The Long Road Home

A groundbreaking book that offers a radical reassessment of the aftermath of World War II. As newly formed relief organizations began to grapple with the recovery effort in Europe in 1945, they were confronted by an entire starving and uprooted continent. And while they were only beginning to grasp the atrocities that would come to be known as the Holocaust, more than twenty million people who had been expelled from their homes and homelands-“Displaced Persons,” as they were called-constituted an immediate refugee crisis, the largest in Europe’s history. This commonly ignored aspect of the war is brought to extraordinary life by acclaimed historian Ben Shephard through a trove of personal accounts and major new sources-including memoirs, essays, and oral histories-discovered during the course of his exhaustive research. Weaving together the observations and experiences of those who organized the postwar relief efforts and those who waited for their futures to be decided long after armistice was declared,The Long Road Hometells the epic story of how millions redefined the notion of home amid painstaking recovery.