Much recent scholarly attention to Europe’s displaced persons (DPs) after World War II has been focused on the ways in which their fate and future were entangled in Cold War politics and the humanitarian/neo-colonialist agenda of the international aid organizations: The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and its successor, the International Refugee Organization (IRO). The DPs themselves have been afforded little agency of their own, their voices buried in archival sources that have been inaccessible or ignored. A recent exception is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Lost Souls: Soviet Displaced Persons and the Birth of the Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 2024), in which she argues that the Soviet DPs were not “‘pawns of fate’ but exercised more agency, collective and individual, than is normally assumed” (253).

Katarzyna Nowak, the author of Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria, has, like Fitzpatrick, but even more so, dislodged, complicated, and reconfigured the standard narrative by “taking the history from below approach [and] focusing on what DPs as aid recipients thought, felt, and did.” While her focus is on the Polish DPs, her approach, analysis, and deep dive into the archives with their “wealth of previously unpublished and often even unread, voices of members of displaced populations,” provides a model for historians of other ethnic and national groups, most notably Jews, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Ukrainians (15).

The Polish DPs, the majority of whom were young peasants and workers who had been deported into Germany during the war to serve as forced and slave laborers, shared space in the DP camps with Polish elites and army officers whose allegiance was to the anti-Communist government in exile in London. There were two choices available to these displaced persons. They could return to a Poland devastated by war, whose boundaries were sharply different from those that had defined the prewar state, or they could remain in the camps and hope that opportunities for resettlement outside Germany and Poland would become available.

In the immediate postwar period, large numbers sought to return home, but were unable to do so because the Allies at Yalta had granted precedence to the transport of Soviet DPs, thereby delaying the repatriation of Poles in Germany and Austria. The exiled prewar Polish government in London, together with anti-Communist social elites in the camps, took advantage of the delays to instruct displaced peasants and workers that, as part of the Polish nation in exile, their patriotic duty was not to return to their native land, which was now in the hands of the Soviets, but to build a new, independent and free, ethnically uniform, Catholic, Polish nation in exile. Peasants and workers whose “various and abundant modes of self-identification were not dominated by the national categorization” (23) came to view themselves as Poles for the first time, not simply because they had been invited to do so by the social elites who sought to include them in the anti-Communist Polish nation in exile, but because, in the archipelago of DP camps, nationality was the primary defining category. Those who sought placement in a camp and resettlement in Europe or the Americas had no choice but to identify themselves as “Polish” and join the diasporic communities that welcomed them as such.

Though it remains true that “if not for the efforts of the London government in exile, its agents and allies in the camps, and diaspora organizations, more DPs would have repatriated and fewer would have remained in the West,” (222) it would be wrong to conclude that the DPs were browbeaten and brainwashed into casting their lot with the anti-Communist Polish nation in exile. Those who chose to remain in the camps awaiting resettlement did so for a variety of reasons. “It cannot be underestimated how much the magnitude of Poland’s destruction impacted DPs in their decisions. The country was devastated. Many cities and towns laid in ruin, farms did not produce, shortages of fertilizers and seeds persevered, livestock was decimated, factories razed the ground or dismantled” (200). For many, it made more sense to remain in the camps and start over in another land than to attempt to do so in their former homeland.

The Polish DPs who eventually sought repatriation and those who remained in the camps rather than return to Poland had no choice but to tacitly accept the mandate and mission of the international aid agencies, which provided them with relief and rehabilitation as they, not the DPs, defined it. UNRRA, IRO, and a host of humanitarian agencies and diasporic and religious organizations fed, housed, clothed, provided medical care and vitamins, disciplined, policed, schooled, and sought to introduce the DPs to western notions of democracy and civilization. The DPs accepted the aid, but pushed back against the status of wards offered them. They decided when, where, and for whom to work; they complained about their food and shelter and demanded better; they joked and sneered and resisted, when they could. Still, in the end, those who choose resettlement over repatriation had no choice but to capitulate to what they perceived as the “slave market” procedures deployed by recruiters from nations that were willing to accept DPs, not for humanitarian reasons, but because they provided the solution to postwar labor shortages.

Katarzyna Novak’s book is a superlative example of historical research and writing. Nowak has not only made use of multiple archival sources but has also read them with care and imagination, a rare combination. Her’s is a work that opens up new avenues of interpretation in refugee history, postwar reconstruction, and European nationalism and nation-building. It makes a major contribution to our understanding of the postwar world that the DPs inhabited.