Destination Elsewhere

Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe

Ruth Balint

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501760228
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

In this unique "history from below, " Destination Elsewhere chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee.

As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old.

Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons' camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.

1

TELLING THE TRUTH IN POSTWAR EUROPE

The debates around how to conceptualize persecution, guilt, victimhood, and the refugee after the war were not only conducted in courtrooms, in the pages of law books, in lofty conference halls, or in rooms of parliaments. They were also argued in makeshift rooms in displaced persons (DP) camps, many of which were only recently the sites of concentration camps or army barracks of the Third Reich; in the interviews of refugees by screening officers; and in the pages of carefully penned petitions DPs sent to the International Refugee Organization (IRO) review board seeking what they commonly referred to as “justice.” They manifested in furious scribblings in the margins of application forms or interview notes by IRO officers questioning the wartime accounts of DPs or each other’s decisions. They continued in the informal semijudicial tribunals held by the Geneva-based IRO review board, members of whom periodically traveled on circuits throughout Germany, Austria, and Italy to hear appeals by individuals against negative eligibility decisions.

The question of truth dominated these encounters. Gerard Daniel Cohen quotes one bewildered IRO official, who asked: “How to discover, within this enormous flux of uprooted beings, the authentic refugees and displaced persons?”¹ It was a daily problem: screening officials were constantly instructed to be on the lookout for whether a person was telling his or her own truth or simply an acceptable version that could get him or her through the process. This situation was compounded by the suspicion, correct as it turned out, that there was a flourishing underground industry in writing petitions and forging documents in the camps. Piotr P. was denied DP status by an irate IRO officer who underlined his frustration: “He knows nothing of the contents of the appeal which was signed by him, but was obviously written by someone else without regard to true facts.”² Similarly, Zofia R. had concocted a “gruesome” story about the murder of her father and the deportation of her other relatives to Siberia, when, in fact, previous statements she had signed showed that she had been living in Warsaw with both of her living parents for the entirety of the war. “It should be pointed out,” her interviewer noted, “that her appeal is typed and worded on the same paper as a number of other appeals and is obviously insincere.”³

The practice in deception had been going on since the time of the United Nations Rehabilitation and Repatriation Administration (UNRRA), as Rhoda Dawson, a British welfare officer, recalled. Secrecy surrounded the screening process from the beginning. “We were forbidden to explain the reason for it,” she wrote, and it quickly became seen as a threat by the “muddled, neurotic people, who immediately saw in it another threat of forced return to terror.” DPs who were screened were also forbidden to reveal the contents of the questionnaire to other DPs who came after them. “But after a fortnight,” Dawson writes of her first encounters with screening in the Polish DP camp where she worked, “two men were seen to come into the room with the answers already written down. In another camp members of one group undertook to learn one question off by heart, after which a class was held secretly.”⁴ Susan Pettiss, a welfare worker in Munich, similarly found the extent of “underground maneuvering” going on among the DPs depressing. “They have learned to live by their wits, have learned all the answers so that we find it difficult to know who is a DP and who is not.”⁵

Truth was indeed a precious commodity in DP Europe, the only thing many felt was theirs left to trade. “I am an old father,” wrote one. “My son was refused DP status because of me and because of my guilt. It happened the first time in 1947 when we both went for screening—I insisted that he should only tell the truth, without attempting to hide the real date of his arrival in Germany, i.e. 1939, and I am the guilty one because he could have given any date he chose.”⁶ Dates were important. Arriving in Germany in 1939 would have signaled to the IRO screening officer that Vladimir, the son, had willingly come to Germany for personal gain, rather than by force, thus immediately marking him ineligible for IRO assistance. To claim otherwise, according to the IRO official reviewing his case, was a “manifestly untrue statement.” Others such as Nikolaj E. resorted to the truth only after his life story was exposed as a fabrication. “As the Board has sent me a negative reply to my application for IRO assistance, I am forced to tell the truth which I had concealed up till now,” he wrote. He had lied “out of a sense of duty as a husband and father” to his wife and son, and “because I was anxious to obtain independent work, and that, as you know, is bound up with departure from Austria to countries which are in a position to give such work.” E.’s two appeals were rejected by the IRO, leading him, in another letter, to beg that his case be reviewed so his family could leave Europe. “The wish to place my family life on a normal human basis became an obsession with me,” he confessed. “It has too often happened in my life that I have lost the things to which I was most strongly attached, and I cannot let myself endanger my own health and, consequently, the life of my family since they give my existence all its meaning.”⁷

This exercise in arbitrating truth frequently occurred in the encounters between IRO jurists and DPs contesting their decisions to exclude them from Allied support. The IRO review board was created in late 1947 to allow individuals the right to appeal IRO rulings made by eligibility officers during screening interviews. Many of the board’s decisions were annotated in the IRO Manual for Eligibility Officers, to assist with the multitude of new and unusual cases that increasingly confronted interviewers. That the review board existed was evidence of the attempt, in this period, to instill professionalism and due process in the vetting of refugees, and it quickly became the most significant cog in the IRO’s judicial machinery.⁸ At the time, it was justifiably recognized as innovative. “From a juridical standpoint,” wrote an international law scholar in 1948, “here is the most interesting institution created for the displaced persons.”⁹ The numbers employed in the board were small—at its height, it consisted of a chairman, three members, four deputy members, one recorder, one case reviewer, and nineteen assistants and clerks.¹⁰ Their caseload, however, was comparatively large: as word spread about the possibility of appeal, individuals who faced the inevitable closure of the DP camps made every effort to have negative decisions about their status reversed.

DPs made their appeals to the IRO review board either in person, when the men of the board traveled on circuits of DP camps in Austria, Italy, and Germany, or in writing. These appeals and letters form an unusual written corpus of wartime experience by those caught up, willingly or unwillingly, in the machinery of Nazi occupation, be they ex-slaves or forced laborers, ex-prisoners or escapees, ethnic German fugitives, soldiers, resistance fighters, officials, or pen pushers with access to Nazi power. Their individual files often contain more than one appeal and more than one letter or petition: there was no limit to the number of appeals a petitioner could make. This meant that cases could be, and often were, revisited multiple times, as petitioners fought to convince the board that the IRO officer’s original decision against them was wrong. In the words of its chairman, Marcel de Baer, the review board “developed into an organ having the character of investigator, psychologist and judge.”¹¹ Seen in this context, the achievements of the review board amid the chaos of postwar Europe were indeed phenomenal, if unsung, in legal histories since.

Often, this role of investigator and judge required significant flexibility. The lines between right and wrong, innocent and guilty, victim and perpetrator, were continually being redrawn by IRO decision makers as previously unknown facts emerged and old certainties foundered on the rocks of new Cold War realities. A handwritten page at the front of the review board file for Erik L. notes, for example, that his account and the documentation he provided to back it up “proves that in March ’43 there was a mobilis. for labour. Petitioner himself states that mobilisation for military service for men born in 1925 only began in Autumn 1943.” Added in brackets was the following text: “this statement has been put in Estonian information folder.”¹² Such facts mattered. From 1949, men such as Erik from the Baltic states who had joined the army to avoid being court-martialed after the forcible mobilization order of 1943 could be found eligible; those who had joined voluntarily beforehand could not.¹³ As new facts added up, each carefully annotated and filed, they collectively began to resemble small pieces of a minutely detailed jigsaw puzzle rather than broad brushstroke facts of military outcomes. Although not of my own focus, for the military historian interested in the minutiae of war, they are a potential goldmine. In his appeal against a negative IRO assessment, for example, Nikolaus M. wrote a four-page letter in which he described how, as an ex–White Army officer of the Russian Army, he was exiled in Belgrade when the Second World War broke out. He joined the Russian Defense Corps (Schutzkorps), becoming company commander. Much of his letter, however, is a detailed account of its activities, its missions, its weaponry, and even the uniforms and insignia worn by its volunteer members.

The example of Vjekoslav M. is another case in point. M. was a thirty-nine-year-old mechanic from Croatia who was found to be a prisoner of war of the British between 1945 and 1947, after working as a civilian mechanic repairing engines for the Croat air force between 1941 and 1945. The first decision of the board, made on August 11, 1948, excluded him for “voluntarily assisting the enemy.” The decision explained: “The Croat section of the Luftwaffe was at that time composed of volunteers only, and it is evident, a fortiori, that civilians working for that section were engaged on a voluntary basis.”¹⁴ Over the next year, however, his case was taken up by a sympathetic IRO eligibility officer, Victor Tedesco (later to become a review board member), based at the Klagenfurt camp in Austria where M. was staying. “To say that he worked for the Croat Air Force is about as correct as the statement that an Austrian Mess Orderly at a G.I Mess in Salzburg works for President Truman,” argued Tedesco in a letter to Geneva, urgently requesting another hearing. He attached to his request the summary of his interview with the unfortunate mechanic, whom he described as “hardly erudite”:

M. was employed from 1932 till April 1942 by a textile firm Herakovic in Zagreb as a mechanic. After his return from the Jugoslav Army he found (a) job with the firm Krusnjak in a repair shop. The firm was later nationalised and had to carry out also the orders from the Croat Army. There he stayed till May 1945 when one day early in May several soldiers appeared in the shop and demanded from the manager four drivers. The manager detailed four of his employees, one of them being M. Those four drivers were ordered to go into an army store where they got four lorries full of food and were forced to drive them to Slovenia. Although M. refused to drive the lorry, he was eventually forced to do it, having been threatened by a pistol. Again, at Rogatec, Slovenia, he was asked whether he preferred to return home or to drive on to Carintia. As M. saw the soldier producing a pistol when asking the question he answered that he would drive on.

By the time he arrived in Klagenfurt, ten days later, the war was over. He went on to Tarvisio, “being unable to understand the position, and therefore going where anybody else went, not only the soldiers, but also civilians, women with children.” En route, he was captured by the British, becoming a prisoner of war until the summer of 1946, when he was told to leave because he was not a soldier. “He asked a colonel to let him stay in the camp because he had nowhere else to go.”

M.’s idiosyncratic story captures the experience of one man among millions, helplessly forced at gunpoint to accept decisions by people in power, powerless to refuse, inevitably caught up by the whim of fate in the enormous tide of human movement that ended, temporarily, in the DP camps of Germany and Austria. This was certainly how many chose to present their situation, and how others saw them, as a “demoralized, hopeless mass of stranded humanity,” in the words of one concerned UNRRA official.¹⁵ But this image of victimhood was not completely accurate. Missing from this picture was the DP’s own agency, exercised loudly and frequently, to the great frustration of the authorities. Refusal to repatriate was one of the strongest manifestations of this, and M. was similar to the great majority of Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian DPs who refused to go home. The final line of his interview transcript with Tedesco noted that M. “does not wish to return home and all the members of his family at home advise him to stay abroad.”

Moreover, there was still another matter to clear up: the existence of a tattoo on M.’s forearm. “But he has blood group work,” a handwritten note on a scrap of paper in his file reads, referring to the Nazi practice of tattooing an individual’s blood type, which was usually prima facie evidence of belonging to the Waffen-SS (Schutzstaffel). “Very suspicious.” Underneath, in another person’s handwriting, probably Tedesco’s, was a quick clarification. “He’ll be ready any time you can see him. There is no tattoo mark à la SS. He has an aeroplane and the date 1930 tattooed on his arm—hardly similar.” The review board finally met to reconsider M.’s case, over a year after his first appeal. This “very simple workman who is interested in nothing but engines” was finally declared to be within the IRO mandate as a DP. The following year, he went to Australia.

Direct access of refugees to decision makers was a novel part of the review board’s existence, and these encounters influenced the ways in which individuals were assessed: it was not only at the level of policy but also in these everyday meetings that, over time, a contemporary “persecution narrative” developed, crafted around common tropes of displacement and national loss, and inflected with Western ideas of truth, fairness, justice, and morality. As Jane McAdam has noted, persecution as a criterion for refugee status already existed well before the Second World War, tacitly and implicitly underpinning refugee definitions adopted by the League of Nations and subsequent bodies in the interwar period.¹⁶ But it found universal expression after the Second World War in the writings and interviews of DPs, and it was explicitly included as a reason for refugee status in the IRO Constitution of 1946. It was later rearticulated in the definition of the refugee by the United Nations in 1951.

A new “refugee identity” evolved in this period that was tied to a vision of a world partitioned along Cold War lines, divided between the old and the new, between unfree and free. In 1948, an article appeared in the American magazine Collier’s with the title “Unwanted.” “Shoved about like pawns in a game of international politics are a million and a half desperate people, Europe’s DPs. Their only crime was that they were brave enough to hold out for liberty; their only desire is to become useful citizens.”¹⁷ Frank Clune, an Australian journalist who wrote a book ab...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• 1. Telling the Truth in Postwar Europe
• 2. “There Has Been a Lot of Dirt Here”
• 3. Housewives and Opportunists
• 4. Unaccompanied Children and Unfit Mothers
• 5. The Children Left Behind
• 6. “The Top-Heavy Slow-Turning Wheel”
• 7. Address Unknown
• Plates
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index