03349cam a22003373u 450000100060000000300070000600500170001300600020003000700050003200800410003701000130007804000110009104100170010205000090011910000410012824500260016926400510019530000470024633600260029333700260031933800360034550000310038150801840041252021860059653400580278265300230284070000340286385600520289785600430294999900190299278506UtSlPG20260610134824.0mcr n260607r20261950utu|||||o|||||||||||||| d  a50009380  aUtSlPG 7aen2iso639-1 4aD7311 aSwanstrom, Edward Ernest,d1903-198510aPilgrims of the night 1aSalt Lake City, UT :bProject Gutenberg,c2026  a1 online resource :bmultiple file formats  atextbtxt2rdacontent  acomputerbc2rdamedia  aonline resourcebcr2rdacarrier  aRelease date is 2026-04-20  aBob Taylor, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)  a"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. Further chapters spotlight women’s resilience in turning barracks into makeshift homes, personal losses (dead or vanished relatives, husbands in forced labor), and the aged left to wait out their days; children missing by the tens of thousands, orphan tales, youth idleness and its dangers, and modest rescues through church-run homes and summer placements; and priests—thousands expelled—ministering in diaspora, including a harrowing Siberian-labor testimony and new parish life in Protestant regions with ecumenical help. The section concludes as an expelled priest’s Sunday rounds in Schleswig-Holstein begin to illustrate this strenuous, improvised pastoral care. (This is an automatically generated summary.)  pOriginally published:cNew York: Sheed and Ward, 1950  aPolitical refugees1 aSpellman, Francis,d1889-19674 uhttps://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.3011205640563940uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78506  c119224d119224