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https://theconversation.com/a-miracle-of-western-tenacity-how-10-million-refugees-found-homes-after-world-war-ii-247795>
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Review: Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War
– Sheila Fitzpatrick (Princeton University Press)
A disaster. That was the fitting word for the Europe that emerged immediately
after 1945, covered in soot from cities turned to ashes. Life had collapsed.
Victorious but struggling to find their footing on the continent, the allied
occupiers were overstrained with a host of minutiae: administering food, trying
to prevent disease outbreaks, running prisoner-of-war camps, revamping the
postal service, restoring electricity in major cities.
Then there were the roughly ten million “displaced persons”, over a million of
them in what was left of Germany – a mass, and a mess, hailing mostly from
Eastern Europe. There were singles and people with dependants, forced
labourers, prisoners of war, potential and actual Nazi collaborators, alongside
Jewish survivors of the Nazi camp system.
It was Babylon on wheels: people crying, sick, pleading for shelter and medical
attention in a variety of languages, bereft of food, split by political
factionalism: a labyrinth complex enough to drive any foreign observer mad with
confusion. Dressed in ragged clothes, they carried leaky sacks and scuffed
suitcases and, with those, their hard lives.
They were supposed to be repatriated. But many of them, holders of Soviet
passports, were dodging the Iron Curtain, which was crashing down all too fast.
They did not want to go back. These “lost souls” very much preferred to remain
“lost” to their motherland, which, upon return, would become their mothergrave.
Or so they said.
This the rough outline of the subject of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s new book
Lost
Souls. In engaging prose, Fitzpatrick takes up a topic she touched on in her
previous work
White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to
Australia (2021), telling the involved story of the game of “international
political football” that occurred between 1945 and 1952."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
