According to the editors, this is a collection about the “war after the war” and the experiences of everyday life in the wake of war and genocide. As such it is divided into three broad but distinct sections that deal with the identification of survivors, the reception and resentments of returnees, and the postwar worlds of women and children. As with any such collection, the contributions have been grouped to add coherence to the issues they examine, but there are inevitable and understandable gaps in the coverage, and the chapters need to be seen as indicative of problems that were in many respects much more common than these single case studies might indicate. Thus, for example, the chapter by Raphaël Spina on French Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO, or Compulsory Labor Service) returnees, based in part on interview material, will resonate with the experiences of forced laborers from other occupied countries who returned to their homelands in the weeks and months after the cessation of hostilities. Indeed, one of the focal points of the collection is to relate the grand strategies adopted for a liberated Europe through the practical policies adopted by government and relief agencies to the everyday experiences of the survivors “on the ground.” This is clearly brought out by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Lynne Taylor in their respective examinations of Displaced Person (DP) policy in the British Zone of Germany where they show how unprepared the relief workers were in taking on the tasks that faced them—and also how difficult it was to implement apparently unproblematic directives, including even the most obvious task of identifying those eligible for help.

There are also a number of individual case studies that highlight the postwar problems of specific groups; for example, the Polish victims of camps and forced labor who came to Britain after the war, and the Austrian women convicted of race defilement during the Nazi era. Both appear to have fared badly in their respective postwar situations—leading to the unsurprising conclusion that aid and reparation were highly politicized and often bore little relationship to actual wartime suffering. Among the contributions are chapters that try to break some of the cozy myths surrounding displaced persons. Silvia Salvatici suggests that while couples in camps were often pushed toward legal civil marriages, the DPs themselves saw them in far more pragmatic terms—as a means of gaining certain benefits or advantages. Likewise David Weinberg gives a flavor of the sometimes vitriolic debates that surrounded the fate of postwar Jewish orphan children, with case studies from western Europe, and then goes on to examine the ways in which Jewish communities attempted to address the problems of adolescents whose childhoods were fractured by persecution and war. For Jewish children in the Soviet Union, there was no specific recognition of their suffering as Jews, but Svetlana Shklarov shows how a subculture of commemoration developed within families and the Jewish community.

This is essentially a book of ideas—some more fully explored than others—as perhaps befits a volume to emerge from a conference. The use of individual or small group case studies to bring out wider issues is a worthwhile enterprise, but some of the topics are undoubtedly too large for a format where the contributions often only amount to a few pages—leading to some highly generalized statements that would benefit from qualification. The scope of the contextual research undertaken for these essays also comes out clearly in the endnotes, with some chapters being fulsomely referenced while others apparently betray a lack of familiarity with some of the available sources for their particular topic. That said, this volume shows just how complicated the situation in postwar Europe became by highlighting the plight of specific survivor groups in a way that has not been attempted before. The editors should be applauded for their endeavors in bringing this collection together as it will provide plenty of food for thought in the burgeoning field of post-World War II studies.