of the Jews wanted only to emigrate to Palestine, and this the British government would not permit. Many others wished to emigrate to an America that did not want any immigrants at all. Other countries would take only DPs who could work, stepping in to industries desperate for labour in the push to get economies moving again - and yet few DPs were in a physical condition to labour in fields, mines or forests.
It was a logistical, administrative nightmare, and it largely on the logistics and administration that Ben Shephard focuses. Whilst there are voices of the DPs themselves in these pages, it is very much more a tale told from the perspective of the helpers, not the helped. There was never enough money, never enough personnel, or trucks, or blankets, or shoes, or food, never ever enough food for people who have starved near enough to death. And UNRRA was subject to the inherent poor organisation, petty bureaucracies, infighting, racketeering and corruption that plagues any altruistically-minded body set up in a hurry and staffed by well-meaning but inexperienced volunteers.
UNRRA did its best, but it could have done more, had it been properly staffed, funded and organised. But alas, altruism on the scale we are talking here is very rarely without an element of self-interest on the part of the governments funding it, and even the very best of humanistic endeavours can be overturned in a heartbeat by politicians concerned first and foremost with their own constituencies and parochial concerns. American senators and congressmen were particularly guilty of this, until they began to see an anti-communist benefit to it.
This is an excellent book, a real eye-opener, that ably fills in the gaps between the end of WW2 and the opening of the Cold War. It's also gives a fascinating insight into the role that the camps and the DPs played in the creation of the state of Israel, and also the creation of the concept of 'the Holocaust', which as Shephard points out, was not considered by contemporaries and those who survived it, as we ourselves see it now. One definitely worth a read for anyone interested in what comes after the cataclysm of war...