Sheila Fitzpatrick’s fascinating book chronicles a remarkable success story: the repatriation and resettlement of millions of displaced persons (DPs) in Europe after the second World War. By the early 1950s most DPs had either returned home or migrated, mainly to Australia, Britain, Canada, Israel, Latin America and the United States.
DPs were well looked after by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and, from 1947, by its successor, the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). They were certainly better off than the 10 million Germans living in central and eastern Europe who had fled to what was left of Germany after Silesia and East Prussia were given to Poland as compensation for its territorial losses to the USSR.
As Fitzpatrick also points out, these European DPs (who included many Jews) fared a lot better than the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Most DPs had been forcibly displaced during the war as slave labourers, but among them were a good many Nazi collaborators fleeing retribution, especially from the Soviets. Worried about the formation of an anti-Soviet emigration, Moscow insisted its citizens return home, including those from recently acquired territories such as western Ukraine. For Stalin, displaced Soviet citizens were also a vital human resource, one he didn’t want to lose to the capitalist west.
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Fitzpatrick is a renowned Soviet history specialist but she covers the DP story from every angle.
Half the book deals with high politics. UNRRA was devoted to repatriation, while the IRO focused on resettlement. UNRRA was a Soviet-Western collaboration, an idealistic internationalist organisation that predated the cold war split. UNRRA viewed the DPs as predominantly “victims of nazism”. The US-controlled IRO rebranded them “victims of communism” and hence eminently suitable for resettlement in Western countries, where they were mostly welcomed with open arms.
The other half of the book details the self-made lives of the DPs inside and outside the camps organised by UNRRA and the IRO. Fitzpatrick’s DPs are not victims but agents, who often sought to control their fate by resisting repatriation and insisting on resettlement in countries of their choice. Among those exercising their agency was Fitzpatrick’s late husband, Michael Danos, a Latvian DP who resettled in the US in 1951.
[ How Ireland dealt with aftermath of the second World WarOpens in new window ]
Fitzpatrick concludes that the resolution of the DP problem after the second World War is “one of the great achievements of diplomacy and international organisation in the modern era”. But, sadly, a lot of the energy, money and organisation that made this possible came from the imperatives of the emergent cold war.
