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

“根据西方世界的观点，”路易斯·霍尔本（Louise Holborn）在1956年出版的国际难民组织（International Refugee organization）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身份中拯救出来所付出的任何代价。”然而，在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（DPs）营地，无法重新定居，用霍尔本自己的话说，他们是“不经济的难民”。这些人被称为流离失所者的“核心”，这一群体主要由那些被认为太老、病得太重、残疾太严重，或者家庭规模太大，他们的重新安置在经济上不可行的人组成。通过关注这一“核心”，本研究试图将这些人从边缘转移到DP历史的中心。它将研究这个类别是如何发展的，它的含义在1943年至1957年期间是如何变化的，以及它被用来处理如此庞大和异质群体的不同方式。最后，它将调查官员、行政人员和当代媒体是如何使用这个词的，以及难民自己如何回应被贴上“核心”案例的标签。研究将主要集中于他们在难民营内（而不是在其原籍国）的经历，因此，该项目的时间范围从1943年善后救济总署成立开始，到1957年最后一个难民难民营Föhrenwald关闭为止。关于第二次世界大战后流离失所者的学术研究在多年被忽视之后，在过去十年中蓬勃发展。然而，虽然这些较近期的作品中有许多涉及到硬核，但几乎有一种感觉是，随着学术体系的发展，它的关注点变得越来越狭窄和具体。“硬核”是一个经常被提及的类别，偶尔也会在这个文献中进行研究，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，看看它的起源和应用。因此，我的项目将对文献做出有价值的贡献，成为第一个以这种方式研究“硬核”的人。残障史研究最近也蓬勃发展，因此我是这两个领域的受益者，并计划利用这两个领域最新的学术成果。然而，尽管最近在残疾研究方面取得了进展，但当代文化和历史学者往往“特权”残疾退伍军人，而将其他战后残疾群体排除在外（Schlund, 2022）。这项研究将对战后残疾进行不同的分析，重点关注成千上万的病人、老人和残疾的流离失所者，这些人被称为“核心”，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，这些人经常被放在括号里，他们被排除在重新安置之外被认为是不幸的，但由于饱受战争蹂躏的欧洲国家的经济需要，这是不可避免的。有关美国的研究将移民史和残疾史混合在一起，质疑这种限制性移民政策的实用主义和必然性（例如Baynton， 2016），但在欧洲，残疾对移民史的重要性尚未得到充分研究。露丝·巴林特的《2021年别处的目的地》是为数不多的对残疾和流离失所者进行全面调查的研究之一，但将残疾问题集中在一个主要处理儿童的章节中，这是一个有限的焦点，因为儿童不像一些残疾成年人，不是决策者。通过关注所有年龄段的“核心”，该项目将解决巴林特的工作遗留的问题，例如，一个明显残疾的残疾人比一个具有类似水平的功能障碍的残疾人更不可能被重新安置。

'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.