Justice, Politics and Memory in Europe after the Second World War. Vol. 2: Landscapes after Battle ed. by Suzanne Bardgett et al. (review)

The conference series "Beyond Camps and Forced Labor," held at the Imperial War Museum in London in January 2009, brought together European and North American scholars interested in the fate of the survivors of the Second World War. This book, the second volume to result from those conferences, consists of three main sections dealing with postwar justice, national narratives and private memories, and image and memorial. Edited by four leading European scholars and practitioners, this collection of sixteen essays provides new insights into the way the Western and Eastern European countries have dealt with the multifaceted legacy of the Second World War. The book's 21 contributors include historians, political scientists, and sociologists working in universities in England, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, and the United States. Six of the chapter authors are doctoral or postdoctoral students, one works outside academia, and the others are senior researchers.

The volume is a welcome addition to the literature because of its attention to the long under-researched and neglected group of survivors of concentration camps and Nazi wartime policies. The research presented here on the experience of survivors after the war suggests that persecution, fear, pain, and injustice continued long after the military conflict formally ended in 1945 and the Allies triumphantly declared victory. One of the volume's primary contributions is its nuanced definition of the survivors, who represented a great variety of fates, personal choices, and experiences. Among them were the emaciated skeletons measured with contempt by Patrick Gordon Walker during his visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the clean and healthy survivors of the same camp whom Walker praised, some prisoners who ruthlessly betrayed family members and friends in order to avoid the ultimate punishment, and others who believed they did not deserve a second chance to live because so many others had died. The volume acknowledges the many shades of survival, the different ways the various categories of survivors were seen as deserving recognition and praise, the wide diversity of positions survivors adopted toward their fate, and the difficulties they continued to face. Together with their liberators and former captors, the volume argues, survivors "became drawn into the morass of Cold War politics and morality" (p. 4) during their transition to new lives after the concentration camp.

Landscapes after Battlepicks up where the first volume left off, detailing "the survivors' navigation through bureaucratic and political obstacles in search of recognition, compensation and justice after the end of the war, and their place in post-war public memory and commemoration" (p. 6). The first section of the book details postwar justice by discussing the British, U.S., and Soviet trials of German atrocities and war crimes, the compensation and property restitution programs offered to Jewish and Roma survivors who had suffered as a result of various Nazi policies, and the implementation of the Ghetto Pension Act of 2002, which benefited survivors who had worked in Eastern European ghettos. As these chapters make clear, retributive and reparatory policies excluded numerous categories of victims from compensation and restitution and many important groups of victimizers from court trials because of factors that had to do with postwar politics more than with the need to address the legacies of the Second World War.

The second and third sections investigate the role of survivors in the postwar public discourse, memory, commemoration, and rewriting of history. The contributors examine "how forced labor, extermination, camps and survival have since been remembered, narrated and represented" (p. 9). The five chapters of the second section touch on a variety of topics related to national narratives and private memories. The authors explore why the flood of published narratives of Nazi persecution and genocide produced in 1945-1950 failed to penetrate mainstream scholarship and culture; the way the testimonies of Polish survivors brought to Sweden by the Red...