In this memoir, Kathryn Hulme, a United Nations relief officer in Bavaria from 1945 until 1951, records the daily life, hopes and struggles of over 100,000 Displaced Persons housed by UNRRA at Wildflecken, a former training camp for Nazi SS troops, and in other DP camps.
"[A]n unforgettable report on the struggle, the plight, the defeat or the eventual redemption of countless victims of the time." George Shuster, ***The New York Times***
"A shattering book, and one that defines, once and for all, the meaning of that ghastly twentieth-century invention, the displaced person." ***The New Yorker***
"*The Wild Place* is a rare book powerful and exciting, compassionate and disturbing, tragic and funny drawn from great and strange material. It is a verbatim record of the most dramatic human debris of our time, the homeless hordes left on deposit in Germany." ***The New Yorker***
"Little has been recorded of the heroic postwar work with masses of displaced persons, and it will be hard to find a better account than this. It is crowded with people and incidents and has a special vitality as well as the ring of truth. Highly recommended." ***Library Journal***
"Miss Hulme's story will seize your imagination, keep you fascinated, rouse your compassion, admiration, and respect... The top book of American nonfiction published this year..." ***San Francisco Chronicle***
"A beautiful book, heartbreaking and at the same time veined with humor. It projects the passionate sense of purpose experienced by a compassionate woman struggling desperately to salvage human lives, and it leaves us with a quickened awareness of the astounding tenacity of the human spirit, the astounding durability of hope." ***The Atlantic Monthly***
"A sensitive and moving report, by an UNRRA field worker, of her five years' experience in European D.P. camps after the war." Henry L. Roberts, ***Foreign Affairs***
"A deeply felt and deeply moving record of this whole tragedy of displacement and dispossession, this is certain to engage the heart of any reader who has one." Kirkus Reviews