Review: Irena Grudzińska Gross on Displaced Persons

Several million displaced East Europeans were resettled at the end of World War II. How did that happen?

Recently the air here in twenty-first century America (and Europe) has been full of talk of migrants and migrations. The fear of the masses flooding the United States decisively shaped our recent election. It seems that even the newly arrived express hostility towards the desperate people at our gates, as if each acclimatized migration wishes to be the last one. Yet, being a migrant myself, I consider people’s routes more important than their roots. And people’s right to migrate fundamental.

Of course, migrations are hard and perilous for migrants and, sometimes, for those who receive them. But there are millions of stories of relocations that, while difficult, are thought of with gratitude. One such is a story described in a new book by the historian Sheila Fitzpatrick. Entitled Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War, the book shows several aspects of the repatriation and resettlement of several million East Europeans at the end of the Second World War. The book considers how such a massive deglomeration of people was performed within a few years, and how the DPs (as the people in the Displaced Persons camps were called) themselves were able actively to influence its course. The paradoxical side of this story is that the resettlement was helped by the growth of the hostilities that we call today the Cold War. The West, especially the United States, accepted this torrent of refugees just as the iron curtain was falling.