Seven decades after the end of the Second World War, we use the word “liberation” rather liberally. But is freedom really a thing that can be brought by one person to another, for example by a soldier to an inmate of a concentration camp? It is appealing to think so, and thus to imagine a precise and satisfying ending to the war. Dan Stone's pioneering study of the process of liberation demands, instead, that we consider seriously the meaning of freedom. Following a distinction once made by Isaiah Berlin, one could characterize his history as a contemplation of the differences between negative and positive liberty: freedom from oppression, and freedom to choose one's course. The lives of inmates changed when Germans left the camps; but, as Stone argues, it would be difficult to say that these people, many of them sick and emaciated, many of them surrounded by piles of corpses, all of them cruelly separated from their previous lives, were suddenly free. Stone makes the sensible case that liberation was a “process” that “happened over time” (2). Negative freedom, the end of oppression, was not enough.

“The most basic of the sorrows of liberation,” writes Stone, “was the fact that so many people died afterwards” (85). Former inmates died by the thousand even as others could celebrate the end of the war. Stone skillfully moderates the debate about whether the liberating armies could have done more for these people; naturally, they were unprepared for what they found, but in retrospect the reaction seems impressive. The Quakers were in Belsen six days after the soldiers. Jewish soldiers and chaplains helped and then coordinated help. Jewish organizations followed. An American nurse summarized poignantly the basic drama: the inmates “couldn't be liberated. What they needed was medical care, lots of it and as soon as possible” (76). By taking seriously the medical history of the contact between doctors, nurses, and former inmates, Stone shows that liberation was, and had to be, a process. On the basis of extremely broad reading of primary sources, both from inmates and from soldiers and care workers, he creates a social history where such a thing might have seemed impossible.

Stone's book concerns two kinds of institutions: the German concentration camps that suddenly came to an end when Soviet, American, or British troops arrived, and the displaced person (DP) camps established by the Western allies in occupied Germany. Many of the concentration camps were converted to DP camps, and many of the Jewish survivors of the concentration camps then found themselves in DP camps. Stone's subject, the reader comes to understand, is not only the Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, but also the much larger number of Jews who joined them in the DP camps. The theme is a Jewish one, subjectively, since it concerns the particular experiences of Jews in institutions where others were more numerous. As Stone knows, Jews were a minority in the German concentration camps, Jews were a minority of those present in concentration camps when Allied soldiers arrived, and Jews were a small minority of inmates of the DP camps.

Precisely because the Holocaust had taken place in Europe as a whole, the experience of Jews inside the DP camps was different from the experience of other “nonrepatriable” displaced persons. Jews’ families and friends had been murdered, and Jews were usually unwelcome in their former homes. They had escaped the Holocaust during the war, but they could not escape its consequences afterwards. Jews in the DP camps did not want to be housed along with other displaced persons, since the Polish, Hungarian, and Soviet citizens might be anti-Semites or even perpetrators, and because of anti-Jewish violence inside the camps. Very quickly Jews who had survived elsewhere than in concentration camps came to outnumber Jews who had survived the camps. They came to DP camps in Germany as part of an attempt to go somewhere else.

Stone relates how, in the DP camps, Jews slowly began to take control of their own lives. For Jews, the arrival of Allied troops could not be part of a liberatory narrative, since from their perspective the whole story should never have begun. As one Jewish woman tried to explain, she could not rejoice “because we felt this should never happen” (44). To be shifted from a concentration camp to a DP camp, to understand that beyond the DP camp was a Europe where Jews had been exterminated, to realize that British policy toward Palestine had not changed—these could also be experienced as stages in a story that never should have happened. But as physical health returned, Jews also began to seek a sense of purpose. Many Jews, certainly far more by percentage than before the war, identified themselves as Zionists. The idea of Zionism could be, as Stone writes, “a form of rejectionism” (160), since it was a way to leave and to renounce Europe. Palestine was where most Jews wanted to go, says Stone, although the United States seems to have been comparably popular. But surely Stone has a point when he concludes that the idea of participating in a Jewish state was one way that Jews in DP camps displaced their “developing sense of agency” (119)—in other words, positive liberty.

This is a book about the Holocaust in that the Jews beheld and returned to a world of grief. But it is not a book about the Holocaust as such. Jews killed in the Holocaust could not be liberated. No one speaks of the “liberation” of the thousands of German death pits in eastern Europe, where about half of the killing of the Holocaust took place, although Soviet soldiers marched over them just as surely as they marched through Auschwitz. To speak of the “liberation” of Treblinka is also strange, since it was a murder factory rather than a camp and no longer existed when the Soviets arrived. Similarly, the “liberation” of Auschwitz verges on a misunderstanding: the death facility could not be liberated since it was no longer operating and its victims were all dead. The Auschwitz camps were nearly empty (about 7,000 prisoners remained) when the Red Army arrived. The concentration camps, as Stone emphasizes, were not generally where the Holocaust took place. So their capture was not “the end of the Holocaust.” The title and the subtitle of the book do not sit well with one another; the first several chapters of the book are largely devoted to explaining this to the reader.

It was not the camps that made the German system special, but the perpetration of a Holocaust over pits and at death factories. Other systems deported, others had camps. Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald were not, sadly, the worst places in Europe. But they were seen, and seen as such. The visual and memorial “turns” have not helped Holocaust history, since they confirm popular impressions rather than encourage understanding; when outstanding historians such as Stone try to describe unknown events or make new arguments they struggle against images and discourses that their field sometimes promotes. It is very important to stress, as Stone does again and again, that the overlap between the camp system and the places where Jews were killed was relatively small. The difference between what was seen by the British and the Americans and what actually happened is important for the history of the Holocaust as a whole, since the former is a vanishingly small part of the latter.

The difference between what was observed by Westerners and what was experienced by Jews is also important for the people who are the subject of this book. After September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, about a quarter million Jews fled to eastern Poland. When the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, these people found themselves under Soviet rule. When asked if they would take Soviet citizenship, most Jews declined since they expected to return to their lives in Poland after the war. In June 1940 about 60,000 Polish Jewish refugees from Nazi rule were deported to the gulag for declining Soviet documents. Polish Jews who were native to eastern Poland had already been deported to the gulag that February and April on other grounds. After the Soviet NKVD murdered over a thousand Jewish officers of the Polish army at Katyn and four other sites, their wives, children, and parents were deported to the gulag.

All in all perhaps 85,000 Polish Jews were deported the gulag, chiefly to Kazakhstan and Siberia. At the end of the war, Jews who had been Polish citizens were unwelcome in the USSR. Stone is right that the Soviets and their Eastern European clients wanted more Jews in DP camps since this put pressure on the British to open Palestine to Jewish settlement, an objective of Soviet foreign policy. The “largest influx of Jews” to the DP camps, as Stone records, were “Polish returnees from Soviet exile” (180). It seems possible that more Jews in the DP camps had a Soviet experience of war than a German one. Stone catches an element of that Soviet story when he notes that, upon returning from the USSR to their prewar homes, Polish Jews were often met with violence. The particular sadness of this is that such people realized simultaneously that their family and friends had been killed and that they themselves were not welcome. Yet since their Soviet wartime experience is missing, a chapter of the Jewish history of liberation remains to be written.