What is a Displaced Person?

Extract

For three years when I asked myself the question, I thought I knew the answer. A D.P. was a human being who had lost his country, and all that was needed to stop his being one was to give him another. But during those three years I decided myself, and ten years of subsequent experience have confirmed the lesson of my initial error: you cannot give a man a new country. All you can do is just make it possible for him to dream free from care of the old.

The D.P., this man uprooted from his native soil, torn from his social setting, and cowed by want and the kind of regulation ill- luck that attends all state-aid, has been thrust into an unreal world. He has been taken out of his own time and projected into this superneolithic present which we may call ‘The Age of Hutments’, and he begins to acquire a special sort of mentality. His personality disintegrates to a larger or smaller degree, according to his level of intelligence and strength of will, and becomes merged in the mentality common to all D.P.s.

A dull new world takes shape, a realm of shadows. For three years I deceived myself; I mistook the refugee for a pauper. But ‘poverty’ is not the word to describe his misfortune, the refugee is primarily someone who has been uprooted and who drifts between the East from which he has fled and the West which very often will not admit him unless he has retained his muscular strength.