Victims of Hitler and Stalin is a very thorough, traditional, and well-researched account of the movements and wartime experiences of Polish and Baltic people who came to Britain after the Second World War. The research is based on a combination of official published sources and oral history accounts and memoirs, and the book is broken down into a series of chapters that reflect different stages of the war experience. Starting with depictions of life before the war in Poland and the Baltic states, the chapters follow the key developments of the war: German occupation, Soviet occupation, deportations to German work camps and Soviet gulags and life in those camps, release, and eventual settlement in Britain as allied soldiers or displaced persons. At each stage the official political decisions and developments of the war are outlined in great detail, with oral accounts being brought in “to grasp the impact of these events on individuals” (6). On several occasions Thomas Lane stresses the brutal nature of the Soviet Union's wartime conduct in particular, and a major aim of the work is to redress the perceived imbalance of collective wartime memory, where Nazism is associated with brutality to a much greater extent than Soviet occupation. As he asserts, “The propensity to jest about Bolshevism in the West, despite everything, combined with fond memories of youthful idealism in support of the Communist cause, has created a barrier to familiarising a broad readership with the terror of the Soviet system” (2). As the title suggests, this book is about those who were victims of Stalin’s, as well as Hitler’s, terror—and in many cases those who were victims of both.

The book's great strength is that is throws light on the very complex and confusing time of Nazi and Soviet occupations in Poland and the Baltic states, essentially from the perspective of “ordinary” people. By providing detailed appraisals of life under occupation, German and Soviet deportations, and life in the gulags, this book illustrates clearly the chaos of the period. The experiences of the interviewees are largely depicted through displacement and feelings of terror, and the first chapter in particular concentrates on the dislocation felt by those forced to move during the war. Difficult issues are not shirked either—alleged Polish and Baltic participation in anti-Semitic atrocities and issues of Latvian SS collaboration are all confronted. The section dealing with the development of communities in the United Kingdom also has some interesting points about the changing nature of ethnic identity over time, although issues of class and gender are neglected.

While there is plenty to recommend this book to those with an interest in the war itself, and Polish and Baltic immigration into postwar Britain, there are some areas of concern. I am not convinced that the style of mixing a detailed factual account of the war with personal accounts always works. Although Lane states that “this book does not claim to be an `oral history’” (6), there is still a substantial amount of oral history material used. The attempt to build fragments of testimonies into a bigger historical and political narrative means that the accounts themselves are often left underanalyzed. Crucial questions about memory, narrative devices, silences in testimonies, and the differences between oral accounts and written memoirs are raised only briefly in the introduction. A good example of this is the fascinating account of an Estonian man regarding Estonian collaboration and atrocities: “Regarding the local population I cannot recall that our battalion created any atrocities. In spring we used to lend Russian and Finnish farmers our horses to work in the fields for which we got something in return, and twice a week we had a dance in the vicinity. We never had any firing squads or hangings” (49). The reader is left wanting to know more about this interview—what questions were asked, was the issue of firing squads and hangings raised by the interviewer, or was the account offered unprompted? While anti-Semitic atrocities are addressed in the book, moreover, the author does not comment on the more subtle “othering” of Jews found in many of the included accounts—where Jews are portrayed as a very separate group.

In fact, this is part of a wider problem in that the interviewees are treated in a very anonymous way. Although in many cases, especially early on in the book, the accounts are introduced with some background detail about the life of the respondent, many more testimonies are left to stand on their own with no hint of the gender, age, or background of the interviewee. Unfortunately, the list of interviews provided in the bibliography does not contain any of these details either, most importantly, the gender and place of residence in the United Kingdom. This issue of gender is also another disappointing area, in that the experiences offered appear to be largely from male respondents. Very little is said, for example, about the 35,000 Polish women and children (144) who spent the last years of the war in Red Cross camps in the British colonies, even though the majority of these people ended up emigrating to Britain permanently.

On balance, this book offers a very rich account of experiences in wartime Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, particularly in the way that it combines solidly researched facts and statistics with an attempt to show what these developments meant “on the ground.” It raises awareness of the horrific experiences of these populations at the hands of both Stalin and Hitler, and the terrible decisions and strategies they had to make and follow in order to survive. It would, however, have been able to explore these experiences even more convincingly if the extraordinary accounts used had been given greater status and had been analyzed more fully.