Ruth Balint, "Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe" (Cornell UP, 2021)
About this episode
Ruth Balint discusses her book on the experiences and narratives of displaced persons in postwar Europe and their impact on the concept of refugees.
In this unique “history from below,” Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and Their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe (Cornell University Press, 2021) 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…
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