The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War

Groundbreaking and remarkably relevant to modern emergency relief efforts, The Long Road Home tells the epic story of how the mammoth refugee problem in the wake of World War II was painstakingly solved.

While the war was still going on, the Western Allies began to plan for the humanitarian crisis they knew would come when the shooting stopped. Haunted by memories of the chaos and loss of life at war's end a generation earlier, they were determined to get it right this time. But what faced aid workers in 1945 was not what they had planned for--Jewish survivors of the concentration camps and a mass of "displaced persons" from Eastern Europe--Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Yugoslavs--who did not want to go home. It would take five years to find them new countries--in Israel, the United States, Canada and Australia. Ben Shephard has drawn on a mass of materials, including newly discovered diaries and journals, to bring out the human reality of this story.