Displaced Persons: A Novel

By Ghita Schwarz

“This is an amazing novel. The writing is piercing and clear, and the humanity of the author and her characters will inhabit my thoughts for years to come.”
—Anne Roiphe, National Book Award-winning author of Fruitful

 

An astonishing tale of grief and anger, memory and survival, Displaced Persons marks the arrival of a supremely gifted new literary talent, Ghita Schwarz. Schwarz’s powerful story of a group of Holocaust survivors—“displaced persons”—struggling to remake their lives and cope with the stigma of their pasts in the wake of the monumental Nazi horror is beautiful, tragic, moving, and unforgettable, chronicling the lives of ordinary people who have suffered under extraordinary circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062006813

Reviews for Displaced Persons

[chris.wolak · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While this novel doesn't put the reader directly in the shoes of the characters, which I don't think was the author's intention, you feel like you're standing next to them and seeing what they're going through. You witness their numbness, fear, hunger, the surreal feeling of being alive after what just happened, the rekindling of hope, the betrayals, the silence, the eventual public dialog about the Holocaust. I think Schwarz did an amazing job of creating a cohesive narrative that covers 65 years and the lives of multiple characters in just over 300 pages. It sort of exhausted and invigorated me at the same time. It is what some would call a haunting novel, or at least it was for me. After finishing Displaced Persons it took me a few days of flipping through other books before I could find one to commit to. The characters in Displaced Persons wouldn't let me go.

[mlleehreen · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This debut novel is a grim, uncompromising work of literary fiction that shows how for those Jews who lived to see the end of World War II, liberation did not bring an end to suffering but, rather, a new set of challenges. The first half of the novel is set in refugee camp run by British military, where “displaced persons” can find food and shelter. Many of the displaced persons are concentration camp survivors – like Pavel, the protagonist – but others, like Chaim, spent the war on the run, moving from place to place under various false identities.

Some of the “displaced persons” at the camp aren’t ready to face the future yet – but others see that the charity of the British is a temporary solution. Without their homes, their families, or their worldly possessions, they face the job of building a new life from scratch. That’s where things get difficult – desperate times call for desperate measures, and many of the inhabitants of the camp are willing to lie, cheat, steal, and even commit murder in order to obtain identity papers, emigration permits, or money.

The characters, and in particular Pavel, are real, fully-realized and not always easy to like. Pavel was probably a macho, stubborn, non-communicative man before the war. After, he is macho, stubborn, non-communicative and deeply traumatized – his emotions are stunted, hard to access, and his instinct for self-preservation makes him severe and occasionally cruel. He is a natural caretaker, and after emancipation he is driven to provide for his new wife, Fela, and his sister, his only family member to survive the war. Pavel wants Fela to have a comfortable house, so he uses forged documents to convince British officers to kick an old widow out of her home so that he can inhabit it himself.

Such acts do not sit easily on Pavel’s conscience, but he can justify them to himself. It is, nonetheless, deeply painful when the tables are turned – a business partner tries to kill Pavel, so that he can steal a few small diamonds that Pavel keeps in a secret pouch sewn into his clothes. Pavel had hoped to use them to emigrate to America; Pavel’s business partner takes the stones, and he arrives in America first.

Things get a little better for Pavel and Fela after they arrive in the United States – while they continue to struggle, they are able to provide for their children. Their son, Larry, grows up to become a doctor. But Pavel is again betrayed by the people he thought he could trust the most – he goes into business with his brother-in-law, who seizes an opportunity to drive Pavel out of his own company in a hostile takeover.

The point, ultimately, is that all the horrors of World War II didn’t grant the survivors any kind of exemptions – no free pass to a few easy years, or a peaceful time to recuperate. Life, with all its ups and downs, goes on. The writing is gritty and atmospheric, perfectly capturing the mood of the book, which traces its path through murky moral grey areas and painful truths. It is a hard and bleak book, but well-executed and beautiful. While painful to read, I enjoyed it a great deal.

[kshaffar · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There is no faulting Ghita Schwarz's prose here. This beautifully written story of Holocaust survivors trying to pick up the scattered pieces of their lives after being brutalized during the Holocaust.Though slow in places, I was amazed at how human everyone was. After having lived through (largely untold) horror, in the end most were refreshingly normal. Nicely done.

[checkadawson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This novel tells the story of Pavel Mandl. After being liberated from a Nazi concentration camp at the end of WWII, Mandl ends up in a displaced persons camp where he must begin to put the pieces of his life back together. With stunning resourcefulness, Mandl manages to acquire a house and put together a makeshift family (along with two other refugees). Jump to 15 years later, and Mandl and his "family" are still haunted by their wartime experiences as they try to make a new life in New York City. This novel grapples with concepts of memory and guilt and the challenges faced by new immigrants to America. A masterful accomplishment.

[bostonbibliophile · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Boring, boring, boring novel about Holocaust survivors forging new lives for themselves in post-war Europe and America. I only got through the first four or five chapters before I had to call it quits. Recommended for dedicated readers of Holocaust and post-Holocaust fiction only.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In May 1945, Pavel and his friend Fishl are newly liberated from the German concentration camps. They steal to get money and rent rooms from a widow woman. Eventually they are joined by Fela and Pavel, two other refugees and begin to build their lives back together.This is one of the most depressing books I've read in a long time. While I felt sorry for the characters for their war experiences, I did not like a lot of the choices they made, such as Pavel's plan to kick a widow out of her house to have for himself, Fela, and Chaim. I thought a story about characters in the aftermath of their war experiences might give some interesting insight into their psychology. Well, it did, but what I found was an awfully bleak world view in which your friends and family can betray or hurt you, and broken lives can never fully be put back together. Aside from the tone, I had trouble with the lack of quotation marks around speech, unless it was a character speaking in English. It was very hard for me to follow in the beginning, especially, trying to remember who was speaking, and knowing when speech stopped and a character's thoughts began. Because the book covers the years 1945 through 2000, there are often gaps of several years between chapters, which gave the story a very disjointed feeling that I also had a hard time with. I'm not sorry I read it, as it thoughtfully addresses the way in which tragedies like World War 2 can become commodities, but it's not the type of book I enjoy reading.

[baileysandbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ghita Schwarz's book Displaced Persons reads like a flowing collection of short stories as the stories of the main characters are told following the end of WWII through to the early 1990s. The reader is taken into the worlds of Pavel, Fela and Chaim as they rebuild their lives, eventually making their way to the United States. Throughout the story, their war-time experiences play a significant role in their responses to the new environments they are faced with.I found this book to be well written and very compelling.

[libsue · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

1945 Pavel Madel a Polish Jew recently liberated from a concentration camp decides that life in the Displaced Persons camp is not much better. In the woods he and a friend come upon Germans attempting to flee with contraband. From these men Pavel will obtain items that will forever alter is future.Chaim, a 13 year old boy who has managed to escape the camps, helps rescue Fela a woman who has survived, but has lost both a husband and a child.Finging themselves "displaced persons" these three come together and form a friendship and family that last through the years.Within this novel Ms. Schwarz provides insight into the lives of those freed from the camps, and the difficulties that they faced just trying to move on. She's done a marvelous job of trying to get the reader to understand the guilt of the survivor, and the reasons why some of those that did survive were reluctant to share their story.

[kellyannbrown · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This books follows in the footsteps of four young persons who came of age following the holocaust. As they grow and marry and have children, this novel explores the loves and families that they lost, the loves and families that they later formed and how the experience of survivorhood shaped their future lives.Coming to America gave them the foundation for lives that could heal, but none forgot their experiences that made each of them survivors. Haunted by those seminal backgrounds, they never really connect to their children. They want to shield their children from the horrors of hunger and separation that formed them before they were parents, but then could never understand the carefree natures of the children.I found this book to be very different and in some way more haunting than other books about survivors. The characters were young and basically unformed when they experienced the years of war and then diaspora. Coming of age as a person without family and separated from loved ones made them view the world very differently. Writing a book separated from the event by 60 years makes a strong and subtle footprint on this book.

[schwager_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"Displaced Persons" is a story about the lasting social, economic, and emotional impact that the events of World War II have on a group of holocaust survivors. The reader follows a group of Polish Jews into old age into 2000. Going beyond the immediate aftermath of the holocaust is what makes this book so interesting, and sets it apart from other “holocaust survival literature” that dominates this genre.The author has created very strong characters with great voice. The generational differences and attitudes are played out beautifully and add a rich layer to the story. Because of this strength of character, I did not encounter any character confusion others here have reported. The story events are compelling, and the status of a group of survivors is always central to their struggles. I really appreciated how the author portrayed the societal attitudes toward the holocaust survivors and Jewish Immigrants in general and the changes through the the story. From 1960 Queens, New York where there is a sense of shame in being an immigrant to 1995 when the immigrants offer their oral histories with a sense of pride. The author also wonderfully includes the issues of displacement. Some characters move to Israel and some to the United States, while others are still torn between the two.And there are the questions for these characters that all immigrants have faced, what and how much to tell their children about their previous life. Among all these heavy subjects there are also stupid relatives, loving friends, rotten lovable children, and unfaithful spouses.

[bkladyatl · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Displaced persons is a novel about the aftermath of the holocaust. It tracks the lives of the main characters from liberation in Germany to their lives as immigrants in New York. The impact of their experiences is felt throughout their lives and their children. This was not an easy book to read. Told in third person, there were no quotes used making it difficult to know who was speaking.

[liz_di_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this was a terrific book that explored the struggles of WW II refugees and their internal struggles as they fought to start anew in an unacceppting world. It questioned human nature, do our experiences make us better or are we all still capable of sin despite the horrors that we are faced with in life. It also examined how we as a society deal with crimes against people and questions what the timeline for sympathy and understanding is. How long does it take society to digest these crimes against humanity?

[carolynschroeder · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was a very unique glimpse into the lives of a few Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors. It begins at the end of the war and among the British and American camps that were set up for those survivors in Germany. I have never read anything that focused on this time and it raises questions many of us never thought of like what exactly is freedom when family, career, possessions and often, identity, had been taken from those who survived the atrocities. Also, how incredibly hard it was to start a new life, with nothing, yet that is exactly what the survivors had to do. The characters Pavel, Fela and Chaim (and later Sima and her father) create an uneasy family of sorts in the camps and the the novel follows their lives after they finally immigrate to the United States/Israel. Pavel and Fela fall into marriage and Chaim becomes a son, who goes on to marry the little girl he once taught, Sima. Overall, this was a daring and ambitious novel, but in many ways it just did not come together for me. Part of the problem is the horrid mixture of quote-less dialog at times, other times it is in quotes, it's hard to know who is talking, or thinking and what is being said to whom. I have no idea why an author would choose this as it can ruin an otherwise great novel. That made what should have been a pleasure reading a bit of a frustrating chore. In addition, some extra editing would have really benefitted the book as it repeats itself often, e.g., three times the author states that Fela did not like to cook, but she did like to bake. I kept wondering why all of the repetition was necessary. While interesting historically, the lives of the characters are at times so mundane it really does drag. It also jumps around a lot, rather sporadically. In any event, for anyone having an interest in the Holocaust from the survivors' points of view, this is well worth the read. I also think this is an author worth watching.