Postwar Holocaust Guilt and Displacement

The defeat of Nazi Germany left millions of people displaced across Europe and exposed the scale of the Holocaust. Survivors sought relatives, housing and routes of emigration, while former officials, collaborators and members of perpetrator families attempted to account for—or conceal—their wartime roles.

Allied trials and denazification processes established public records of crimes but did not resolve the private burdens carried by families. Migration to countries such as Britain and Australia offered new identities, yet memory, shame and fear of discovery often crossed borders with those who left Europe.

Fiction set in this aftermath can explore inherited guilt, the instability of postwar identity and the distinction between a child’s lack of agency and an adult’s later responsibilities. All the Broken Places follows the daughter of a fictional Auschwitz commandant as she reconstructs a life after 1945.