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Rebecca Clifford, Ruth Balint. Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1324–1325, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae291
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Europe 1945: an unprecedented sixty million people are displaced. Their ranks include hundreds of thousands of concentration and internment camp survivors, victims of Nazi forced and slave labor, prisoners of war, exiled ethnic Germans, and refugees fleeing all manner of violence that emerged in fragile states as the Second World War ended. Ruth Balint’s Destination Elsewhere contributes to a growing scholarship on Displaced Persons after the war that has focused attention on the nature of humanitarian aid policies in an emerging Cold War context. Most of those traveling Europe’s “restless roads” returned home, but Balint’s focus is the “last million,” those who refused to repatriate, whose numbers included not only Jewish Holocaust survivors but many hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians who did not want to return to countries under Soviet control. Destination Elsewhere takes a bottom-up approach, seeking out the “ways in which DPs, often at pains to assert their individual histories, sought to make their histories “count” in the brutal competition for visas to the West” (6). Balint explores why DPs refused to return to their countries of origin, how they forged narratives to navigate the rules and policies set in place by aid organizations, and the impacts their refusal had on an international community that was at once eager for laborers but wary of refugees.
