Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as well as the bottom, People on the Move reconstructs the complex map of forced population displacements that took place across Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.

While most studies of the Holocaust stop in 1945, the year of the liberation and the official end of the Holocaust, Tam's Stark follows the fate of the Hungarian Jews until the Communist takeover in the late 1940s. The basic problem confronting quantitative experts in Holocaust studies is the difficulty in locating accurate data relating to the Holocaust and the immediate postwar era. The author has collected and evaluated virtually every primary and secondary source related to the quantifying of human loss among the Hungarian Jewish communities to produce a full, detailed measure of the scope of destruction.

The author goes on to cover the enlarged, war-years territory of Hungary, and then to a detailed comparison of the destruction of Jewish communities and the emigration of the survivors.

Europe has a long history of state-led population displacement on ethnic grounds. The nationalist argument of ethnic homogeneity has been a crucial factor in the mapping of the continent. At no time has this been more the case than during and after the Second World War. Both under the aggressive expansionism of the Third Reich and after Germany's defeat, millions were brutally forced out of their homelands. Presenting a history from the top as well as the bottom, People on the Move reconstructs the complex map of forced population displacements that took place across Europe during and immediately after the Second World War.