Immigrants and Foreigners in Central and Eastern Europe during the Twentieth Century

This collection from editors Borodziej (Warsaw Univ., Poland) and von Puttkamer (Jena Univ., Germany) covers relatively little-known cases of refugees and migrants: Jewish refugees living in railway cars near Budapest in the 1920s, the thousands involved in the Czecholovak–Hungarian population exchanges following WW II, and refugees from Nazi Germany in Czechoslovakia. The most recent case in the book is that of southeast Asian and African refugees arriving in Hungary in the 1960s. One case, about Poles returning from the US in the 1920s, shows how difficult it is even for immigrants to reintegrate in the country they had left only years before. The common theme binding these diverse chapters is that movements of people generate social, economic, and political disruption. The final essay sketches refugee crises that followed great wars and the domestic and international efforts to address them. A particularly difficult case was that of displaced persons (DPs) in defeated Germany as Moscow sought to forcibly repatriate Balts and others who had fled the Soviet Union during the war. Although these essays add only slivers of information to the narratives of migrant issues, the book is recommended for its histories—with rich footnoting—of obscure migrant cases.

- - R. P. Peters, Harvard University, CHOICE magazine