from Part I - History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025
This chapter offers a nuanced account of liberation, displacement, and homecoming after the Second World War. It emphasizes the ambiguity of a liberation that was not always freeing, displacement that continued wartime suffering, and a homecoming that was often bittersweet, when it was even possible. It traces the ways in which the savage history of postwar Europe led to massive population transfers, including of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It looks at “homecoming” both in western and in eastern Europe, as well as post-liberation migration out of Europe. After all, most east European Jews quickly realized they had little future in Europe, their sense of belonging shattered. The surrounding societies were often unwelcoming for returnees, reluctant to return appropriated property, and retained substantial antisemitism. If, in western Europe, Jewish survivors could, to a degree, “go home again,” this proved impossible for the most part in eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish survivors often abandoned Europe altogether, seeking new lives in Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. The political and social history of displaced persons after the war is thus both pan-European and global.
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