Heartbreaking. Beautifully written. Gets the Yiddish-inflected English perfect. This book may not be super compelling to most folks but to survivors and their kin, it captures the complexity of survival and the chaos after the camps were liberated perfectly. I would have liked it if the author developed the latter chapters in the book (as well as the characters' of the children of the survivors). ( )

While this novel doesn't put the reader directly in the shoes of the characters, which I don't think was the author's intention, you feel like you're standing next to them and seeing what they're going through. You witness their numbness, fear, hunger, the surreal feeling of being alive after what just happened, the rekindling of hope, the betrayals, the silence, the eventual public dialog about the Holocaust. I think Schwarz did an amazing job of creating a cohesive narrative that covers 65 years and the lives of multiple characters in just over 300 pages. It sort of exhausted and invigorated me at the same time. It is what some would call a haunting novel, or at least it was for me. After finishing Displaced Persons it took me a few days of flipping through other books before I could find one to commit to. The characters in Displaced Persons wouldn't let me go. ( )

This debut novel is a grim, uncompromising work of literary fiction that shows how for those Jews who lived to see the end of World War II, liberation did not bring an end to suffering but, rather, a new set of challenges. The first half of the novel is set in refugee camp run by British military, where “displaced persons” can find food and shelter. Many of the displaced persons are concentration camp survivors – like Pavel, the protagonist – but others, like Chaim, spent the war on the run, moving from place to place under various false identities.

Some of the “displaced persons” at the camp aren’t ready to face the future yet – but others see that the charity of the British is a temporary solution. Without their homes, their families, or their worldly possessions, they face the job of building a new life from scratch. That’s where things get difficult – desperate times call for desperate measures, and many of the inhabitants of the camp are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and even commit murder in order to obtain identity papers, emigration permits, or money.

The characters, and in particular Pavel, are real, fully-realized and not always easy to like. Pavel was probably a macho, stubborn, non-communicative man before the war. After, he is macho, stubborn, non-communicative and deeply traumatized – his emotions are stunted, hard to access, and his instinct for self-preservation makes him severe and occasionally cruel. He is a natural caretaker, and after emancipation he is driven to provide for his new wife, Fela, and his sister, his only family member to survive the war. Pavel wants Fela to have a comfortable house, so he uses forged documents to convince British officers to kick an old widow out of her home so that he can inhabit it himself.

Such acts do not sit easily on Pavel’s conscience, but he can justify them to himself. It is, nonetheless, deeply painful when the tables are turned – a business partner tries to kill Pavel, so that he can steal a few small diamonds that Pavel keeps in a secret pouch sewn into his clothes. Pavel had hoped to use them to emigrate to America; Pavel’s business partner takes the stones, and he arrives in America first.

Things get a little better for Pavel and Fela after they arrive in the United States – while they continue to struggle, they are able to provide for their children. Their son, Larry, grows up to become a doctor. But Pavel is again betrayed by the people he thought he could trust the most – he goes into business with his brother-in-law, who seizes an opportunity to drive Pavel out of his own company in a hostile takeover.

The point, ultimately, is that all the horrors of World War II didn’t grant the survivors any kind of exemptions – no free pass to a few easy years, or a peaceful time to recuperate. Life, with all its ups and downs, goes on. The writing is gritty and atmospheric, perfectly capturing the mood of the book, which traces its path through murky moral grey areas and painful truths. It is a hard and bleak book, but well-executed and beautiful. While painful to read, I enjoyed it a great deal. ( )

For many schoolchildren, Holocaust survivors were rescued by the Allies, and they lived happily ever after. This is the extent to which history books discuss the plight of the Jews and other political prisoners deemed unworthy to survive by the Nazi regime. Ghita Schwartz’ Displaced Persons disabuses this notion and showcases just what did happen to the hundreds of thousands of people from whom everything had been taken. It is by turns thrilling, thought-provoking, and always informative, as it shows a people continuing to struggle to survive.

The end of the war was not just devastating to the people of Germany. For those who survived the concentration camps, the end of the war still meant being detained in camps for those without family or home. In other words, nothing really changed. They continued to be at the mercy of soldiers, albeit British or American ones and without the fear of death. There was little money and little food. More importantly, they remained unwanted, not only by Germans and Polish, but also by Americans and the British, both of whom limited the number of refugees they would allow into their borders. Yet, in spite of this ongoing miserable treatment, people like Pavel and Chaim, Fela and Hinda begin to rise and to recover.

Displaced Persons begins to falter once all of the characters make their way to New York. It is at this point in time where their stories become less dramatic and enthralling. What was a fascinating study in sociology and human nature becomes something more mundane as they each struggle to find happiness and overcome the sense of not belonging anywhere. Their stories are told in little vignettes with jumps through time, sometimes spacing several years. There seems to be no continuity to these jumps other than to show how long-lasting the pain of the past really is and how it influences future generations. The details remain murky, as each advance in time comes with the sense of visiting someone you haven’t seen in years but have no time to spend catching up before diving into everyday life. There is an impression of unfamiliarity with each jump that is disconcerting to the reader and interrupting the flow of the narrative.

When you have seen and experienced the worst that one human can do towards another, how do you recover from that? The short answer, based on Pavel’s, Chaim’s, Fela’s, and the others’ experiences, is that you don’t. The long answer, as discovered in Displaced Persons, is that recovery means different things for different people. Some became criminals, some ignored the past, others harbored fear or anger or both, and yet others developed a profound need for family and security. While their stories are interesting, Displaced Persons shines brightest when it tells the stories in the displaced persons camps. These are the stories that show how fragile and yet how very strong these survivors truly were. The rest of the novel tends to drag, ruining the impact of what could have been an amazing novel.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to HarperCollins and the LibraryThing Early Reader program for my review copy!

There is no faulting Ghita Schwarz's prose here. This beautifully written story of Holocaust survivors trying to pick up the scattered pieces of their lives after being brutalized during the Holocaust.

Though slow in places, I was amazed at how human everyone was. After having lived through (largely untold) horror, in the end most were refreshingly normal. Nicely done. ( )