ABSTRACT
In the 1940s, ‘displacement’ was the fashionable word for becoming a refugee. But the ‘displaced persons’ in Europe, who from 1947 were looked after by the International Refugee Organization (IRO), were refugees with a difference. The IRO’s remit was broader, extending to included ‘refugees’ as well as ‘displaced persons’, and as the Cold War gathered force, the first-wave emigres were increasingly seen as anti-communists rather than Nazi collaborators. Among the Soviet prisoners of war were Ernest Shnittser, a Kiev University student consigned to a construction battalion because his parents had been arrested as ‘enemies of the people’ during the Great Purges, and Leonid Artemev, a Russian from the borderlands that in the twentieth century had passed from Russian to Polish and briefly to Soviet hands, before coming under wartime German occupation. Behind the scenes at the IRO, there was growing sympathy for the cause of anti-communist White Russians, including those who had fought under German command during the war.
