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Inside the DP camps

An erudite account of postwar immigration
by
April 2025, no. 474

Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Princeton University Press, $59.99 hb, 351 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Inside the DP camps

An erudite account of postwar immigration
by
April 2025, no. 474

Many students of Australian history are aware of a particularly ugly cartoon published in the Bulletin in December 1946. ‘The Pied Harper’ depicted a hook-nosed Arthur Calwell playing a Jew’s harp welcoming a shipload of ‘imports’ (Jews) into Australia. This was the stereotypical image: bearded, unattractive, and similarly hook-nosed. The analogy with the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin was clear. In contrast – and to assuage such public anxieties about mass migration – were the published photographs in January 1948 of Calwell, the immigration minister, celebrating Nordic-looking ‘beautiful Balts’, as he termed them, on their arrival to Australia.

Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War

Lost Souls: Soviet displaced persons and the birth of the Cold War

by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Princeton University Press, $59.99 hb, 351 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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