pumpkinstrokemarrow

Remembered on the way to Cheam about the Sudeten Germans, between 2 and 3m of whom were expelled from what was then Czechoslovakia after the second world war. The history is rather messy with the Sudeten Germans having lived in what had been the Kingdom of Bohemia for a very long time. The Czechs grabbed Sudetenland after the first world war on the collapse of the Austrian empire, paying possibly scant regard to the aspirations of the German majority there. This eventually resulted in the Sudeten Germans, taken as a whole, looking to Hitler to sort things out. And then there was the movement of the Polish borders to the West after the second world war, incorporating chunks of what had been Germany in Poland. This also resulted in large scale migration in unpleasant circumstances. In both of these cases the migrants were on the losing side and shared in war guilt; and while I believe some Germans are returning - presumably to the land of their parents rather than to their own - the numbers involved are quite small. One does not come across Sudeten Germans in the news very often. Details courtesy of wikipedia.

All this is no excuse for what happened in Palestine but it does provide some background and context. There were numerically bigger tragedies closer to home.