Uneconomic Refugees? The 'Hard Core' of Displaced Persons in Postwar Europe

“根据西方世界的观点，”路易丝·霍尔本在她1956年的《国际难民组织官方历史》中断言，“男人有一种基本价值，这种价值超过了将他们从难民地位中拯救出来所付出的任何代价。然而，第二次世界大战结束六年后，仍有10万至20万人留在欧洲的流离失所者（DP）营地，无法重新安置，因为他们是，用霍尔本自己的话说，“不经济的牺牲品”。这些人被称为“核心”的流离失所者，一个群体主要由那些被认为太老，太病，太残疾，或家庭太大，他们的重新安置被认为是经济上可行的。通过关注这一“硬核”，本研究旨在将这些人从DP历史的边缘移到中心。它将研究这一类别是如何发展的，它的含义在1943 -1957年间是如何变化的，以及它被用来处理这样一个庞大而异质的人群的不同方式。最后，它将调查官员，管理人员和当代媒体如何使用这个词，以及DP本身如何应对被贴上“核心”案件。研究将主要集中在他们在难民营的经历上（而不是在他们的原籍国），因此，该项目的时间跨度从1943年难民救济和难民事务局成立开始，到1957年最后一个流离失所者营地Förwald关闭为止。在过去的十年里蓬勃发展。然而，虽然这些更近期的作品中有许多提到了硬核，但几乎有一种感觉，即随着学术界的发展，其重点变得更加狭窄和具体。“硬核”是一个经常被提及的类别，偶尔也会在这篇文献中进行研究，但在这个项目中，我计划退后一步，系统地分析“硬核”本身的类别，研究它的起源和应用。因此，我的项目将作出有价值的贡献，文学，是第一个检查'硬核'在这种方式。残疾史上的工作也蓬勃发展最近，因此，我是横截面的受益者，并计划利用最新的奖学金跨越，这两个领域。然而，尽管残疾研究的最新进展，当代文化和历史奖学金往往“特权”残疾退伍军人排除其他战后残疾群体（Schlund，2022）。这项研究将提供一个不同的分析战后残疾，通过关注数以万计的病人，老人和残疾的DP标记的“硬核”，因为许多国家不愿意接受他们作为移民。在关于流离失所者的学术研究中，这些人往往被降级为附加说明，他们被排除在重新安置之外是不幸的，但由于遭受战争破坏的欧洲国家的经济需要，这是不可避免的。关于美国的研究混合了移民和残疾的历史，质疑这种限制性移民政策的实用主义和不可避免性（例如Baynton，2016），但在欧洲，残疾对移民历史的重要性研究不足。露丝·巴林特的《2021年其他地方的目的地》是为数不多的对残疾和残疾人进行彻底调查的研究之一，但将残疾集中在一个章节中，主要涉及儿童，这是一个限制性的重点，因为儿童与一些残疾成年人不同，不是决策者。通过关注所有年龄段的“核心”，该项目将解决Balint的工作留下的问题，例如明显残疾的DP不太可能被接受重新安置，而不是具有类似水平的功能障碍。

'According to the views of the Western world,' asserted Louise Holborn in her 1956 official history of the International Refugee Organisation, 'men have a fundamental value which outweighs any costs incurred in salvaging them from their status as refugees.' Yet six years after the end of the Second World War, between 100,000 and 200,000 people remained in the Displaced Persons (DPs) camps of Europe, unable to resettle due to their being, in Holborn's own words, 'uneconomic refugees'. These individuals were labelled the 'hard core' of DPs, a group primarily made up of those considered too old, too ill, too disabled, or with families too large for their resettlement to be seen as financially viable. By focusing on this 'hard core', this study seeks to move these people from the margins to the centre of DP history. It will examine how this category developed, how its meaning changed during the period c.1943-1957, and the different ways it was employed to handle such a large and heterogeneous group of people. Finally, it will investigate how the term was used by officials, administrators, and contemporary media, as well as how DPs themselves responded to being labelled 'hard core' cases. The research will focus primarily on their experiences within the camps (rather than in their countries of origin), and as such the timespan of the project begins with the foundation of the UNRRA in 1943, and ends with the closing of the last DP camp, Föhrenwald, in 1957.Scholarship on Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the Second World War has, after many years of neglect, blossomed within the past decade. However, whilst many of these more recent works make some reference to the hard core, there has almost been a sense that as the body of scholarship has grown, its focus has become narrower and more specific. 'Hard core' is a category often referred to and occasionally examined in this literature, but with this project I plan to step back, and to analyse systematically the category of the 'hard core' itself, looking at its origins and applications. My project will thus make a valuable contribution to the literature, being the first to examine the 'hard core' in this manner.Work on disability history has also flourished recently, and therefore I am the beneficiary of the cross-section of, and plan to make use of the most up-to-date scholarship across, both areas. However, despite the recent advances in disability studies, both contemporary culture and historical scholarship have often 'privileged' disabled veterans to the exclusion of other postwar disabled groups (Schlund, 2022). This study will provide a different analysis of post-war disability, by focusing on the tens of thousands of sick, elderly, and disabled DPs labelled the 'hard core' because many countries were unwilling to accept them as immigrants. In the scholarship on DPs, these individuals were often relegated to parenthetical remarks, their exclusion from resettlement characterised as unfortunate but inevitable due to the economic needs of war-decimated European countries. Studies blending histories of migration and of disability, which question the pragmatism and inevitability of such restrictive immigration policies, have been written about the United States (e.g. Baynton, 2016), but in Europe, disability's significance to histories of migration is understudied. Ruth Balint's 2021 Destination Elsewhere is one of the few studies to include a thorough investigation of disability and DPs, but centres disability in a single chapter dealing mainly with children, a limiting focus since children, unlike some disabled adults, were not decision-makers. Through a focus on the 'hard core' of all ages, this project will address questions Balint's work leaves open, such as the idea that a visibly disabled DP was less likely to be accepted for resettlement than one with a functional impairment of a similar level.