The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War

by Ben Shephard

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781400033508
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/14/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	5.22(w) x 8.46(h) x 1.02(d)

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

"[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

…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

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