Home. It is such a important concept of the human experience. Sure some people can exist as nomads but for the the majority of us we need a place to call our own. After the extremely divisive political conflicts of World War II many people did not ideologically belong anymore to the country that they had been living in either for many generations or recently by some unfortunate circumstances of war. It is an unfortunate reality that wherever a country decides to go with their politics, some people in their population will disagree and chafe under the new regime.
Reading about the displaced people after World War II, it reminded me of the people living in coal country in the Appalachian area. Since the domestic coal industry has continued to decline so have jobs and many people urge the people of the Appalachian area to leave but they refuse leading many to frustration wondering why. But all it all comes back to this concept of home. There’s no reasoning past it, just like many people returned to the Soviet Union wanting to go home only to be shipped off to Siberian gulags, many West Virginians stay even if there’s no hope of ever getting a job just because of the attachment of home.
For many post-war refugees though they had the opposite problem of wondering if their old home would even be like home anymore. The quote from a refugee of Nazi Germany, Hannah Arendt, in the book In War’s Wake by Gerard Daniel Cohen really struck me that displaced people will view repatriation as deportation. The war had uprooted and completely changed the world of so many people that it was unthinkable for many to just return back to their old ways. How could Jewish survivors of the war return to the country that plotted and executed the demise of millions of their people? Many towns of eastern Europe were the refugees were from were reduced to rubble and under the control of foreign Allied troops. Many of the people they had grown up around had died whether from fighting, being forced to work, starvation, or death camps. Many people probably wanted to start afresh in whole new countries and forget all about their old homeland. But that would not be sustainable.
Just like how today the United Kingdom and France’s governments are straining to support all of the refugees from war-torn areas like Syria, the United States and the United Kingdom would not be able to support all of these war refugees. They would just have to resettle and learn the new normal of their postwar lives.
I grew up in Tazewell County, Virginia. Which borders Mercer and McDowell County, West Virginia in the hills of Appalachia. The connection you make here is interesting and one I can personally relate to. As the coal industry back home decreases, there is not much job opportunity. As much poverty and lack of industry growth that lie in those hills, there is still an attraction to go back home. Whether or not I will live out the rest of my days in the big city of Richlands, we will wait and see. However, I definitely was able to make the connection here. I liked the comparison of even with the destruction of their homes, the citizens wanted to return there. However, that was not the case for most, as you mentioned in the last paragraph, they had to adapt to life after the war. Which in many cases, was a new life away from home.
The modern day connections to what was going on following World War II was really good and helped define the situation. The use of the way people thought about home is helpful to understand the plight of the displaced people since their home had changed so much. One thing that could help here is detailing what the DP’s have to go through in order to find a new home or if they should go back home. Would they feel the same pull that the people in the Appalachians feel to their home or do you think they are to distant from that old home?
You did a good job of connecting the displaced person’s crisis of post-WW2 to today’s refugee crisis and the issues in Appalachia; however, you might want to focus a bit more on your thoughts on post-war Europe. It would help to explain a bit more why the refugees would be feeling upset about “repatriation” to their homelands and such. However, the choice to compare Syrian refugees to post-war refugees was very effective in conjuring a tangible image for the reader to grasp.