In their place, Nasaw leaves us with a grim reality: the estimated seven million displaced persons (DPs) who were left stranded, malnourished, and utterly bereft in the wreckage that had been Nazi Germany.
While most of this number eventually repatriated to their home countries, Nasaw, whose previous books include Pulitzer Prize–nominated biographies of Joseph P.
Kennedy and Andrew Carnegie, zeroes in on the “last million” DPs who languished for up to five years in refugee camps, waiting to be resettled because they no longer had countries to return to.
Among these were Poles, Ukrainians, and Balts who’d worked for the Nazis and now refused to return to Soviet-dominated homelands, as well as — most tragically — the quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, whose homes in Europe had vanished and who could not remain in the place where their families had been murdered.