Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe by Ruth Balint

Abstract

Humanitarian responses to and experiences of displacement in the aftermath of the Second World War have received considerable scholarly attention over the past two decades. The field has been particularly dynamic in recent years, from examinations of the everyday encounters between relief workers and displaced persons (DPs) to broader accounts of how the war cast a long shadow over individual lives and countries (see, for instance, the excellent monographs by Rebecca Clifford, by Peter Gatrell, and by Laure Humbert). Destination Elsewhere is a welcome addition to this historiography and to the already extensive contribution of Ruth Balint to migration and refugee history in Australian and global contexts.Not surprisingly, the book's primary focus is on Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war, but Balint frequently expands the spatial and temporal boundaries of her analysis. Crucially, Australia is thoroughly examined throughout the monograph. The inclusion of Australia is a necessary corrective to the “myopia” (p. 15) of most historians, who tend to overlook the country's role in postwar resettlement (a myopia that also existed, as Balint notes, among DPs themselves, who often did not know about or consider Australia a viable migration option). Other non-European countries also appear within individual histories of persecution and displacement. For example, Balint discusses China on several occasions, highlighting the “global reach of the war's displaced” (p. 55).The main period discussed is the years of the International Refugee Organization (IRO), whose representatives are the dominant voices in the book, but Balint also goes beyond this and frequently allows herself to address the many resonances of her research with historical and more recent issues. She connects her discussion of “child rescue” discourses to the broader history of “brutal separation of families by state authorities” in the Western world and draws an important parallel with the treatment of Aboriginal families in Australia (p. 94). She also carefully engages with current refugee issues, discussing the often-ignored plight of disabled refugees today as well as denouncing the stark contrast between (1) how postwar refugees (or at least some of them) were encouraged to come to Australia and were celebrated in the country's national narrative and (2) the extremely hostile policies and public discourses of today regarding migrants.The book's contributions are many and far-reaching. Two are particularly worthy of discussion. The first is a convincing reevaluation of our understanding of the postwar project of family restoration that has been thoroughly analyzed by Tara Zahra and others. Balint further documents the “paternalist family paradigm” (p. 76) that meant that, in the rise of the individual in postwar refugee and human rights laws, the DP status of most women and children still depended on the male head of family (pp. 60–61). But, importantly, she also demonstrates how “not all families were considered equal” (p. 145). Family reunification was deeply entangled with Cold War politics that gradually “shifted ideas of victimhood away from the war to its aftermath” (p. 155). For instance, IRO officers frequently circumvented repatriation policies to help children to migrate to the West, even when their parents or relatives had been located (p. 84).Family restoration was also profoundly shaped by eugenic ideas about population control that, far from being discredited with the fall of the Third Reich, were openly included in the immigration policies of Western liberal democracies and, as the author reminds us, still remain today within discourses around “able bodied citizenship” (p. 112). In the immediate aftermath of the war, humanitarian workers and child experts implemented new ideas about aid and welfare but also “brought far older attitudes toward disability” (p. 112). The IRO's stance regarding disabilities, which mirrored the expectations of immigration authorities in the countries involved in resettlement programs, left many families with disabled children to face a “tragic dilemma”: choosing between their migration plans and their children. Some families accepted offers of placement or simply abandoned their children, but others refused to be separated. Such acts of resistance, which Balint carefully documents and describes as “quite heroic when seen in the context of the pressures of emigration for remaining DPs” (p. 101), form part of the second major contribution of the book.Destination Elsewhere is remarkable in its determination to bring to light the experiences and perspectives of DPs. Drawing on Rom Harré’s notion of “file-selves” (a notion entangled with broader “paper identities”), Balint examines a wide range of sources such as questionnaires, appeals, petitions, and denunciation letters to “make sense of the new worlds that DPs first imagined and then, as new migrants, inhabited” (p. 18). With a constant awareness of the silences and limitations of materials that often only offer “brief flashes of ordinary lives” (p. 9), she documents how DPs “battled to be recognized as legitimate” (p. 37), wrote denunciations about war crimes and collaboration, or resisted categories and family and gender roles that were imposed on them. Doing so, Balint not only highlights how DPs “[influenced] decisions about them and their fellow DPs” (p. 43), but also contributed to shaping broader discussions around worthiness, victimhood, or guilt. She forces us (borrowing here from Natalie Zemon Davis, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Marita Eastmond) to think about what truth, especially historical truth, means. This discussion is particularly thought-provoking as it again clearly echoes today's widespread and violent “culture of disbelief” toward populations on the move.Balint's sensible attention to DPs’ intimacies and to “all the drama and the mystery of human relations” (p. 146) makes Destination Elsewhere a necessary read for historians of twentieth-century state-building, migration, refugees, gender, and family. Her close reading of personal histories will also be of interest to any social scientist who, “confronted with figures in the millions … wishes to understand individual experience” (p. 9).