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Ruth Balint, "Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe" (Cornell UP, 2021)
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A
So good, so good, so good.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Geraldine Gutfin. Today I'm thrilled to host Ruth Ballant, professor of history at University of New South Wales in Australia. In today's episode, we will talk about her book Destination Elsewhere, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2021. Ruth, a very warm welcome to the show.
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B
Oh, thank you for having me.
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A
So first of all, I would love for you to situate this. I think it's your most recent book publication, right? Like I would love for you to situate it within your broader intellectual history. You have written extensively on migration, so I wonder how much this project overlaps with things you've worked on before, but also what might be different or new. Tell us everything.
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B
All right. Well, yes, this is a book about the displaced persons who were part of the post war landscape in Germany and Austria and to some extent Italy. And it is a little bit of a departure for me because I have tended to focus more on Australian migration history. Australia does play an important role and we can talk about that in this book. But for me, what I wanted to do was to situate the book, to start it in Europe. So it is very much bringing Australia into that sphere of post war Europe after 1945. And how I came to the book was quite interesting because I happened to be in Germany a number of years ago and I traveled to the small town of Bud Aralson where the International Tracing Service is located. The International Tracing Service is now named the Aralson Archives, but up until the 21st century it was known as the International Tracing Service and it gained a certain notoriety as a secret archive. It was where all the documents were kept relating to the crimes of the Nazi regime. And there's something like 30 million documents located in this town relating to around 17 million individuals who were persecuted by the Nazis. And for many years it was closed to the public. You had to submit a form as a family member to get information about your relatives, which, you know, sometimes this could take years. I traveled there in just after it had been open to the public. So in around 2007 or 2008, it was opened up to researchers to come there or relatives to come to Bud Aralson and try to find out, you know, information. When I arrived, I wasn't there to conduct research. I was there to find out what had happened to members of my family, what had happened to members of my four grandparents families during the Holocaust. But as sometimes happens in the life of an historian, that visit was quite transformative. And I really, in that first visit, I recognized the potential of this particular archive for history. And it was the beginning of really 10 years of study and research that led to the writing of this book.
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A
So I have a question about this, because I feel like if you are going to this kind of archive looking for relatives, as you did originally, you know, we kind of know what you're looking for. But when you have a project like this where you're trying to capture the lives of people that you don't know that are not relatives, what was your methodology for approaching this kind of archives? Because reading the book, I feel like I. There are two problems that came to mind in terms of. Of writing a book such as yours based on the materials you have at your disposal. The first one is the really the mess of materials. How do you even. What kind of methodology do you adopt to figure out what am I going to look at? Where am I going to look for? Am I looking for specific names? So that's the first one. And then the second one is that the information about specific individuals is quite scattered and fragmentary. So how do you bring this into a story that would make sense for the reader? So what was your approach to these two methodological issues when you were conceiving of the book and later on writing it?
- [06:15]
B
That is such a good question. And initially I didn't have a methodology and it was quite chaotic. What I recognized in those early visits to this particular archive was, was I became interested in, in fact, in the post war period as opposed to the Holocaust. That was the first thing I recognized that a lot of the material that is held at the Arolsan archive is less about the Holocaust and more about what happens to people afterwards. And it was a moment really around sort of 13, 15 years ago, when the aftermath of World War II is becoming an important field of research in migration history. And I was very interested in understanding how displaced persons navigated their journeys out of these displaced persons camps onto countries of resettlement in the West. And I recognized that to. To be able to use the archives of, of the international tracing service effectively, I began by looking at what were known as the care and maintenance forms and looking at the, you know, at first I just, you know, there are millions of these or at least a million probably. So it's, you know, you need to narrow down that search. And the way I did that was that I looked at those, those displaced persons who are being refused displaced person status. And in response. And this was quite innovative in this post war period. And we can talk a bit more about how innovation really was part of this story. But what is quite innovative is that, that there is a review board set up in this period by the allies so that displaced persons who are refused displaced person status or refugees who are refused this important displaced person's label. This is what gave people access to aid, it gave people access to the camps, so shelter, and it gave people access to potentially a visa to the West. So those who are refused displaced person status, DP status, are able to petition the authorities, the allies, this review board, and to get their cases reheard. Petitioning the review board meant having to tell your story in quite detail. And so this is what started to interest me the most. What are the stories people are telling to the authorities? How is storytelling becoming such an important survival strategy in this period? And so that's sort of where this led me. I can't really say I had a very comprehensive, as you can see in the book, I look at lots of people and I look at lots of stories, and it's more about the patterns that emerge rather than, you know, specific case studies. But yes, this is where the book sort of ends up becoming of most interest is in the storytelling that displaced persons have to create about themselves in order to get access to this important. What. What's a good word here to. In order to get access to, I guess, a life of what they see as freedom.
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A
Right, right. And I think that's what I see as really one of the most important intervention in the book. And I think you stress this particularly in the, in the conclusion when you draw parallels with the current refugee crisis and where you say, we have to stop anonymizing refugees, we need to put faces and stories on the refugee, quote, unquote, problem. And so yours is really, as you call it, a history from below or social history of DPs. And I really appreciate this, and it takes great care to really put this all together. I wonder if before we go into more substantive discussion of the storytelling and other aspects of the story, you can just kind of paint a bit of a picture of the immediate situation after World War II. What is the scale of the DP problem? Where are the DPs based? And you mentioned the IRO, the International Refugee Organization. Can you tell us a bit more about how this organization, which is really one of the main actors in the story, fits and fits in the book?
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B
Yes, of course. So after. Well, after the end of the war, which is another whole, you know, books are written about that moment when the war ended. But there were around, you know, 60 million people just traipsing across Europe trying to return home, trying to locate families. And when the dust settles, There is around 20 million people, homeless people, left in Germany. Now, at least many of these are ethnic Germans who have been expelled from countries in Eastern Europe. They are not the interest or concern of the Allies. And the Allies make this very clear at the beginning that they are not going to be looking after anyone of Volksdeutsch or ethnic German heritage. And there's around 8 million refugees who are made up of people who were brought to Germany as forced laborers or slave laborers. There are prisoners of war, there are concentration camp survivors, and there are kidnapped children, of course, soldiers, as well as, of course, your collaborators or even war criminals who manage to kind of hide themselves in this massive throng. Initially, the unrwa, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, set up centers to care for the displaced persons. And. And their sort of mandate is to repatriate. It is assumed by the Allies that all these people will want to go home by the end of 1945. And going into 1946, it starts to become evident to the Allies that at least a million and a half of these people don't want to go home. Their countries are coming under Soviet control. For the much smaller numbers of concentration camp survivors and German Jews, it's clear that. Well, you know, for the concentration camp survivors, it becomes clear that going home, there is no home to go back to. A number of them do return to their homes, only to discover that their families have all been killed. There's no homes left, or their possessions have been stolen. So they come back to the displaced persons camps in Germany. So the Allies start to recognize that, oh, no, they don't want to go home. What are we going to do with them? So in 1946, a new organization takes over from the UNRWA, named the International Refugee Organization, and they are given a new mandate, and that is to resettle rather than repatriate. So that's where my book really starts. It's also very much a Cold War story because along with the International Refugee Organization, the iro, there's a deepening. There's the deepening Cold War. And the Allies recognize that. That in fact, they shouldn't be. They don't want to be sending people back to Communist countries. It's not a good look in this Cold War. And in fact, what is a good look is to have displaced persons claim that they want to go to countries, to democratic countries, and not back to Soviet occupied Europe. So that's, that's really where the book starts and where, you know, where my interest kind of sits. The refusal by displaced persons to return to their countries of origin by 1946 is a refusal that forces the Allies to create new systems, to invent new systems for deciding who counts as a refugee and who deserves protection and who can be allowed to immigrate to countries of resettlement. So, indeed, and I think you brought up the conclusion to the book. I think what's really interesting is that in this moment, new labels are being developed that still hold true today. So you're getting the new categories, the categories of refugee as opposed to migrant, the categories of politically persecuted as opposed to economically opportunist, undeserving and undeserving, sorry, deserving and undeserving. These are categories that are starting to crystallize and harden at this time.
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A
So I'm really interested in the relationship between the storytelling that you mentioned earlier and those categories that are developing. So the first question is how are these categories evolving within the lifespan of the IRO itself, itself? And then how does the need to fit within those existing or changing categories shape the narratives that potential migrants or that these DPs are providing to, to the, to the board?
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B
How.
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How do those two things work in tandem?
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B
Yeah, that's a really good question. And it was the question that I had as well. What is really fascinating about this moment, and if we think of a social history of, for example, international law up until the creation of the United Nations Convention on the refugee in 1951, 52, what is really interesting is before World War II, to get refugee status, to get recognized as a refugee, you had to Prove that you belong to a particular group of people. After the war, this changes and it becomes based on the individual rather than the group. So now a refugee has to prove that they are legitimately displaced according to their own personal story, rather than just belonging to a group. And so in the post war period, and particularly under the iro, a screening process is created that is based on an interview with a screening officer. And the form, the application form, and the point of that form is to screen out war criminals, collaborators and ethnic Germans, anyone who is seen as undeserving. And really those of the three main categories. And the refugee have to be able to tell officials who they are, what they were doing during the war, how they were displaced, why they fear return to their countries of origin, why they deserve protection or a chance to migrate to the West. In other words, they have to tell a story about themselves. And the stories that refugees tell themselves start to become a particular narrative that DPS tend to share. It is true, as IRO officials suspect, that, that an underground industry builds up, is created in the camps that help displaced persons tell the correct story, help displaced persons to get their stories straight. And I think this is really interesting. You know, you start to tell and you start to be able to see a particular narrative. You start to see a familiar narrative through line in which DPs draw on ideas about freedom and democracy and anti communism. And during this period, anti communism becomes more important, most important. And that's what I'm talking about when I say that the Cold War kind of informs the creation of the legitimate displaced person. Anti communism almost becomes more important than having to prove you're a victim of Nazism. In this period, displaced persons really learn to craft a particular narrative that draws on these ideas of democracy equaling freedom, of victimhood under the Soviets, of communist oppression. And it's the assertion of this democratic identity, I think, that really becomes the marker of the legitimate displaced persons. And I think at one point in my book I say that, you know, it becomes more important to be seen to be anti communist than to be seen to have been a victim of the Nazis in this period.
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A
So let's, let's trace that what's happening on the other hand of that process, right, because you have the DPs on the one hand or prospective DPs, and then you have the people making these decisions. And as you just alluded, they are aware that there are scripts that people are following. So what's happening on their end and how do they process the people that they're and you know, those are face to face encounters. That's the beauty of social history. You show that it's individuals interacting with other individuals and obviously some of the power to decide the future of the people in front of them. So how are they ultimately making these decisions, knowing, you know full well that, you know, something might be embellished, that people might be lying? You also have a whole chapter on denunciation. There's a lot of denunciation. So there are all kinds of things that kind of muddle the truth. If you know, how do you even speak about the truth in this context? So how do they come to these kind of decisions about Wu to grant status to.
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B
Yes, it's such an interesting question and you know, I would love to know a little bit more about what, you know, we can't get into the minds of the IRO officials, but sometimes I was very surprised. There seemed to be a lot more support and sympathy for. And this becomes even more apparent as the 40s draw to a close. And you know, the world is turning away from the crimes of the Germans to, towards and to, and collaborators of course, from Eastern Europe towards more focus on trying to fight the communists. And so fascists seem to be in this period being seen with more sympathy and support than we would expect coming from our own perspectives. And this really surprised me looking at some of these encounters that really a lot of people that were quite suspicious were being granted displaced person status based on these stories of being, you know, anti communist. So initially there's, you know, a bit more, I think the screening, the security screening is more intense. But as the 40s move on and it seems the world move on, it seems to become more relaxed. And so by the time that the displaced persons camps are being emptied and closed in the early 50s, IRO officials are being actually instructed to allow people with clearly problematic histories, such as people in the Galician SS even to be granted DP status. There's another sort of stage in this process between being given DP status in the camps and being then vetted for countries of resettlement. So countries of resettlement, you know, namely Australia, Canada, the United States, by 1948 with the USDP Act, America's one of the more later countries to join in the IRO resettlement program. And of course, countries in Western Europe, they all send their migration officials to, to the displaced persons camps to conduct their own interviews. And there's a competition going on between the resettlement countries to get the fittest, the youngest, the most, you know, potentially attractive dps to come to their countries. These are, you know, less about humanitarian objectives, these resettlement programs and really more programs based on pragmatism. It's very evident to the welfare workers in the iro, on the ground, in the DP camps that countries are looking for their pound of flesh. They're less interested in rescuing victims of Nazism, for example. And I focus particularly on Australia and Australia's migration program as it is acted out in the DP camps in Europe. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, Australia tends to get ignored or tended to get ignored. When I was writing this book,
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in
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B
overall histories of displaced persons, it's been very focused on the American story or the story of Jewish survivors that go to Palestine, which becomes Israel in 1948. But Australia took the second largest number of displaced persons after the United states. Australia took 170,000 displaced persons. And I think the Australian story is really interesting in that respect. The displaced persons they didn't want were the Jews. And yeah, and this is a very interesting story because when Australia looks back at this history it tends to see it as a narrative of rescue and you know, a very celebrated history. But in fact Australia was under the white Australia policy at the time. It was looking for manual labourers to rebuild the post war economy as was Canada, as was Belgium, as was, you know, France and the United States and in fact even know Israel to some extent wanted strong manual workers. So that's really part of my book is about the way the interviews happen at this time in the DP camps. As I said, first it's the security screening but then it's the interviews with the migration officers. And I was very interested in the way that Australian migration officers interviewed and selected migrants. And it became apparent to me quite quickly that people with perhaps Nazi or collaborative pasts were able to slip through that process quite easily. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures can go up 20 degrees. Turn the temperature down down with blinds.com and get up to 50% off custom window treatments like solar roller shades and more during the Memorial Day Mega sale. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you free samples, real design experts and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 50% off site wide and huge savings on door busters. Right now during the Memorial Day mega sale@blinds.com rules and restrictions apply as long
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A
as they could show that they were, you know, productive and good. Add to the, to the workforce. So I have a question about this, this distinction that you made between Jewish and non Jewish dps.
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B
Yes.
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A
How, how does this story. Because you mentioned some Jewish dps, but you don't have a chapter that look specifically at, at dps through, through, through, through that lens. But what is your understanding of how different their experiences were in terms of, you know, seeking, getting interviewed by those different countries or not interviewed? Like how kind of from beginning to end, how was the fact of being a DP status shaped that trajectory compared to someone who was not legally labeled as Jew as Jewish?
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B
That's right. I mean, this is very interesting and I do, I should say that my book is not really focused on the Jewish dp, the Jewish survivor experience, because I think that has been quite. It's been studied and looked at and written about quite extensively. However. Yeah. So really within the first year it becomes. Initially displaced persons are classified according to nationality, but it becomes very clear in the first year that Jewish displaced persons should have their own separate DP camps, that they're being kind of housed together with people who only weeks or months before had been their persecutors. So Jewish DPs are able to gain their own separate DP camps and they're also able to be exempted from, from the security screenings and the sort of process that non Jewish DPs have to go to. So very soon. And certainly by the time the International Refugee Organization comes in, Jewish DPs have their own camps and they have their own category, you know, their own classification as Jewish DPs. So they sort of are separated out from that process, except in the cases, and this is quite interesting, where they're in mixed marriages. And this becomes quite an interesting story that I do touch on, because women in those years automatically gain the nationality of their husbands upon marriage. So you have the situation of Jewish women who have married German men, in fact, and are being denied access to the sort of support that other DPs have because they've been stripped of their Jewish status after the war. Whereas in fact, during the war, being married to this German man might have saved their life. Or conversely, the German man who married the Jewish women might have suffered and been put in camps. So a number of these mixed marriage couples are writing to the authorities at this time saying, hang on a minute, this isn't fair. So that's also a sort of story in my book about what happens to mixed marriage couples during the war. But otherwise, for Jews who've survived, they are separated out from the need to go through these screening processes.
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A
I was also really interested in the intermarriage question, I mean, I suppose, the marriage across either religious or national borders. And you have, I think, one section of the book that talks about. Are there German women married to Chinese men in Shanghai?
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B
Oh, yes.
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A
And yeah. Which I thought was also interesting. And some of them divorced.
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B
Tell me if I.
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A
If I got the. The this part of the book world. But they retained Chinese nationality even after divorce, which affected their. Their claims. So, yeah, that's definitely a part of the story. So let's. So let's talk about the flip side of this policy of trying to look for strong male. A lot of the people in this story are not men and they're not strong. You look at women, you look at children, you look at children with disabilities. You even have, I think, a part of the book that's on elderly people. So what fate awaited all those categories that would not have been seen as, quote, unquote, desirable by this Western government?
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B
So that's really an important point in my book is they become classified as the hardcore, the kind of unresetable leftovers of the DPs, you know, the ones that no countries want. And this is exactly that. It's single mothers, it's disabled people, elderly people, people who've been handicapped by the war, known as the war handicapped. It's the elderly. And I was very interested in. In how. Because I think that still continues today in that the immigration policies of nations is very much structured around who they wish to exclude based on fitness. And, you know, what was really interesting in looking at the Australian forms, the migration questionnaires was, you know, they'd have fit. One of my. You're right. One of my chapters looks at the problem for families with disabled children. And this was a shock to me to encounter this in my research is that families with children would, you know, attempt to get resettlement in countries like Australia. And as I said, the criteria for the main criteria was being fit. And children who were not fit, who had some form of disability would therefore cast the whole family as unfit. You know, and families were having to make really difficult decisions. They were being encouraged by, you know, even by IRO officials to put these disabled, to leave these disabled children behind, to put them in institutions so that the rest of the family could have a chance at a new life somewhere else. And I traced a number of these stories, and it's a very, very sad part of this history. Families having to give up children or families separating, you know, married couples divorcing over the mother, staying behind with the disabled child. And the rest of the family emigrating elsewhere. All families leaving children to be institutionalised, either in Germany or Belgium, took a number of these children as well. So that is the impact of these migration policies on families that I think has not really been properly acknowledged until now. And it's the elderly as well. Some of the saddest stories I came across in looking at this history was families with elderly members. Sometimes the elderly members would suicide, and this was because families were being rejected.
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A
They wanted to free them from the burden of caring for them and stand behind.
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B
That's right, yes. So this is another part of the history that I tell in this book.
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A
And how did gender norm and expectations shape the way in which female DPs were retreated and their claims were heated or dismissed?
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B
This is really important as well, is on the one hand, you have this shift towards the individual in international refugee law, as I said, the individual having to tell their story. But in fact, it's a very gendered individual because women at this time are being. Men are seen as the head of the family and women are usually classified as dependent. So they, you know, when women are treated as either wives, as mothers or relatives of men, rather than individuals or political actors in their own right. So when women try to separate out from men who might be rejected because they have been found to have collaborated or that, you know, with the Nazis, for example, they often have to speak very loudly in the archives to have their claims as individuals heard. And when they do speak very loudly, they're then sort of demonized as opportunists. So the kind of, you know, while we can talk about the individual in refugee law, it's a very gendered approach. And women often suffer the most in this period by kind of these decisions that are being made.
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A
You mentioned earlier the review board that heard the cases of people whose claims had been dismissed. So can you kind of walk us through what the board was and how people used it and how we could, you know, affect the personal trajectory of these people?
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B
Yes. So, as I said, non Jewish displaced persons who want the status of a displaced person in order to get access to aid, get access to shelter and hopefully at the end of that, a ticket to the West. You know, they go through these screenings. If they're rejected, they have the chance to have their cases, well, to appeal. What we might understand as an appeal process, the review board, the IRO review board is a collection of senior officials, really. It's about 10 men generally. Often they have a background in law and they do this kind of. They Go around, they travel. It's a traveling review board that travels around to the displaced persons camps hearing appeals, or they receive appeals in the mail. They receive petitions by people who often write really long letters saying, you've rejected me from displaced person status and I'm a legitimate refugee for these reasons. So, you know. And what's also very interesting about the review board is that the reviewers come together and discuss the problematic cases. And in the process of this discussion, history is being made because these reviewers are having to discuss recent history and reassess how they're viewing the history of what happened in the war and deciding whether, you know, people who fought, for example, in the Schutz Corps or, you know, fought in the Latvian Legion army, can we see them as legitimate? Were they forcibly conscripted or were they volunteers? So it's a moment when a new history is being revised about how to understand, understand this recent war. And although we're not hearing often, except in the cases of mixed marriage, Jewish refugee stories, what we are hearing, and particularly I discuss this in my chapter on denunciation, what we are hearing is petitions from people who saw, who did see, you know, so did see what was happening to Jews. So this is why denunciations, I think, are important to look at as a source for understanding the Holocaust and have not been looked at, really by historians until now, because denunciations by other DPs about other DPs really are a clue as to what people were seeing, what bystanders were viewing, you know, of their fellow villagers or, you know, so you get, for example, in one camp, particularly a Hungarian displaced person's camp, someone who is angry with another DP will write to the review board and say, look, I know that this man was very active in the Arrow Cross. I saw what he did. He did this, he stole, he murdered. And I have the evidence for this. So these denunciations actually are quite interesting in what they tell us about how people could see what was going on and what they knew. So I think it's really interesting in the history of the bystander.
- [44:25]
A
Yeah, right. They're an incredible source, a difficult one, but an incredible source for studying topics beyond the question of displacement and post forward migration and probably very much overlooked.
- [44:39]
B
Yes, yes, I think so.
- [44:41]
A
I have one final question before asking you about your current and future projects. If you have five minutes to spare. Five minutes.
- [44:49]
B
Yeah.
- [44:50]
A
Okay. My question is about this gorgeous photos in the book. You have about 20, which is a lot, actually, in a scholarly monograph. So what were you hoping to Convey through those photos and how did you select them?
- [45:07]
B
They are often of. Yeah, that's a really good question actually. Let me have a think about that. I mean, I think for this moment in time in history, the way the world was receiving its information both about the survival, about displacement, about for example, unaccompanied children are an important part of my book is through these, is through the photograph. And particularly too, the second half of my book is really about that migration process and the way that countries who are receiving these migrants are being in a sense educated about displaced persons is through the photograph. And so I wanted to kind of convey or to show the reader the sort of photographs that, that are being circulated in this period as well. So that's, I think why. And I found that these images so compelling I was able to source them from both migration museums as well as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and from various national archives and of course the International Refugee Organization. And I think they just tell a sort of parallel story of what displacement was being represented as in the late 1940s.
- [46:48]
A
They're a fabulous addition to the book. In conclusion, do you have any more thoughts you would like to share with our listeners and if you don't mind telling us what you currently working on are hoping to work on in the near future?
- [47:01]
B
Yes, I'd love to hear from readers. I hope people find this very interesting. So really I would just like to say that I think this is such a fascinating moment in our history. It's a moment when we're starting to rethink the modern idea of the refugee, both in our humanitarian frameworks, but also within international law and with immigration regimes. And I think what's really important to recognise is that the refugees themselves and displaced persons at this point in time are having a say in how these are being developed. I don't think, you know, in today's world we give refugees and displaced persons enough of a say, enough participation in these regimes and these so called regimes of protection. And I think, you know, this period is quite salutary in that way. Now what I am working on at the moment. So I am looking at more deeply at the idea of the family in this post war period. And I've become very interested in marriage and the way that women were able to use marriage as a strategy for migration. We often hear about the post war moment as being this incredible moment of rebuilding and regeneration and we see that through the lens of marriage. But what's happening to these marriages? And what about the ghosts of previous marriages? How are they playing out in these new liaisons. So I'm writing about that. I also have a new Australian Research Council grant which I'm going to be starting at the end of the year, and that is a completely different story. It's taking me back to the turn of the 20th century and it's very much an Indian Ocean story about pearls and gems and the incredible trading networks that were being created in this period between the northwest of Australia, which was a pearling port, it was one of the centers of pearling in the world. The trades of network that are being created from Broome in northwest Australia through India and the Middle east to the great gem houses of London and Paris. That is my next project.
- [49:57]
A
That sounds absolutely fascinating. Ruth, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing all of the insights about your beautiful book. Good luck with all your projects and thank you to our listeners for joining us today. Goodbye everyone. Have a great day.
- [50:10]
B
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