In this memoir, Kathryn Hulme, a United Nations relief officer in Bavaria from 1945 until 1951, records the daily life, hopes and struggles of over 100,000 Displaced Persons housed by UNRRA at Wildflecken, a former training camp for Nazi SS troops, and in other DP camps. "[A]n unforgettable report on the struggle, the plight, the defeat or the eventual redemption of countless victims of the time." - George Shuster, The New York Times "A shattering book, and one that defines, once and for all, the meaning of that ...
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In this memoir, Kathryn Hulme, a United Nations relief officer in Bavaria from 1945 until 1951, records the daily life, hopes and struggles of over 100,000 Displaced Persons housed by UNRRA at Wildflecken, a former training camp for Nazi SS troops, and in other DP camps. "[A]n unforgettable report on the struggle, the plight, the defeat or the eventual redemption of countless victims of the time." - George Shuster, The New York Times "A shattering book, and one that defines, once and for all, the meaning of that ghastly twentieth-century invention, the displaced person." - The New Yorker " The Wild Place is a rare book - powerful and exciting, compassionate and disturbing, tragic and funny - drawn from great and strange material. It is a verbatim record of the most dramatic human debris of our time, the homeless hordes left on deposit in Germany." - The New Yorker "Little has been recorded of the heroic postwar work with masses of displaced persons, and it will be hard to find a better account than this. It is crowded with people and incidents and has a special vitality as well as the ring of truth. Highly recommended." - Library Journal "Miss Hulme's story will seize your imagination, keep you fascinated, rouse your compassion, admiration, and respect... The top book of American nonfiction published this year..." - San Francisco Chronicle "A beautiful book, heartbreaking and at the same time veined with humor. It projects the passionate sense of purpose experienced by a compassionate woman struggling desperately to salvage human lives, and it leaves us with a quickened awareness of the astounding tenacity of the human spirit, the astounding durability of hope." - The Atlantic Monthly "A sensitive and moving report, by an UNRRA field worker, of her five years' experience in European D.P. camps after the war." - Henry L. Roberts, Foreign Affairs "A deeply felt and deeply moving record of this whole tragedy of displacement and dispossession, this is certain to engage the heart of any reader who has one." - Kirkus Reviews
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I bought this as a gift for someone who had spent time in the refugee camp described in the book, but before I gave it to her, I read it -- after all, it's a used book -- one more reading couldn't hurt it. It really touched me, and not just because I knew someone who had experienced this. The story is told from the point of view of people who worked at this camp, where I had heard about it from the other side -- from someone who had lived there as a refugee. But despite the difference in perspective, some of the stories that I heard about the time in the camps before coming to America were in this book, and in some cases, things that I heard about the camp began to make more sense when I read about it from the other side. After all, I was reading the experiences as written by an adult, where the stories I heard were the remembrances of a child. Even if you don't personally know anyone who was at this particular camp, the history of that time and of those people who suffered through the war, and many who eventually made it to America and other friendly shores, is part of our heritage. While it's not written as professionally as most books these days, that's also part of the charm of the book. You're reading something written by someone who lived there and experienced these things, and sometimes it feels like you're peeking over her shoulder. I sat down to read this book, not expecting much, but once I started, I couldn't put it down until I finished it. And that doesn't happen very often.
