Recounts the disorder in Europe after World War II, describing the brutal acts against Germans and collaborators, the anti-Semitic beliefs that reemerged, and the Allied-tolerated expulsions of citizens from their ancestral homelands.

Part I. The legacy of war. Physical destruction -- Absence -- Displacement -- Famine -- Moral destruction -- Hope -- Landscape of chaos -- Part II. Vengeance. The thirst for blood -- The camps liberated -- Vengeance restrained : Slave labourers -- German prisoners of war -- Vengeance unrestrained : Eastern Europe -- The enemy within -- Revenge on women and children -- The purpose of vengeance -- Part III. Ethnic cleansing. Wartime choices -- The Jewish flight -- The ethnic cleansing of Ukraine and Poland -- The expulsion of the Germans -- Europe in microcosm : Yugoslavia -- Western tolerance, Eastern intolerance -- Part IV. Civil war. Wars within wars -- Political violence in France and Italy -- The Greek Civil War -- Cuckoo in the nest : Communism in Romania -- The subjugation of Eastern Europe -- The resistance of the 'Forest Brothers' -- The Cold War mirror.