Pilgrims of the night

"Pilgrims of the night" by Edward Ernest Swanstrom is a humanitarian study written in the mid-20th century. Drawing on first-hand travels and Catholic relief work after World War II, it examines the plight of Europe’s expelled and displaced—especially the millions of German expellees—through moral argument, social analysis, and vivid case studies. The focus is on how men, women, children, clergy, and whole communities struggle to survive, keep faith, and rebuild dignity amid ruins and mass migration. The opening of the book frames the postwar crisis through a foreword invoking the Holy Year and a drive through bomb-shattered Cologne, leading to Cardinal Frings’s plea for the largely overlooked “Expellees.” Swanstrom distinguishes them from Displaced Persons, outlines the Allied-engineered mass transfers that pushed nearly 12 million into a wrecked Germany, and cites Catholic and Protestant protests against the doctrine of mass guilt. He then reports from Salzgitter’s former slave-labor barracks—now crammed with uprooted families—where men fear joblessness as dismantling proceeds, and from the Uelzen transit camp, where new fugitives from the Soviet zone are screened, many turned back, and a few help-seeking vignettes reveal raw desperation. He visits Camp Friedland to show the Red Cross search for families as POWs trickle home, recounting a transport’s wrenching scenes and the uncertainty over countless prisoners.

Pilgrims of the night, by Edward Ernest Swanstrom. Republished by OpenStories from Project Gutenberg eBook #78506.