Year Zero E-Book

Ian Buruma

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 652

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Many books have been written, and continue to be written, about the Second World War: military histories, histories of the Holocaust, the war in Asia, or collaboration and resistance in Europe. Few books have taken a close look at the immediate aftermath of the worldwide catastrophe. Drawing on hundreds of eye-witness accounts and personal stories, this sweeping book examines the seven months (in Europe) and four months (in Asia) that followed the surrender of the Axis powers, from the fate of Holocaust survivors liberated from the concentration camps, and the formation of the state of Israel, to the incipient civil war in China, and the allied occupation of Japan. It was a time when terrible revenge was taken on collaborators and their former masters; of ubiquitous black markets, war crime tribunals; and the servicing of millions of occupation troops, former foes in some places, liberators in others. But Year Zero is not just a story of vengeance. It was also a new beginning, of democratic restorations in Japan and West Germany, of social democracy in Britain and of a new world order under the United Nations. If construction follows destruction, Year Zero describes that extraordinary moment in between, when people faced the wreckage, full of despair, as well as great hope. An old world had been destroyed; a new one was yet to be built.

Leseprobe

To my father, S. L. Buruma,and to Brian Urquhart

A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

—WALTER BENJAMINNinth Thesis on the Philosophy of History

CONTENTS

Prologue

PART ONE

LIBERATION COMPLEX

CHAPTER 1

Exultation

CHAPTER 2

Hunger

CHAPTER 3

Revenge

PART TWO

CLEARING THE RUBBLE

CHAPTER 4

Going Home

CHAPTER 5

Draining the Poison

CHAPTER 6

The Rule of Law

PART THREE

NEVER AGAIN

CHAPTER 7

Bright Confident Morning

CHAPTER 8

Civilizing the Brutes

CHAPTER 9

One World

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Image Credits

PROLOGUE

There was something about my father’s story which baffled me for a long time. His experience of the Second World War was not a particularly unusual one for a man of his age and background. There are many worse stories, yet his was bad enough.

I was quite young when I first heard about my father’s war. Unlike some people, he was not reticent about it, even though some memories must have been painful to recall. And I enjoyed hearing them. There was also an illustration of sorts provided by tiny black-and-white photographs, stuck in an album which I retrieved from a drawer in his study for my private pleasure. They were not dramatic images, but sufficiently strange for me to wonder at: pictures of a primitive workers’ camp in eastern Berlin, of my father grimacing grotesquely to sabotage an official photograph, of officious-looking Germans in suits adorned with Nazi insignia, of Sunday outings to a lake in the suburbs, of blond Ukrainian girls smiling at the photographer.

These were the relatively good times. Fraternizing with Ukrainians was probably forbidden, but memories of those women still produce a wistful look in my father’s eyes. There are no photographs of him almost dying from hunger and exhaustion, of being tormented by vermin, of using a waterlogged bomb crater as a common toilet as well as the only available bath. But these hardships were not what baffled me. It was something that happened later, after he had come home.

Home was the largely Catholic town of Nijmegen in the east of Holland, where the Battle of Arnhem took place in 1944. Nijmegen was taken by the Allies after heavy fighting, and Arnhem was the bridge too far. My grandfather had been posted there in the 1920s as a Protestant minister to take care of a relatively small community of Mennonites.* Nijmegen is a border town. You could walk to Germany from my father’s home. Since Germany was relatively cheap, most family holidays were spent across the border, until the Nazi presence became insufferable even for tourists round about 1937. Passing by a Hitler Youth camp one day, my family witnessed young boys being severely beaten by uniformed youths. On a boat trip along the Rhine, my grandfather caused (perhaps deliberate) embarrassment among German passengers by reciting Heinrich Heine’s poetic ode to the Rhine maiden, The Lorelei. (Heine was Jewish.) My grandmother decided that enough was enough. Three years later, German troops came pouring across the border.

Life went on, even under German occupation. It was, for most Dutch people, as long as they were not Jewish, still oddly normal, at least in the first year or two. My father entered Utrecht University in 1941, where he studied law. To have a future as a lawyer, it was (and to some extent still is) imperative to become a member of the fraternity, the so-called student corps, which was exclusive and rather expensive. Although socially respectable, being a Protestant minister did not earn enough to pay all my father’s bills. So a maternal uncle from the more affluent side of the family decided to subsidize my father’s social obligations.

However, by the time my father joined, student fraternities had already been banned by the German authorities as potential hives of resistance. This was soon after Jewish professors had been expelled from the

But Utrecht remained open, and the fraternity continued to function, albeit underground. This meant that the rather brutal hazing rituals for new members had to take place in secret. First-year students, known in the corps as “fetuses,” were no longer forced to shave their heads, for this would have given them away to the Germans, but it was still customary to make the fetuses hop around like frogs, deprive them of sleep, treat them like slaves, and generally humiliate them in a variety of sadistic games that happened to catch the senior boys’ fancy. My father, like others of his class and education, submitted to this ordeal without protest. It is the way things were (and still are) done. It was, as they rather pedantically put it in Latin, mos (the custom).

In early 1943, young men were put to another, more serious test. The German occupiers ordered all students to sign a loyalty oath, swearing to refrain from any action against the Third Reich. Those who refused would be deported to Germany, where they would be forced to work for the Nazi war industry. Like 85 percent of his fellow students, my father refused, and went into hiding.

Later that year, he received a summons from the student resistance in Utrecht to return to his hometown. The reason for this remains obscure. A stupid mistake, perhaps, made in a moment of panic, or it may just have been a case of incompetence; these were students, after all, not hardened guerrilla fighters. My father arrived at the station with his father. Unfortunately, the Nazis had chosen just that moment to round up young men for labor in Germany. The platform was blocked on both sides by the German police. Threats were made that parents would be held responsible for any escapes. Worried about getting his parents in trouble, my father signed up. It was a thoughtful, but not a particularly heroic act, which still bothers him on occasion. He was transported, with other men, to a nasty little concentration camp, where Dutch thugs were trained by the SS in the savage techniques of their trade. After a brief time there, my father spent the rest of the war working in a factory in Berlin manufacturing brakes for railway trains.

This was a mixed experience, at least at first. As long as they did not actively resist the Germans, Dutch student workers were not put in concentration camps. The tedium of factory work, the shame of laboring for the enemy, and the physical discomforts of sleeping in freezing and verminous barracks even had their compensations. My father recalls attending concerts of the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler.

Things at the Knorr Brakes factory may also not have been all that they seemed. A taciturn, dark-haired man called Herr Elisohn tended to slink away when approached by the Dutch student workers, and there were others who shunned too much contact, men with names such as Rosenthal. Much later, my father surmised that the factory might have been hiding Jews.

Things got much worse in November 1943, when the Royal Air Force started its long bombing campaign on the German capital. In 1944, the RAF Lancasters were joined by American B-17s. But the wholesale destruction of Berlin, and its people, really began in the first months of 1945, when bombs and firestorms were more or less constant. The Americans attacked by day, the British by night, and in April, the Soviet “Stalin Organs” started shelling the city from the east.

Sometimes the students managed to squeeze themselves into air-raid shelters and subway stations, not a privilege allowed to prisoners in concentration camps. Sometimes a hastily dug ditch was their only protection against the bombing raids, which, in my father’s memory, the students both welcomed and feared. One of the worst torments was lack of sleep, for the bombing and shelling never really stopped. There was a constant din of air-raid sirens, explosions, human screams and falling masonry and glass. Yet the students cheered on the Anglo-American bombers that could so easily have killed them and in some cases did.

In April 1945, the workers’ camp had become uninhabitable: roofs and walls were blown away by wind and fire. Through a contact, possibly made through one of the less Nazified Protestant churches, my father found refuge in a suburban villa. His landlady, Frau Lehnhard, had already taken in several other refugees from the wreckage of central Berlin. Among them was a German couple, Dr. Rümmelin, a lawyer, and his Jewish wife. Ever fearful of her arrest, the husband kept a revolver in the house, so they could die together if this should come to pass. Frau Lehnhard liked to sing German Lieder. My father accompanied her on the piano. It was, in his words, “a rare reminder of civilization” in the mayhem of Berlin’s final battle.

On his way to work in eastern Berlin, my father passed through the ruined streets where Soviet and German troops were fighting from house to house. On the Potsdamer Platz, he stood behind the Stalin Organs as they bombarded Hitler’s chancellery with their sinister screaming noise. It gave him a lifelong horror of big bangs and fireworks.

Sometime in late April, or possibly in early May, 1945, Soviet soldiers arrived at Frau Lehnhard’s house. Such visits usually implied gang rapes of the women, no matter how old, or young, they were. This didn’t happen. But my father almost lost his life when Dr. Rümmelin’s revolver was discovered. None of the soldiers spoke a word of English or German, so explanations for the presence of the gun were useless. The two men in the house, Dr. Rümmelin and my father, were put up against the wall to be executed. My father remembers feeling fatalistic about this. He had seen so much death by then that his own imminent end did not come as much of a surprise. But then, through one of those freakish bits of luck which meant the difference between life and death, there appeared a Russian officer who spoke English. He decided to believe Dr. Rümmelin’s story. The execution was called off.

A certain rapport was struck up between my father and another Soviet officer, a high school teacher from Leningrad. Without any language in common, they communicated by humming snatches of Beethoven and Schubert. This officer, named Valentin, took him to a pickup point somewhere in the rubble that had once been a working class suburb of western Berlin. From there my father had to find his way to a DP (displaced persons) camp in the east of the city. He was joined on his trek through the ruins by another Dutchman, possibly a Nazi collaborator, or a former SS man. Since it had been several weeks since my father had had any proper food or sleep, he could barely walk.

Before they got much farther, my father collapsed. His dubious companion dragged him into a broken building where the man’s girlfriend, a German prostitute, lived in a room up several flights of stairs. My father cannot recall what happened next; he was probably unconscious for much of the time. But the prostitute saved his life by nursing him back to a state sufficient to make it to the DP camp, where more than a thousand people of all nationalities, including concentration camp survivors, had to make do with a single water tap.

A photograph of my father taken in Holland more than six months later shows him still looking puffy from hunger edema. He is wearing a rather ill-fitting suit. It might have been the one he received from a Mennonite charity organization in the United States, which had urine stains on the trousers. Or perhaps it was a hand-me-down from his father. But, although pudgy and a little pale, in the photograph my father looks cheerful enough, surrounded by other men of his age, raising their beer mugs, mouths opened wide, cheering, or singing some student song.

He was back in his fraternity at Utrecht. This would have been in September 1945. My father was twenty-two. Because wartime initiations to the corps had occurred in secret, it had been decided by senior figures in the fraternity that the hazing rituals had to be conducted all over again. My father does not recall having to hop like a frog, or being too badly knocked about himself. This kind of treatment was reserved for younger boys who had just arrived at university, some of them perhaps fresh from camps far worse than my father’s. There may have been Jewish students among them who had been hiding for years under the floorboards of houses belonging to brave Gentiles prepared to risk their necks. But my father does not remember anyone being especially bothered about such things; no one was interested in personal stories, Jewish or otherwise; they all had personal stories, often unpleasant. As part of their initiation to the corps, the new “fetuses” were screamed at, humiliated, and even squashed into tiny cellars (a game later known in fraternity circles as “playing Dachau”).

And this is what baffled me. How could my father have put up with such grotesque behavior after all he had gone through? Did no one find this peculiar, to say the least?

No, my father said repeatedly. No, it seemed normal. That is the way things were done. It was mos. No one questioned it. He later qualified this by saying that he would have found it unseemly to have abused a Jewish survivor, but couldn’t speak for others.

It baffled me, but gradually I think I came to understand. The idea that this was normal seems to me to provide a clue. People were so desperate to return to the world they had known before the Nazi occupation, before the bombs, the camps, and the murders, that hazing “fetuses” seemed normal. It was a way back to the way things once were, a way, as it were, of coming home.

There are other possibilities. Perhaps to men who had seen serious violence, student games seemed relatively inoffensive, the healthy hijinks of youth. But it is more likely that the men who took to hazing with the greatest enthusiasm were those who had not experienced very much at all. Here was a chance to act tough, a pleasure that was all the more keenly felt if the victims were people who had been through a great deal more.

• • •

THIS STORY OF MY FATHER—as I said, not as bad as many others, but bad enough— was what made me curious about what happened just after the most devastating war in human history. How did the world emerge from the wreckage? What happens when millions are starving, or bent on bloody revenge? How are societies, or “civilization” (a popular word at the time), put together again? The desire to retrieve a sense of normality is one very human response to catastrophe; human and fanciful. For the idea that the world as it was before the war could simply be restored, as though a murderous decade, which began well before 1939, could be cast aside like a bad memory, was surely an illusion.

It was, however, an illusion held by governments as much as by individual people. The French and Dutch governments thought that their colonies could be repossessed and life would resume, just as it had been before the Japanese invaded Southeast Asia. But it was only that, an illusion. For the world could not possibly be the same. Too much had happened, too much had changed, too many people, even entire societies, had been uprooted. Nor did many people, including some governments, want the world to go back to what it had been. British workers, who had risked their lives for King and country, were no longer content to live under the old class system, and voted Winston Churchill out of office just two months after Hitler’s defeat. Joseph Stalin had no intention of letting Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia restore any kind of liberal democracy. Even in western Europe many intellectuals saw communism, wrapped in the morally cozy gown of “antifascism,” as a more viable alternative to the old order.

In Asia, the incipient change was, if anything, even more dramatic. Once Indonesians, Vietnamese, Malays, Chinese, Burmese, Indians, and others too had seen how a fellow Asian nation could humiliate Western colonial masters, the notion of Western omnipotence was smashed forever, and relations could never be the same again. At the same time, the Japanese, like the Germans, having seen the vainglorious dreams of their leaders turn to ashes, were receptive to changes that were partly encouraged and partly imposed by the victorious Allied occupiers.

British and American women, whom wartime circumstances had propelled into the workforce, were no longer so content to swap their economic independence for domestic subservience. Many still did, of course, just as it took time for colonies to gain full independence. The conservative desire to return to “normal” would always vie with the wish for change, to start again from scratch, to build a better world, where devastating wars would never happen again. Such hopes were inspired by genuine idealism. That the League of Nations had failed to prevent a (second) world war did not hamper the idealism of those who hoped, in 1945, that the United Nations would keep peace forever. That such ideals, in time, turned out to be as illusory as the notion of turning back the clock does not diminish their power, or necessarily devalue their purpose.

The story of postwar 1945 is in some ways a very old one. The ancient Greeks knew well the destructive force of the human thirst for revenge, and their tragedians dramatized ways in which blood feuds might be overcome by the rule of law; trials instead of vendetta. And history, in the East no less than the West, is littered with dreams of starting afresh, of treating the ruins of war as an open building site for societies based on new ideals, which were often not as new as people thought.

My own interest in the immediate postwar period was sparked partly by current affairs. We have seen enough examples in recent years of high hopes invested in revolutionary wars to topple dictators and create new democracies. But mainly I wanted to look back in time to understand the world of my father, and his generation. This is partly, perhaps, because of a child’s natural curiosity about the experience of a parent, a curiosity that grows stronger as the child becomes older than the parent was at that time. Such curiosity is especially acute when the father was tested by hardships that the child can only imagine.

But it is more than that. For the world my father helped to create from the ruins of the war that so nearly killed him is the world that we grew up in. My generation was nurtured by the dreams of our fathers: the European welfare state, the United Nations, American democracy, Japanese pacifism, the European Union. Then there is the dark side of the world made in 1945: communist dictatorship in Russia and eastern Europe, Mao’s rise in the Chinese civil war, the Cold War.

Much of this world of our fathers has already been dismantled, or is fast coming apart at the seams. To be sure, in almost every place that was affected by the last world war, life today is far better than it was in 1945, certainly in material terms. Some of things people feared most have not come to pass. The Soviet empire has fallen. The last battlegrounds of the Cold War are on the Korean peninsula, or possibly the narrow Taiwan straits. Yet, as I write, people everywhere are talking about the decline of the West, of the United States as well as Europe. If some of the fears of the immediate postwar period have faded, so have many of the dreams. Few still believe that eternal peace will come from a kind of world government, or even that the world can be shielded from conflict by the United Nations. Hopes for social democracy and the welfare state— the very reason for Churchill’s defeat in 1945— have been severely bruised, if not dashed, by ideology and economic constraints.

I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future. History is all a matter of interpretation. Often the wrong interpretations of the past are more dangerous than ignorance. Memories of old hurts and hatreds kindle new conflagrations. And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don’t, we cannot understand our own times. I wanted to know what my father went through, for it helps me to make sense of myself, and indeed all our lives, in the long dark shadow of what came before.

* To avoid confusion, I should mention that Dutch Mennonites are very different from their American brethren. Dutch Mennonites tend to be rather progressive, open to other faiths, and not at all reclusive. The opposite tends to be true of American and German Mennonites, which caused a certain degree of awkwardness when bearded figures in old-fashioned black suits turned up on formal visits to my grandfather in Nijmegen. universities. At Leyden, the dean of the law faculty, Rudolph Cleveringa, protested against this measure in a famous speech, his bag packed with toothbrush and a change of clothes in case of arrest, which duly came. Students, many of them from the corps, went on strike. Leyden shut down. The fraternity in Amsterdam had already been dissolved by its own members after a German ban on Jewish students.

PART 1

LIBERATION COMPLEX

CHAPTER 1

EXULTATION

When Allied troops in Germany liberated millions of prisoners of Hitler’s fallen Reich— in concentration camps, slave labor camps, prisoner of war camps— they expected to find them docile, suitably grateful, and happy to cooperate in any way they could with their liberators. Sometimes, no doubt, that is what happened. Often, however, they encountered what became known as the “Liberation complex.” In the slightly bureaucratic words of one eyewitness: “This involved revenge, hunger and exultation, which three qualities combined to make displaced persons, when newly liberated, a problem as to behavior and conduct, as well as for care, feeding, disinfection and repatriation.”1

The Liberation complex was not confined to inmates of DP (displaced person) camps; it could have been used to describe entire countries newly liberated, and even in some respects the defeated nations.

I was born too late, in too prosperous a country, to notice any effects of hunger. But there were faint echoes still of revenge and exultation. Vengeance, against people who had collaborated with the enemy or, worse, slept with him, continued to be exacted in a quiet, almost surreptitious way, mostly at a very low level. One did not buy groceries from a certain store, or cigarettes from another, for “everyone” knew that the owners had been “wrong” during the war.

Exultation, on the other hand, was institutionalized in Holland by turning it into a yearly ritual: May 5, Liberation Day.

As I remember it from my childhood, the sun always shone on May 5, with church bells ringing, and red, white, and blue flags snapping in the light spring breeze. December 5, the feast of St. Nicholas, may be a bigger family occasion, but Liberation Day is the great show of patriotic joy, or at least it was when I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. Since the Dutch did not liberate themselves on May 5, 1945, but were freed from German occupation by Canadians, British, American, and Polish troops, the annual outburst of patriotic pride is slightly odd. But still, since the Dutch, like the Americans and the British, like to believe that freedom defines the national identity, it makes sense that the German defeat became blurred in national consciousness with the collective memory of defeating the Spanish crown in the Eighty Years’ War straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Sentimental tears come easily to someone of my generation, born just six years after the war, confronted with images of Scottish bagpipers walking through machine-gun fire on a Normandy beach, or French citizens singing the “Marseillaise,” not, of course, through any memories of our own, but through Hollywood movies. But I saw a little bit of the old exultation, precisely fifty years after May 5, 1945, when the entry of Canadian Army soldiers in Amsterdam was reenacted to celebrate the anniversary. The fact that Allied troops didn’t actually arrive in Amsterdam until May 8 is now beside the point. The original occasion must have been extraordinary. In the account of a British war correspondent on the spot: “We have been kissed, cried on, hugged, thumped, screamed at and shouted at until we are bruised and exhausted. The Dutch have ransacked their gardens so that the rain of flowers which falls on the Allied vehicles is endless.”2

Fifty years later, elderly Canadian men, medals pinned to tight and faded battle dress, rode into the city once more on the old jeeps and armored cars, saluting the crowds with tears in their eyes, remembering the days when they were kings, days their grandchildren have long tired of hearing about, days of exultation before the war heroes settled down in Calgary or Winnipeg to become dentists or accountants.

What struck me more than the old men reliving their finest days was the behavior of elderly Dutch women, dressed like the respectable matrons they undoubtedly were. These women were in a state of frenzy, a kind of teenage ecstasy, screaming like girls at a rock concert, stretching their arms to the men in their jeeps, reaching for their uniforms: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” They couldn’t help themselves. They, too, were reliving their hours of exultation. It was one of the most weirdly erotic scenes I had ever witnessed.

• • •

IN FACT, AS ALREADY NOTED, the Canadians did not come to Amsterdam on May 5, nor was the war officially over on that date. True, on May 4, Grand Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and General Eberhard Hans Kinzel had come to the tent of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (“Monty”) on the Lüneburg Heath to surrender all German forces in northwest Germany, Holland, and Denmark. A young British army officer named Brian Urquhart saw the German’s rush along a country road to Monty’s HQ in their Mercedes-Benzes. Not long before that he had been one of the first Allied officers to enter the nearby concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where most of the liberated prisoners “seemed beyond articulate speech, even supposing we had found a common language.” What he thought were logs from a distance were piles of corpses “as far as the eye could see.”3 When Admiral von Friedeburg, still dressed in a splendid leather greatcoat, was confronted a few days later with an American news report of German atrocities, he took this as an insult to his country and flew into a rage.

On May 6, another ceremony took place in a half-destroyed farmhouse near Wageningen where General Johannes Blaskowitz surrendered his troops to Canadian lieutenant-general Charles Foulkes. There was little left of Arnhem itself, after having been pounded to rubble in September 1944, when British, American, and Polish troops had tried to force their way through Holland in the military catastrophe known as Operation Market-Garden. One of the people who had seen this disaster coming was Brian Urquhart, then an intelligence officer working for one of the operation’s chief planners, General F. A. M. “Boy” Browning, a dashing figure with a great deal of blood on his hands. When Urquhart showed his commanding officer photographic evidence of German tank brigades waiting around Arnhem to blow the Allies away, he was told to take sick leave. No one, certainly not a lowly intelligence officer, was allowed to spoil Monty’s party.*

But still the war was not over, even in Holland. On May 7 crowds had gathered on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam in front of the Royal Palace, cheering, dancing, singing, waving the orange flag of the Dutch royal family, in anticipation of the triumphant British and Canadian troops whose arrival was imminent. Watching the happy throng from the windows of a gentlemen’s club on the square, German naval officers decided in a last-minute fit of pique to fire into the crowd with a machine gun mounted on the roof. Twenty-two people died, and more than a hundred were badly injured.

Even that was not the very last violent act of the war. On May 13, more than a week after Liberation Day, two men were executed. They were German anti-Nazis, who had deserted from the German army and hidden among the Dutch. One had a Jewish mother. They emerged from their hiding places on May 5, and turned themselves in to members of the Dutch resistance, who handed them over to the Canadians. They then fell victim to a typical wartime muddle. When Montgomery accepted the German surrender on May 4, there were not enough Allied troops in Holland to disarm the Germans or feed the POWs. For the time being German officers were allowed to remain in command of their men. The two unfortunate German deserters were placed among other German soldiers in a disused Ford assembly plant outside Amsterdam. A German military court was hastily improvised by officers keen to assert their authority for the very last time, and the men were sentenced to death. The Germans asked the Canadians for guns to execute the “traitors.” The Canadians, unsure of the rules and unwilling to disrupt the temporary arrangement, complied. And the men were swiftly executed. Others apparently met a similar fate, until the Canadians, rather too late, put a stop to such practices.4

The official date for the end of the war in Europe, V-E Day, was in fact May 8. Even though the unconditional surrender of all German troops was signed in a schoolhouse in Rheims on the evening of May 6, the celebrations could not yet begin. Stalin was furious that General Eisenhower had presumed to accept the German surrender for the eastern as well as western fronts. Only the Soviets should have that privilege, in Berlin. Stalin wanted to postpone V-E Day till May 9. This, in turn, annoyed Churchill.

People all over Britain were already busy baking bread for celebratory sandwiches; flags and banners had been prepared; church bells were waiting to be tolled. In the general confusion, it was the Germans who first announced the end of the war in a radio broadcast from Flensburg, where Admiral Doenitz was still nominally in charge of what remained of the tattered German Reich. This was picked up by the BBC. Special editions of the French, British, and U. S. newspapers soon hit the streets. In London, large crowds gathered around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, expecting Churchill to announce victory so the biggest party in history could finally begin. Ticker tape started raining in the streets of New York. But still there was no official announcement from the Allied leaders that the war with Germany was over.

Just before midnight on May 8, at the Soviet HQ in Karlshorst, near my father’s old labor camp, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the brutal military genius, at last accepted the German surrender. Once more, Admiral von Friedeberg put his signature to the German defeat. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, expressionless, rigid, every inch the Prussian soldier, told the Russians that he was horrified by the extent of destruction wrought on the German capital. Whereupon a Russian officer asked Keitel whether he had been equally horrified when on his orders, thousands of Soviet villages and towns were obliterated, and millions of people, including many children, were buried under the ruins. Keitel shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.5

Zhukov then asked the Germans to leave, and the Russians, together with their American, British, and French allies, celebrated in style with teary-eyed speeches and huge amounts of wine, cognac, and vodka. A banquet was held in that same room the following day when Zhukov toasted Eisenhower as one of the greatest generals of all time. The toasts went on and on and on, and the Russian generals, including Zhukov, danced, until few men were left standing.

On May 8, crowds were already going crazy in New York. They were also pouring into the streets in London, but a peculiar hush still fell over the British crowds, as though they were waiting for Churchill’s voice to set off the celebrations. Churchill, who had decided to ignore Stalin’s wish to postpone V-E Day till the ninth, would speak at 3 p. m. President Truman had already spoken earlier. General Charles de Gaulle, refusing to be upstaged by Churchill, insisted on making his announcement to the French at exactly the same time.

Churchill’s speech on the BBC was heard on radios around the world. There was no more room to move on Parliament Square outside Westminster, where loudspeakers had been installed. People were pressed against the gates of Buckingham Palace. Cars could no longer get through the crowds in the West End. Big Ben sounded three times. The crowd went quiet, and at last Churchill’s voice boomed through the loudspeakers: “The German war is therefore at an end . . . almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us . . . We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad . . .” And here his voice broke: “Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.” A little later, he made the V for Victory sign on the balcony of the Ministry of Health. “God bless you all. This is your victory!” And the crowd yelled back: “No it is yours!”

The Daily Herald reported: “There were fantastic ‘mafficking’ scenes in the heart of the city as cheering, dancing, laughing, uncontrollable crowds mobbed buses, jumped on the roofs of cars, tore down a hoarding for causeway bonfires, kissed policemen and dragged them into the dancing . . . Motorists gave the V-sign on their electric horns. Out on the river tugs and ships made the night echo and re-echo with V-sirens.”

Somewhere in that crowd were my eighteen-year-old mother, who had been given time off from her boarding school, and her younger brother. My grandmother, Winifred Schlesinger, daughter of German-Jewish immigrants, had every reason to be happy, and her worship of Churchill knew no bounds. But she was nervous that her children might get lost in the “excited, drunken crowd— especially Yanks.”

In New York, five hundred thousand people celebrated in the streets. Curfew was lifted. The clubs— the Copacabana, the Versailles, the Latin Quarter, the Diamond Horseshoe, El Morocco— were packed and open half the night. Lionel Hampton was playing at the Zanzibar, Eddie Stone at the Hotel Roosevelt Grill, and “jumbo portions” of food were on offer at Jack Dempsey’s.

In Paris, on the Place de la République, a reporter for the Libération newspaper watched “a moving mass of people, bristling with allied flags. An American soldier was wobbling on his long legs, in a strange state of disequilibrium, trying to take photographs, two bottles of cognac, one empty, one still full, sticking from his khaki pockets.” A U. S. bomber pilot thrilled the crowd by flying his Mitchell B-25 through the gap under the Eiffel Tower. On the Boulevard des Italiens “an enormous American sailor and a splendid negro” decided to engage in a competition. They pressed every woman to their “huge chests” and counted the number of lipstick marks left on their cheeks. Bets were laid on the two rivals. At the Arc de Triomphe, a bigger crowd than had ever been seen offered thanks to General de Gaulle, who flashed a rare smile. People belted out the “Marseillaise,” and the Great War favorite, “Madelon” :

There is a tavern way down in BrittanyWhere weary soldiers take their libertyThe keeper’s daughter whose name is MadelonPours out the wine while they laugh and “carry on” . . .O Madelon, you are the only oneO Madelon, for you we’ll carry onIt’s so long since we have seen a missWon’t you give us just a kiss . . .

And yet V-E Day in Paris was regarded by some as a bit of an anti-climax. France, after all, had already been liberated in 1944. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that her memory of that night was “much more confused than my memories of our other, earlier festivities, perhaps because my feelings were so confused. The victory had been won a long way off; we had not awaited it, as we had the Liberation, in a fever of anxiety; it had been foreseen for a long time, and offered no new hopes. In a way, this end was like a sort of death . . .”6

Muscovites, on the other hand, swept into the streets as soon as V-E Day was announced in the early morning of the ninth. Masses of people, many of them still in their nightgowns and pajamas, danced and cheered through the night, crying “Victory! Victory!” In a letter to the British historian Martin Gilbert, one of Stalin’s interpreters, named Valentin Berezhkov, recalled: “The pride that victory was finally won over a treacherous and foul enemy, the grief for the fallen (and we did not know then that nearly thirty million were killed on the battlefields), hopes for a lasting peace and continued cooperation with our wartime allies— all this created a special feeling of relief and hope.”7

Libération of May 8 was probably right: this was above all a party for the young. “It was only the young who felt exuberant. Only the young jumped onto the jeeps, which resembled a grandstand at the Longchamp races, running through the Champs-Élysées, flags around their heads and songs on their lips. And that is the way it should be. For the young the danger is over.”

My grandmother in England, pining for her husband still serving in the British Army in India, could not share her children’s exuberance. Her feelings were no doubt shared by many people who worried about faraway husbands or sons, or had lost far too much to rejoice. The reaction of this daughter of immigrants was also peculiarly English. “I missed you too much to celebrate,” she wrote to my grandfather, “so I improved the shining hour by doing a bit of extra work in the garden.”

My father cannot even remember the day the war officially ended. He vaguely recalls the sound of Russian guns fired in celebration. Marshall Zhukov mentions this in his memoir: “We left the banquet hall [on May 9] to the accompaniment of a cannonade from all types of weapons . . . the shooting went on in all parts of Berlin and its suburbs.”8 But my father was used to the sound of guns, and made no special note of it.

Brian Urquhart, the young British intelligence officer, stuck in northern Germany, fresh from the shock of witnessing Belsen, could not feel total joy either: “It is difficult to reconstruct what I actually felt at the time on such an overwhelming occasion. Nearly six years from despair to victory, many friends gone, fantastic waste and destruction . . . I wondered about all those nameless faces in war photographs, refugees, prisoners, civilians under bombing, Russians in the snow and wreckage of their country, crewmen on sinking freighters— how many of them would their families see again?”9

But such thoughts did not dampen the spirits of revelers in New York, Paris, and London. It was a festival of youth, but also of light. Quite literally. “The City Lights Up!” was the May 9 headline of the New York Herald Tribune. “The Night Sky of London was Aglow Again” said the London Daily Herald on May 8. In Paris the lights of the Opéra were lit for the first time since September 1939, in red, white, and blue. One after the other, the lights went back on illuminating the Arc de Triomphe, the Madeleine, and the Place de la Concorde. And the Herald Tribune proudly reported “large floodlighted Stars and Stripes, Union Jack and Tricolor” waving in front of their building on the Rue de Berri.

New York City had been going steadily darker since the “dimout” on April 1942, and then the “brownout” since October 1943. Only the torch on the Statue of Liberty remained dimly lit. But by 8 p. m., May 8, according to the New York Daily News, “all the jewels in Broadway’s crown were full aglow, and the great chunky masses of humanity seemed to swim in the light and their spirits were warmed by it.”

Nelson’s Column on London’s Trafalgar Square was picked out by a searchlight. St. Paul’s, standing almost alone in the midst of the bombed City financial district, was bathed in floodlights. Cinemas lit up Leicester Square in lurid colors. And then there was the soft red glow of tens of thousands of bonfires lit all over London and beyond, all the way up to Scotland.

It wasn’t just the relief that lights could be switched on again now that bombs and “doodlebugs” (German flying bombs) were no longer to be feared. There was something symbolically moving about the return of light. Reading these accounts I was reminded of a story I was told once by a Russian academic in Moscow. French literature was her subject and her passion. She had dreamed all her life of seeing France and other parts of western Europe, places she knew only from books. At last, in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her dream came true; she was allowed to travel to Paris by train. I asked her what had impressed her most. She said it was the moment her train passed from East to West Berlin in the night, and suddenly there were lights.

• • •

FESTIVALS OF LIGHT, universal and as old as the first torch lit by man, often have a mystical origin, relating to the seasons and the beginning of new life. Some recollections of the early days of liberation have a distinct air of religious exultation. This is especially true of the rapturous reception of Allied soldiers by the female population. Maria Haayen, a young woman from The Hague, remembers seeing the first Canadian tank rumbling towards her, with the head of a soldier peering from the gun turret: “All the blood drained from my body, and I thought: there comes our liberation. And as the tank came nearer, I lost my breath and the soldier stood up— he was like a saint.”10

This feeling was perhaps more common among young women, but it was shared by men. One Dutchman recalled that it “was a privilege even to touch the sleeve of a Canadian uniform. Each Canadian private was a Christ, a saviour . . .”11

In one important sense, the experience of the Allied soldiers in liberated countries in the summer of 1945 might be compared to what happened about twenty years later, when the Beatles arrived. Then, too, liberation was expressed as a form of mania, which was above all erotic. In 1945, men in countries such as Holland, Belgium, and France, and even more so in defeated Germany and Japan, were either absent, or in captivity, or poor, underfed, and demoralized. Foreign occupation and defeat had more or less destroyed male authority, at least temporarily. A Dutch historian at the time put it like this: “Dutch men were beaten militarily in 1940; sexually in 1945.”12 The same could be said for France, or Belgium, or any number of countries which had known occupation. One of the consequences of war was that many women had lost much of their female subservience. They had taken jobs, worked for the resistance, or been left to take care of their families. They were, in the deeply disapproving French phrase of the time, hominisée; they had begun to behave like men.

Compared to the skinny Dutchmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, unwashed, shabbily dressed, the spruce Canadians and tall Americans, wellfed, well-paid, sharp-looking in the sexy uniforms of conquerors, must indeed have looked like gods. In the words of one of many Dutch women who ended up marrying a Canadian: “Let’s face it, after what we had been through the Canadians looked delicious.”

Nothing expressed the eroticism of liberation better than the music accompanying the Allied troops, music that had been banned by the Nazis: swing music, jazz, Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” Tommy Dorsey, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.” In Paris, young people danced to “Victory discs,” jazz records distributed to American troops. And the Franco-American spirit entered French chansons too. The hit song of 1945, sung by Jacques Pills, went:

Oh! Là là!Bonjour mademoiselleOh! Là là!Hello, qu’elle fait comme çaOh! Là là!Je pense you are très belleOh! Là là!You very beau soldat . . .

Fraternizing with the Germans was still officially forbidden to the Western Allies in 1945. In Holland and France it was actively encouraged. There was even something named Operation Fraternization. In July, the Entertainment Committee of the Netherlands was founded under the auspices of Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard, specifically to offer English-speaking female company to the more than one hundred thousand Canadians. The idea was that these young women would accompany the soldiers to art shows, museums, movies, and properly supervised dances.

The hopeful and piously expressed expectation was that the women would “uphold the honor of our nation.” My Dutch grandmother, as the wife of a Protestant minister, was asked to oversee the dances, to make sure nothing took place between the Canadians and their Dutch girlfriends that might sully the national honor. Her colleague in this endeavor was a Catholic priest called Father Ogtrop, whose name was shouted out by the dancers to the tune of “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.” I’m not sure what transpired at those dances. But in the words of one Canadian soldier, he had never “met a more willing female population than we did in Holland.”13

This was just as well, from the point of view of the Allied troops, since their commanders took a dim view of prostitution. Red light areas were “off-limits,” even in France, where maisons de tolérance had thrived under German occupation. Some of the older American veterans still had fond memories of Paris in 1918, after World War I, where the brothels of Pigalle (“Pig Alley”) had given the doughboys a warm welcome. Even after World War II, the ban on prostitution was not always observed. In at least one recorded instance, in the city of Cherbourg, several brothels were indirectly run by the U. S. Army itself.14 Some were reserved for black GIs, others for whites only, and American MPs made sure the queues at the brothel doors were orderly. But for the most part, this time, much to the chagrin of those who worried, with excellent reason, about the proliferation of venereal diseases in the absence of organized sexual trade, fraternization was on a strictly freelance basis.

Not that relations between troops and local women were equal. The men had the money, the luxury goods, the cigarettes, the silk stockings and, more important, the food that people desperately needed to survive. And the many expressions of worship for the liberators suggest a potentially humiliating lack of balance. Yet to see the women who were so eager to fraternize as naïve hero worshippers, or powerless victims, would not be entirely accurate. Simone de Beauvoir mentions a young Parisian woman in her memoir whose “main distraction” is “American hunting” (la chasse à l’Américain).

Benoîte Groult, who later became a popular novelist, wrote an account, with her sister Flora, of their American-hunting exploits. They called their Journal à Quatre Mains a novel, but it is a barely fictionalized diary. Groult spoke English and was one of the French women who volunteered to fraternize through the American Red Cross. But her real stamping grounds were less salubrious. She spent most of her evenings at clubs in Paris that catered to Allied soldiers and welcomed French girls but barred French men, clubs with innocuous names like Canadian Club, Independence, Rainbow Corner.

Groult’s detailed physical descriptions of American and Canadian soldiers are as adoring as those by people who thought they were gazing at saints. Except that they are amazingly down-to-earth, and the men are far from saintly. She writes about her conquests in the way some men brag about picking up babes. The clubs she frequents are described as “slave markets.” But the slaves, in this instance, are the conquering heroes.

Here is Benoîte Groult on Kurt, an American fighter pilot: “The nose a little short, or rather, a trifle turned up, giving him a childish air common to all Americans; his skin bronzed by the stratosphere; strong hands, the shoulders of an orang-utang . . . perfect hips, straight, correcting the slightly heavy power of the rest of his body . . .” Kurt never reads books, and is interested only in food and airplanes. But what does she care? Indeed, she writes, “I want the arms of an idiot, the kisses of an idiot. He has an adorable smile, the corners of his mouth curling up above those perfect American teeth.”15

In short, Groult would have been seen by Frenchmen as terribly homminisé. She had been married, but lost her husband during the war. Liberation in the summer of 1944 gave her the license, and the desire, to find pleasure in the arms of men she would never see again. This was a precious freedom. In fact, it was Kurt who wanted a more serious relationship, showed her photographs of his parents, and hoped to take her back to the States as his war bride. For Groult, a young Parisian intellectual with literary aspirations, this was naturally out of the question.

Benoîte Groult was perhaps unusually hard-boiled, or pretended to be. But her account illustrates a point made by a French historian of the German occupation. According to Patrick Buisson, the presence of large numbers of young German men in France during the war offered many women a chance to rebel: women stuck in bad marriages, or in oppressive bourgeois families, maids bullied by their employers, spinsters left on the shelf, or simply women of all classes who wished to break away, even temporarily, from the constraints of a conservative patriarchal society. The fact that liaisons with an occupation army also brought material benefits, allowing many such women to live better than others, including in some cases their former masters, sweetened the sense of revenge.16

And not just women. Minorities of all kinds often forge alliances with powerful outsiders to get the majorities off their backs. This was a facet of all colonial societies. But the disproportionate number of French homosexuals who either collaborated with the Germans or used wartime Paris as a sexual playground may also have had something to do with a common grievance against the respectable bourgeoisie. The fact that Nazi and Vichy propaganda was itself homophobic was not an impediment. Occupation was not necessarily endorsed; it was an opportunity.

“Fratting” with the Allied liberators was, in any case, more alluring than collaboration with the Germans, for it was not tainted with treachery. It is hard to know how much homosexual fraternizing went on, since this is obviously something people were rather discreet about. One case is beautifully described by Rudi van Dantzig, the dancer, writer, and cho reographer of the Dutch National Ballet. He wrote a novel, For a Lost Soldier, based on his own experience after being evacuated from Amsterdam to a northern village during the “hunger winter” of 1944/45. When the Canadians reached his village, he was only twelve years old, but had yearnings he himself barely understood. A jeep stops on a country road. A hand is extended. He is hoisted on board. This is when Jeroen, the boy, meets Walt, the Canadian soldier, who would end up seducing him. But the book is not at all an indictment of pedophilia. On the contrary, it is written as an elegy: “The arm around me is warm and comfortable, as though I’m wrapped in a chair. I let it all happen almost with a sense of joy. And I think: ‘This is liberation. This is the way it should be, different from other days. This is a party.’”17

Benoîte Groult is perfectly well aware of the material benefits of having sex with an American. She makes the link between sexual hunger and hunger for food quite explicit. Lying in bed under Kurt’s body, she remarks, is like sleeping with a whole continent: “And you can’t refuse a continent.” Afterwards, they ate: “My appetite was sharpened by four years of occupation and twenty-three years of chastity, well almost. I devoured the eggs hatched two days ago in Washington. Spam canned in Chicago. Corn ripened four thousand miles from here . . . It is quite something, the war!”

Spam, eggs, Hershey bars could be eaten right away. Stockings could be worn. But Lucky Strikes, Camels, Chesterfields, or Caporal cigarettes could be exchanged on the black market for more food. The GIs were supplied with plenty. This, as much as their broad shoulders, sweet smiles, straight hips, and fine uniforms, was an inestimable attraction. The easy access to cigarettes alone made them into rich men in very poor countries. It was easy to conclude, then, that the women who slept with them were really no better than whores.

This was indeed what many people thought, especially women who barely scraped by, or men who were barred from the dance halls, cinemas, and recreation centers reserved for the liberators and their local girlfriends. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that some of the young women who latched on to Allied servicemen still wore headscarves to hide the evidence of recently shaved heads, the mark of punishment for those who had shortly before taken German lovers.

No doubt some women were freelance prostitutes, especially in the defeated countries where sexual services were the only way to keep oneself, or one’s children, alive. But even in the case of women who switched with perhaps unseemly haste from German to Allied lovers, the reasons were not always straightforward or venal. A freshly shaved “horizontal collaborator” from a small town in France told a self-appointed committee of purgers who threatened her with further punishment for her “immoral” behavior: “I don’t care if you shave my hair. I am no longer in touch with my husband [a former prisoner of war]. And I won’t let that stand in the way of having fun with the Americans, if I choose to.”18

Reading contemporary accounts and comments in the press, one might get the impression that the summer of ’45 was one long orgy indulged in by foreign servicemen and local women, out of greed, or lust, or loneliness. This impression appears to be confirmed by statistics: five times more women were hospitalized in Paris for sexually transmitted diseases (aka VD) in 1945 than in 1939. In Holland more than seven thousand illegitimate babies were born in 1946, three times the number in 1939. High STD rates can be explained by the lack of medical supervision or contraceptives, poor hygiene in poverty-stricken areas, or any number of other reasons. The fact is that many women and men were simply looking for warmth, companionship, love, even marriage. Much as the early months of liberation offered the chance for wild abandon, people also longed for a return to normality. It should not be forgotten that the 277,000 legitimate Dutch births in 1946 constituted the highest figure in the recorded history of the nation.

• • •

BERGEN-BELSEN WAS LIBERATED ON APRIL 12. British forces commanded by Lieutenant Derrick Sington were ordered to get there as quickly as they could. The war was not yet over, but conditions in the camp were so appalling that local people feared that a typhus epidemic— the same epidemic that had killed Anne Frank just weeks before— might spread to them. Since the German authorities could not or would not deal with the risk of a typhus outbreak, they agreed to let British troops enter Belsen, even though they were still at war.

Driving past piles of corpses and barracks stinking of excrement and rotting flesh, the soldiers could not quite believe what they were witnessing with their own eyes. Images from Belsen were among the first to be published in the Western press, and in Britain Belsen became the main symbol of Nazi mass murder. Brian Urquhart recalled that he had known about Nazi anti-Semitism: “Even so, the ‘final solution,’ the actual extermination of millions of people, was simply unimaginable. We were completely unprepared for Belsen.”19 What neither he, nor the other British soldiers, realized was that Belsen was not even an extermination camp. Those camps were in Poland, and most had already been destroyed by the Germans before retreating to the west.

Lieutenant Sington drove on, telling the survivors through a loudspeaker that they were free. Most were too far gone to respond in any way. Then he reached the main women’s camp, still holding his microphone:

In a few seconds the car was surrounded by hundreds of women. They cried and wailed hysterically, uncontrollably, and no word from the loudspeakers could be heard. The compounds of the camp were planted with young birch trees and the women plucked leafy sprigs and small branches and hurled them on to the car.20

These women were among the lucky ones. They could still walk. A British medical student, who had volunteered to help, came across the following scene in one of the barracks:

I was standing aghast in the midst of all this filth trying to get used to the smell which was a mixture of post-mortem room, a sewer, sweat, foul pus, when I heard a scrabbling on the floor. I looked down in the half light and saw a woman crouching at my feet. She had black matted hair, well populated and her ribs stood out as though there were nothing between them . . . She was defecating, but she was so weak that she could not lift her buttocks from the floor and, as she had diarrhoea, the liquid yellow stools bubbled over her thighs.21

The doctors and medical volunteers were desperate for more food, drugs, and medical equipment. They were faced with disease and famine on a scale they had never experienced, or even imagined was possible. Hundreds of people were still dying every day, sometimes from eating army rations that were too rich for their shrunken intestines. But the army is not always an efficient institution, and conditions in Germany were chaotic. One day in late April a mysterious consignment arrived containing large quantities of lipstick.

It turned out to be a godsend. The commanding officer of a British ambulance unit, Lieutenant Colonel Gonin, remembers:

I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet lips . . . At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.22