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Personal narratives can teach us much about aspects of people’s lives that do not enter the documents that historians prefer. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the written documents were often created by outsiders who had their own agendas and prejudices. To ignore the survivors’ memoirs and oral histories would be to create history based on sources no more credible. In some instances, there would be no other documents at all. To ignore the survivors’ testimonies in those cases would be to let their history go untold.

In postwar Germany, Allied personnel and displaced populations competed with local Germans for housing. Examining group interactions and conflicting interests in this competition sheds light on issues of responsibility and reconciliation in the occupied country. In the East, Germans quickly grasped the key political interests of the Soviet occupiers: inhospitable landlords were denounced as "Nazis," and many East Germans rewrote their pasts to claim "victim-of-fascism" status. In the West, Germans cast themselves as allies in the battle against Communism. Wartime and postwar victims in both East and West struggled to gain a moral status that would facilitate access to resources and authority; yet in neither East nor West did they create united fronts. Meanwhile, the alliance between local Germans and ethnic German expellees against the DPs and Communists did facilitate integration of the ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe into western German society, changing the social and political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]