How did people who had been interned in the camps fare in the real world, after the war? Were people returning to their old homes next to the people who betrayed them/supported the Nazis, etc? How effective was denazification on the community level?
/u/commiespaceinvader has written in response to What was life in Germany like for Jewish, handicaped, gays after WWII? and How did the Allies care for Holocaust survivors? See also:
/u/estherke has written about continued Romany suffering after 1945 (the parallel term being 'antiziganism').
Tayara Vaknin, who is longer with us, previously answered How did the German general public respond to the resultant postwar propaganda distributed by the USA blaming them?
/u/Abrytan has previously answered How quick of a process was the Denazification of Germany after WWII?
Another now-anonymous answer about denazification can be found here.
See below
Specifically responding to Jewish people returning to their old homes, we have a variety of responses.
A lucky few were able to return to their hometowns, but reported their neighbours were indifferent to their plight or asserted their suffering over theirs. However, many were not so lucky, and often returned home to find their house expropriated by locals. Reportedly in one specific case a Polish man asked why the Jews had returned, as he had thought they had been taken care of. [1] There were a number of pogroms in Poland immediately after the war in 1945, notably in Krakow and Kielce. In fact many who did return to their hometowns in Poland made their ways back into DP (displaced persons) camps in Germany, hoping to emigrate to Palestine or abroad (of course, many did this after discovering their families had been killed). This accelerated as Communist governments came to power across Eastern Europe.
Camp survivors were amongst around 40 million displaced from their homes across Europe at the end of the war, with 850,000 still in DP camps by 1947 [2]. The last DP camp (Foehrenwald) was closed in 1957. So the ‘return to normal life’ for many was not an instant process or even a ‘return’ at all, but a search for a future lasting for several years; Jewish DPs in the meantime were getting married, having children, living their lives in these camps.
[1] I am paraphrasing here from an account in Martin Gilbert’s ‘The Boys: Triumph Over Adversity’, a collection of eyewitness accounts by child survivors brought to the UK for rehabilitation (organised by Leonard Montefiore, who also set up the Kindertransport)
[2] There is a growing literature on the history of displaced persons in Europe. I’ve taken this from Mark Wyman’s 1995 book, but you can find a detailed bibliography on the excellent Bad Arolsen website (the largest archive for victims and survivors of Nazi Germany) here. David Nasaw’s ‘The Last Million’ is a recent and accessible introduction.