David Nasaw - The Last Million: Europes Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy

Andrew Carnegie

The Chief: The Life and Times of William Randolph Hearst

Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements

Children of the City: At Work and at Play

Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States

The violence of war did not end with the signing of cease-fires, truces, or peace treaties. War bled into postwar and millions of innocents who had never taken up arms continued to suffer long after the soldiers had gone home. Germany was in free fall; chaos reigned; national, regional, and local military, police, and political authorities had abandoned their posts. There was, literally, no one directing traffic, no one policing the streets, no one delivering the mail or picking up the garbage or bringing food to the shops, no one stopping the looting, the rape, the revenge-taking as millions of homeless, ill-clothed, malnourished, disoriented foreigners: Jewish survivors, Polish forced laborers, former Nazi collaboratorsall displaced personsjammed the roadways, the town squares and marketplaces, begging, threatening, desperate.

Wandering Hordes in Reich Alarming: Allies Fear Grave Problems May AriseAsk Liberated to Stay Where Freed, John MacCormac of the New York Times reported in a front-page story on April 7, 1945.

The American and British soldiers moving east into Germany, and the reporters who accompanied them, were transfixed by what Colliers magazine columnist W. B. Courtney referred to as wars living wreckageliving, moving, pallid wreckage.

It washed up and down the margins of the autobahn in a dragging tide. It was composed of people of all sizes, ages, races and varieties or garments. A few had bicycles. Some pushed handcarts. The majority, however, rolled baby carriages. The baby carriage is the sorriest joke in Europe today, for you never see a baby in one.... Instead they are filled with pots and pans and tools, and all the impediments of nomads. There were shivering maids, and youths in shorts, with legs blue and raw. There were released German soldiers with their army packs and cut branches for walking sticks. You knew the displaced persons by the bulk of their clothing and the magnitude of their bundles. A man wearing two or even three suits, a woman wearing several dresses and a couple of coats and carrying more were not unusual sights. None seemed to want food. Their want lay sadly deeper, and you could not touch it with your pity but could only surmise that it was for country and home and news of loved ones. Having once seen the wandering lost millions of Europe, you could never forget them, even as you could never fully know what thoughts were in their minds or what lumps were in their hearts. In the rain and wind, they were a steamy, abject porridge of human woe.

Barely clothed in ripped and ragged, oversized striped camp uniforms, the Jewish survivors were distinguishable by their pallor, emaciated physiques, shaved heads, lice-infested bodies, and the vacant look in their eyes. You could see them walking down the street, Chaplain Herbert Eskin of the U.S. Army recalled, some of them, with torn shoes, barefooted, with their long coats, the women, and the men with the pajamas, you know, dirty, very short hair looking to talk to someone for aid.

The vast majority of Jewish survivors remained in the camps, too ill to leave on their own. The soldiers who encountered them tell the same stories of initial shock, then disgust, accompanied by alternating waves of pity, anger, and stomach-churning illness, followed by a body- and soul-wearying sadness that would not dissipate, a disillusionment with all things human, an enervating, pervasive disquiet that would remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Their first task was the burial of the dead and the triage of the living. Thousands of corpses littered the ground, or were stacked in sheds or uncovered graves. Among the living were those known within the camps as the Muselmnner, the unworldly, ghostly walking dead, too ill, too weak, too hurting to be moved, who had to be bathed and fed in their barracks until they were strong enough to be removed on stretchers to hospital facilities. Those afflicted with or dying of typhus were quarantined and left to perish. Those who were ambulatory were moved to assembly centers to be patched together again and repatriated, as soon as possible.

On April 11, Buchenwald was liberated by the inmates, hours before the arrival of the American army, but after the Germans had evacuated some twenty-eight thousand prisoners, a third of whom had died in sealed railroad cars or on arrival at their new camps or while trying to escape. On entering the camp, American soldiers from the 6th Armored Division of the Third Army found twenty thousand inmates, four thousand of whom were Jews.