The Long Road Home

"During the war, Germany was in dire need of labour. They had conscripted as many people as they possibly could into the army, which had left a gaping hole in their workforce. Rather than use women to fill the hole, which happened in Britain, they went to all the occupied countries and conscripted forced labour. Quite often they would round up people and ship them to Germany and use them quite literally as slave labour. So at the end of the war there were eight million people in Germany who didn’t belong there and had really no way of getting home as the transport network had been completely destroyed. So these people were milling around not really knowing where to go. The only people who were capable of picking them up and sending them back to where they belonged were the Allied armies, who had, of course, all kinds of other priorities. “At the end of the war there were eight million people in Germany who didn’t belong there and had really no way of getting home as the transport network had been completely destroyed.” Ben Shephard’s book is about these people and what it was like to be displaced during the war and having nowhere to go afterwards. What’s really good is that he focuses a lot on those displaced persons who actually didn’t want to go home. For example, the Poles who didn’t want to go back to Poland because it was occupied by the Soviets. Also, parts of Poland had been ceded to Ukraine, so a lot of these Polish people didn’t actually have a home to go back to. So these people languished in displaced persons’ camps for years after the war – well into the 1950s. Then there were the Jews who, as we have just mentioned, were still suffering horrendous anti-Semitism across the continent. They didn’t want to go back to Poland and other Eastern European states. They would rather be in Germany – the place that persecuted them in the first place – than go back to places they believed would continue to persecute them after the war. So it’s a very complex situation for ordinary people to live though. That’s what is so wonderful about his book. Ben Shephard’s got a real sense of humanity and empathy with these people and that shines out from every page of the book. Yes. You’ve got to remember that at the same time there was a civil war going on in Ukraine – Ukrainian partisans fighting against Soviet rule. A lot of the displaced people were the same type of people who would be fighting if they had been in Ukraine. The fact that they’re not there means they have an opportunity to avoid the horrors that are going on in their own country. They didn’t want to be ruled by the Soviets. The idea of going back is the worst thing they can think of. It’s much worse than the idea of dying. They imagine they are going to be tortured and killed anyway, and aren’t prepared to put themselves through that. They went everywhere. Lots went to Canada, the United States and Australia. Hundreds of thousands of Poles ended up coming to Britain. Many of the Jews were helped by Zionists to get into Palestine."