BOOK OF THE DAY: The Long Road HomeBy Ben Shephard The Bodley Head, 496pp, £25
DURING THE second World War the Nazis pressganged millions of workers from all over Europe to replace their mounting battlefield casualties. Lured by the promise of work on farms and in factories some volunteered, as in the Ukraine where recruiters used the slogan: “Come to sunny Germany.” Others, such as the entire staff of a Cracow hospital, were ordered into trucks at gunpoint and forcibly transported to the Reich.
When the guns fell silent in 1945, most German cities were in ruins, with millions uprooted, many of them homeless and starving. This book tells what became of the displaced millions and their struggle to rebuild shattered lives. They included POWs, Holocaust survivors, concentration camp inmates, forced or volunteer labourers and refugees. The Allies called them “DPs” – displaced persons.
Among the POW labourers were 300,000 Poles, treated brutally, and 1.2 million French and British who fared better. By contrast the Nazi plan for Russia was chillingly simple: starve its entire population. After D-Day the Allies were surprised therefore to find that hundreds of German soldiers in Normandy were in fact Russian. The Germans had offered them the choice of joining the Wehrmacht or being shot.
The author notes that the Final Solution was only widely known by late 1944: even leading Zionist David Ben-Gurion thought the Nazis were conducting a pogrom, not industrialised genocide.
When the Allies exposed the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau, typhus, typhoid and dysentery were endemic and the deaths continued, 14,000 in Bergen-Belsen alone. Survivors had to be contained and in a cruel twist many found themselves prisoners in the very camps from which they had been liberated. At least in Belsen the half-starved and the sick were comfortably housed in the former Panzer Training School, a huge improvised hospital set in a lush garden suburb. Ironically German doctors and nurses cared for them.
While the physical suffering of DPs was obvious, Shephard also focuses on the mental toll, quoting author Dorothy MacArdle’s 1947 tour of DP camps full of ill-fed and orphaned children. She predicted these sad victims would grow up with stunted bodies and minds.
Not all Jews were camp survivors; some had remained hidden, some stayed in Russia and others were partisans. When the fledgling Israeli state drafted thousands of DPs into the army they made poor soldiers, possibly because they had seen enough killing to last several lifetimes.
Even though most countries had postwar labour shortages, resettling DPs overseas was never easy. Canada, Australia and Britain were particularly choosey about country of origin. The US strictly limited entry for the huddled masses, with racial quotas for eastern and southern Europeans. The Jewish lobby was strong but American anti-Semitism was even stronger. One constant opponent of DP settlement was the conservative and openly anti-Semitic Irish-American senator for Nevada, Pat McCarron.
Most Jewish DPs opted for Palestine rather than going home. When the barely seaworthy steamer Exodusarrived off Haifa, loaded with refugees, many still in their striped camp uniform, British gunboats rammed it and opened fire killing five people. Images of eight warships escorting this tiny vessel into port flashed round the world and the PR disaster was compounded when British troopships returned all the passengers to Germany.
This is a long, absorbing read on a fascinating topic and while some of the detail is of marginal interest, the author makes it crystal clear that for many thousands of DPs it was indeed a long road home.
Fergus Mulligan is the author of The Trinity Yearand of a forthcoming biography of William Dargan
