David Nasaw

David Nasaw is the author of The Patriarch, selected by the New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year and a 2013 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Biography; Andrew Carnegie and The Chief. He is a past president of the Society of American Historians. David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (Penguin Press) tells the until now largely hidden story of postwar displacement and statelessness. The surrender of German forces to the Allied powers in May 1945, put an end to World War II in Europe. But the aftershocks of the war went on for years. Millions of lost and homeless concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators in flight from the Red Army overwhelmed Germany, a nation in ruins. British and American soldiers gathered them and attempted to repatriate them. But more than a million displaced persons left behind in Germany — Jews, Poles, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and other Eastern Europeans — refused to go home or had no homes to return to. The international community could not agree on the fate of the Last Million. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world. As they crossed from their broken past into an unknowable future, they carried with them their wounds, their fears, their hope, and their secrets. It’s a story with profound contemporary resonance, and shows us that it is our history as well. In a starred review Kirkus Reviews called it “[M]asterful…A searching, vigorously written history of an unsettled time too little known to American readers.”