Refugees in post-1945 Europe: experiences in and beyond the DP camp

The end of the Second World War in Europe revealed an enormous population 'out of place'. The war wrenched civilians as well as soldiers from their homes. The displacement of population was most marked in Eastern and Central Europe where the echoes of war reverberated long after 1945. Several million people who were drafted as forced labourers by the Nazis during the war were stranded in Germany, Austria and Poland. Many of them wished to return to their homes, but many did not. By 1947 some three quarters of a million men and women - Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Russians and others - were still resisting repatriation to newly Sovietised states. The result was the creation of a category of Displaced Persons living in camps across Germany and Austria. For many months they were assisted by Allied civilian and military personnel. A number of non-governmental organisations, such as the Society of Friends (Quakers) played a particularly important role. Eventually, most DPs were resettled in third countries or managed to integrate themselves into local society, but a sizeable minority remained in camps until the end of the 1950s. At this point the United Nations launched a campaign to highlight the situation of refugees in Europe and further afield. This campaign, World Refugee Year, attracted enormous interest in the UK and in other countries, and was described by the British government as 'the most universal short-term humanitarian enterprise the world has yet seen'. Although it is now largely forgotten, it sheds important light on contemporary views of the plight of refugees and DPs in Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. World Refugee Year was an intensely visual campaign: the UN created or encouraged the creation of a powerful visual record of refugees and relief efforts around the world, and particularly in Europe.

The project will bring alive the experiences of post-Second World War DPs, and their stories of camp life and of repatriation and resettlement in their homelands or of emigration and integration into new communities, by reassembling and re-presenting some of the official documentation (governmental memoranda and reports on the camps, secret police files on repatriates, identity documents, etc.) that shaped their destinies, alongside film footage, photographs and graphic art that kept them in the public eye and supported fundraising drives by NGOs, as well as audiovisual and written testimonies by the DPs themselves and their relief workers.

Public interest in these upheavals has been renewed by more recent refugee crises in Europe and elsewhere. This underscores the need for a permanent record of population displacement and the humanitarian effort that it helped to bring about at a crucial point in modern European history. We need to understand which organisations were involved in refugee relief and how they explained their intervention to the wider public as well as to refugees themselves. This period in Europe witnessed the emergence of contemporary global institutions, discourses and practices pertaining to refugees and their status and treatment. It is crucial to understand the origins of these in order to achieve a balanced critical appreciation of current legal, political, social, ethical and cultural debates and discussions around refugees, asylum, immigration, humanitiarianism and related issues.

Issues concerning the experiences of refugees and displaced persons, and about the stance adopted by relief organisations, already form part of the school curriculum at primary and secondary level. Here we believe there is a timely opportunity to create a permanent resource for successive generations of young people whilst at the same time making the history of displaced people and humanitarian action come alive via a public exhibition to a wider audience.

The project seeks to involve primary and secondary school teachers and members of the general public in examining the history of population displacement and humanitarian action in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and thereby to stimulate engagement with debates on contemporary issues concerning immigration, asylum and community relations.

Resource packs, comprising a 20-page teachers booklet, 20 resource cards, four A2 posters and a DVD containing lesson plans, worksheets, maps, images, oral history recordings and documentary sources, are intended to provide a permanent resource for primary and secondary school teachers, initially in Manchester and Nottingham, for use across the curriculum. We will organise focus groups and teaching workshops during the project in order to involve local teachers throughout the design and planning process to ensure that all resources are useful and relevant for classroom use. Focus groups and teaching workshops will enable us to obtain feedback on resources in the development phase, and will also serve as a forum for teachers to voice concerns about teaching potentially difficult or controversial subjects such as the Holocaust or refugee history and to discuss ways of managing these concerns. We shall provide teachers with resources to inspire them to engage students with issues of population displacement and humanitarian action across a spectrum of subjects in the National Curriculum. We will engage the Holocaust Education Development Programme and Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre during the process of curriculum development with the aim of building partnerships through which we can in future extend the distribution of our resources, or create joint resources. Focus groups will be given access to an online discussion forum and document drop-box through which members of the project team will be able to share examples of sources (to gauge suitability/age appropriateness) and resources under development (for trial use in the classroom and feedback). While all resources will be accessible to focus groups throughout the development phase, for continuous feedback on their impact potential, we shall conduct classroom trials of resources at certain points in the project (e.g. Holocaust Memorial Day) and also obtain feedback through four teaching workshops. Two teaching workshops will be held in each location. The first of these will examine curriculum requirements and the production of resources. The second will explore the ways in which the difficult issue of refugee history can be incorporated into teaching across the curriculum. Finalised resource packs will be published and distributed to schools in May 2012 for use in Refugee Week (18-24 June 2012) and World Refugee Day (20 June 2012).

The exhibition is intended to broaden public access to our research and to engage the general public in discussions about refugee history and present-day issues relating to immigration, asylum, refugees' experience and community relations. Using visual images and original documentary footage we plan to engage Manchester and Nottingham communities in discussions about representations of refugees and life as a displaced person in Europe between 1945 and 1960, and thereby to encourage informed debate on related contemporary issues. We aim to attract visitors from communities across the two cities by using different venues, such as the Zion Arts Centre, the People's History Museum and the Museum of Nottingham Life. The exhibition will be of interest to British Quakers and so we plan a short installation in Friends House, London following the conclusion of the project. We have also been in contact with Friends Houses in Nottingham and Manchester where some of the participants of the oral histories used in this research are members. Exhibition visitor numbers and feedback from visitors' books will be analysed and evaluated as will questionnaires issued to schools for both students and teachers.