The Long Road Home - The Aftermath of the Second World War (Ben Shephard, 2010)

I read lots of World War II stuff, and for good reason.  Most of it focuses on the political leadership, the generals and the armies, also for good reason.  This book is different - it focuses on the displaced persons (DPs, to use the then terminology) resulting from the military mayhem.

I liked it, though perhaps not as much as I was hoping.

On the Allied side, lots of planning and effort went into handling the DPs - it was recognized that this was critical to a lasting peace.  Nevertheless, the issue received a tiny fraction of resources in comparison to military needs (and for good reason).

I've read about a lot of these issues in books like this one, and even moreso in this one.  But this is one of the few to focus almost exclusively on the topic.

One obvious theme is the extreme degree of difficulty in eastern Europe - plenty of tough situations in western Europe, but nothing in comparison to areas where Hitler's armies swept through in 1939-1941; and then Stalin's armies swept back through later in the war.  Some areas saw multiple back-and-forth situations.

Life in DP camps - some of this went on for many years - no doubt substantial similarities to modern refugee camps - internal hierarchies and politics etc.

Nordic types were favored by British and US; Poles generally looked down upon; Jewish DPs as a particular challenge given their unique circumstances (even if the Holocaust per se hadn't yet entered public consciousness, certainly folks knew the Jews had been special targets).  This contributed directly to decisions about formalizing Israel as a state in 1948.

Ukrainians and others (including some Poles) absolutely desperate not to be returned to Russia - Americans and Brits became less strict about this as time went on.  These folks knew what their world would be like in Stalin-land.

The effort to trace lost children - sometimes resulting in returning long-adopted (if informally in many cases) children to parents who didn't know them and were in desperate straits of one kind or the other.

Getting places like Canada and the U.S. to take refugees.

Essentially this was a one-of-a-kind problem in terms of scope (not in terms of its nature) - no real way to anticipate or prepare for the post-war era.  The human suffering continued.