MCHE Common Book

The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons From World War II to the Cold War
By Dr. David Nasaw

February 29, 2024 – 6:30 PM on Zoom
The public is invited to join us for a discussion of this work facilitated by MCHE Historian Dr. Shelly Cline.

The terrible toll of World War II did not end when the fighting in Europe stopped in 1945. Millions of refugees – concentration camp survivors, POWs, slave laborers, political prisoners, and Nazi collaborators fleeing Russia’s Red Army – remained in a devastated Germany, malnourished and increasingly desperate.

Many were repatriated to their homelands. More than 1 million were not, including some 250,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whose homes in Europe had vanished. Assistance from other countries, including the United States, never came or lagged.

Renowned historian David Nasaw recounts this tragic postscript to the war in a discussion of his book The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War. Those stranded refugees spent the next three to five years in camps, divided by nationality, with their own police forces, churches and synagogues, schools, newspapers, theaters, and infirmaries. By 1952, the Last Million were scattered around the world.

Nasaw is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for biographies on Andrew Carnegie and Kennedy family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy and earned the Bancroft Prize for History and J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize for The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. A past president of the Society of American Historians, he serves as a distinguished professor emeritus of history, biography and memoir, and American studies at the City University of New York.

Be a part of our future.

Our mission is to teach the history of the Holocaust, applying its lessons to counter indifference, intolerance, and genocide.

Consider making a gift today.

Donate

Get in touch with us.

5801 West 115th Street STE #106,
Overland Park, KS 66211

(913) 327-8192

info@mchekc.org

Contact Us