"[A] highly readable and moving book of postwar relief
efforts...Shephard raises an important point about the writing of
history, which so often dwells on spectacular evil at the expense
of pedestrian virtue...With this book, [he] has made a significant
contribution to redressing the balance." --The New York Times
Book Review
"This is an epic book, beautifully written and astonishingly
well-researched." --The Wall Street Journal
"Thoughtful and sobering." --New York Journal of
Books
"M
內容簡介:
At the end of World War II, long before an Allied victory was
assured and before the scope of the atrocities orchestrated by
Hitler would come into focus or even assume the name of the
Holocaust, Allied forces had begun to prepare for its aftermath.
Taking cues from the end of the First World War, planners had begun
the futile task of preparing themselves for a civilian health
crisis that, due in large part to advances in medical science,
would never come. The problem that emerged was not widespread
disease among Europe’s population, as anticipated, but massive
displacement among those who had been uprooted from home and
country during the war.
Displaced Persons, as the refugees would come to be known, were not
comprised entirely of Jews. Millions of Latvians, Poles,
Ukrainians, and Yugoslavs, in addition to several hundred thousand
Germans, were situated in a limbo long overlooked by historians.
While many were speedily repatriated, millions of refugees refused
to return to countries that were forever changed by the war—a
crisis that would take years to resolve and would become the
defining legacy of World War II. Indeed many of the postwar
questions that haunted the Allied planners still confront us today:
How can humanitarian aid be made to work? What levels of
immigration can our societies absorb? How can an occupying power
restore prosperity to a defeated enemy?
Including new documentation in the form of journals, oral
histories, and essays by actual DPs unearthed during his research
for this illuminating and radical reassessment of history, Ben
Shephard brings to light the extraordinary stories and myriad
versions of the war experienced by the refugees and the new United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that would
undertake the responsibility of binding the wounds of an entire
continent. Groundbreaking and remarkably relevant to conflicts that
continue to plague peacekeeping efforts, The Long Road Home
tells the epic story of how millions redefined the notion of home
amid painstaking recovery.
關於作者:
Ben Shephard was born in 1948, studied history at Oxford
University, and is the author of the critically acclaimed A War
of Nerves and After Daybreak. He was producer of the
U.K. television series The World at War and The Nuclear
Age, and has made numerous historical and scientific
documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. He lives in Bristol,
England.