Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  As Germany began to implement the Final Solution in late 1941, it relied heavily on the cooperation of local bureaucrats in the occupied countries. The most enthusiastic collaboration was found in France, where the Vichy government not only obeyed Nazi directives but did far more than the Germans asked. Indeed, just two months after France’s capitulation in 1940, Vichy had already introduced anti-Jewish policies in its territory without receiving orders from Berlin to do so. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France to the death camps, more than 90 percent were rounded up by French police.

  In other occupied countries, the local aid was not quite as egregious. None of the other nations had indigenous governments like the one in Vichy; they were governed instead by German military or civilian administrations. Still, as a Dutch historian noted, the Germans “needed and received local administrative help in their efforts to isolate Jews in…society and to deport them to extermination camps.” In all these nations, the Nazis had earlier weeded out civil servants and policemen who were not regarded as sufficiently pro-German; they then relied on the rest to do the Nazis’ bidding, which most did with alacrity. Among the duties of the local police and militia was to take part in the Nazi roundups and deportation of Jews.

  Cooperation extended far beyond local bureaucracies and police forces. Many ordinary citizens collaborated as well, informing on and otherwise betraying Jews who not infrequently were their neighbors, friends, or acquaintances. In some cases, local people actually took part in the murder of Jews. Perhaps the most notorious example occurred in the Polish village of Jedwabne in July 1941, where a group of Poles from the area, urged on by German forces, killed more than three hundred Jews.

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  ALTHOUGH IT’S BEEN MORE than seventy years since the end of the war, the issues of national and individual responsibility regarding the Holocaust remain highly fraught. How much should the former occupied nations be held accountable for the small minority of their citizens who helped the Nazis in carrying out the Final Solution? Or, indeed, for the vast majority of their people who did little or nothing to help the Jews?

  Such widespread apathy has a number of explanations. Before and during the war, anti-Jewish prejudice was strong throughout the Continent, as it was in countries such as Britain and the United States. Even in western Europe, where Jews were more integrated into society than in the east, they were, more often than not, still considered outsiders. “During the first two years of the Occupation [in France], the prevailing sentiment towards Jews ranged from indifference to hostility,” noted Julian Jackson. “People had more pressing concerns on their minds.”

  The same held true for the populations of other occupied countries. In Holland, “fear and their own worries held [the Dutch] back,” remarked the writer Elsa van der Laaken, who was a child in The Hague during the war. There was “fear of losing a job or of being imprisoned….People were self-centered now. Your own family and home came first, then you might see what you could do for others without endangering yourself and your family.”

  After the war, most of the governments and peoples of Europe chose to consign to oblivion their indifference to the fate of the Jews. Such deliberate forgetfulness was particularly obvious in France. More than twenty years after the war’s end, revisionist historians and filmmakers finally began revealing the reality of the country’s wartime experience. A particular landmark was The Sorrow and the Pity, a 1969 documentary by Marcel Ophuls that, through a series of filmed interviews, closely examined the Nazi occupation of France, shattering the idea of a country united in resistance and underscoring Vichy’s collaboration with the Nazis, especially in the Jewish deportations. The film, which was extraordinarily controversial in France, was banned from French television and most movie theaters. It ended up playing in a single theater on the Left Bank in Paris.

  Another twenty-four years would pass before France formally acknowledged its wartime complicity in the persecution and deportation of its Jews. “The criminal madness of the occupier was supported by the French people and by the French State,” French president Jacques Chirac declared in July 1995. “It is undeniable that this was a collective fault.”

  Chirac’s assertion was certainly true. Yet it’s also important to keep in mind the complexity of the times and the harrowing moral choices that the French and other occupied Europeans had to make—a point made by Marcel Ophuls himself. In 2000, Ophuls said that his purpose in making The Sorrow and the Pity was not to condemn the French or “give a ‘message’ about how they behaved.” He went on, “This would be pompous, stupid and prosecutorial—to make a statement about a country that had been defeated and had to live under these conditions for four years. I did not set this up to [indict] France for being a collaborator. In times of great crisis, we make decisions of life and death. It’s a lot to ask of people to become heroes. You shouldn’t expect it of yourself and others.”

  Nonetheless, when it came to saving Jews, many thousands of Europeans were, in fact, heroes. They may have comprised only a tiny minority of their countries’ populations, but because of their efforts, nearly half a million Jews were able to survive the war.

  A case in point is France, which, despite its actively collaborationist government, ended the conflict with about three-quarters of its Jews—some 225,000—still alive. As the historian Julian Jackson saw it, the success of the efforts to save French Jews “required the solidarity, passive or active, formal or informal, of the French people.” Jackson added that, for decades before the war, “the Jews of France had looked to the State to protect them, if necessary, from sudden anti-Semitic outbursts of civil society. In the Occupation, it was civil society that helped protect Jews from the state.”

  In the effort to rescue Jews, no country faced more daunting challenges than Poland. It was extremely difficult to spirit anyone into or out of the tightly sealed ghettos in which many if not most of Poland’s 3 million Jews were confined during the war. In addition, Poland was the only country in occupied Europe whose citizens and their families faced immediate execution if caught trying to help Jews.

  Yet Poland was also the only nation whose resistance movement created a formal department for Jewish rescue. Known as Żegota, the group managed to find hiding places for thousands of Jews outside the ghettos. It also provided them with money, forged identification papers, food, and medical care. Of the 50,000 Polish Jews who escaped the Holocaust, “every [one of them] did so only because gentile Poles risked their lives to save them,” declared Lucjan Blit, a Jewish socialist leader from Poland who spent much of the war in London. Echoing that view, the British-American historian Walter Laqueur, whose Jewish parents died in the Holocaust, wrote of the Poles, “It is not surprising that there was so little help, but that there was so much.” The same could be said of the rest of occupied Europe as well.

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  * Polish civilian fatalities—5.6 million—accounted for a staggering 81 percent of the seven nations’ death toll.

  By the late 1940s, most Europeans were anxious to put the war and its recriminations behind them. As Tony Judt noted, “Silence over Europe’s recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future.” But planning for that future was complicated by the vast difference in experiences and outlook between those who had spent the war in London and those who had been trapped at home. Between the two groups, there existed a mutual failure to grasp what the other had endured.

  Writing about the postwar disillusionment of himself and his fellow Engelandvaarders, Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema noted that “through the entire war, one dream never left us, not for single day: our homecoming to Holland as we remembered it. We did come home, but the memory was crushed by reality and the dream exploded. Our country lay before us unrecognizable, emaciated like a wretch from a concentration camp. We couldn’t cope, we turned away as from a leper, sickened and uncomfortable. We felt more at ease with our Allied buddies, with whom we had fought the war in freedom, than with our old friends
who carried the mark of the Occupation.” When he first visited his parents at their home in an affluent suburb of The Hague, Roelfzema recalled, he felt like “a creature from another, foreign world.” When he left after a few hours, “we said goodbye like strangers.”

  For their part, Europeans who had stayed behind, particularly those who had risked their lives in resistance work, greatly resented their compatriots from London, who, in their view, had lived out the war in comfort and safety, with none of the daily tension, terror, and privations of occupation.

  These deep fissures between compatriots were exacerbated by sharply divided visions of their nations’ postwar futures. Many Europeans who had fought in the resistance, for example, were determined to re-create the sense of community that they had experienced during the war, which transcended traditional social and economic divisions. “The fearsome dangers had left no room for petty distinctions of social background, class and religion,” wrote Roelfzema, who had been part of the Dutch underground early in the conflict. “We stood together, we fell together, we died together, brothers and sisters in the classic sense.” What meaning could the war have if it did not result in radical changes in society, leading to a more just and equal world?

  But the great majority of Roelfzema’s countrymen, along with most other Europeans, did not share that view. Exhausted after the chaos and trauma of occupation, they wanted nothing more than to re-create the normalcy of their prewar world, craving little else but peace, order, a roof over one’s head, enough to eat, and the other necessities of everyday life. They were encouraged in that view by members of their countries’ governments in exile, many if not most of which were kept in power when they returned home. Representing continuity, these elder statesmen, Tony Judt observed, were “skeptical, pragmatic practitioners of the art of the possible. They reflected the mood of their constituents.”

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, one of those most disappointed by the return to the status quo was Queen Wilhelmina, who, throughout her long exile in London, had yearned to return to a Netherlands transformed, like herself, by the war. Her hopes had been strengthened by wartime reports from Engelandvaarders that the Dutch were disillusioned with the intrigues and divisions of the prewar political system and wanted drastic social and economic changes, in which they hoped the queen would play an important role.

  When Wilhelmina returned to Holland, however, she discovered that few of her subjects felt, as she did, that the old political and government establishment should go. When national elections were held in May 1946, all of the prewar parties except the Dutch Nazis were returned to Parliament in roughly their former strength—a scenario that was replicated throughout western Europe.

  Although the queen reluctantly backed down in her campaign for change, she defied efforts by government and court officials to force her back into the royal “cage” that had separated her from her countrymen before the war. She did so even as she took up residence again in the stately, cavernous Noordeinde Palace in The Hague, which, in Roelfzema’s words, “was the embodiment of everything she hated about her former life.” She once said to him in a facetious tone tinged with bitterness, “You and your RAF, you missed your targets often enough. So why couldn’t you have dropped just one little bomb by mistake on this old place?”

  Once reinstalled in the palace, she insisted on maintaining the informal style she had adopted in London and Anneville, breaking as many rules of protocol and tradition as she could and urging her staff to do the same. “She set the tone, we performed accordingly,” said Roelfzema, who continued as Wilhelmina’s military aide for several months after the war. “I whizzed around the endless corridors of Noordeinde Palace on a motorbike, scandalizing all the lackeys and missing the occasional ancient retainer by a hair.”

  Working hard to strengthen her bonds with her people, the queen, during the lean, impoverished postwar years, refused to turn on heat or electricity in her palaces as long as most Dutchmen had to do without them. She also rode a bicycle around the devastated countryside to meet and encourage farmers and others who had lost their homes and land.

  Although Wilhelmina never again recognized the restrictions of class and rank, her subjects, to her distress, could not bring themselves to do the same. “To every Hollander, she offered her hand in equality, but Hollanders continued to bow,” Roelfzema said. “After reigning for half a century, she had, in the end, become too democratic for them. She never gave up, but she could not break down the barrier.”

  Nonetheless, for all the disappointments of her later years, Wilhelmina could take pride in all that she had accomplished. During the war, she had, in fact, achieved her greatest childhood ambition—to perform great deeds, as her ancestors William the Silent and William of Orange had done. Hers, however, had been achieved not on the battlefield but during her London exile. In a never-to-be-repeated moment, a modern monarch of the Netherlands had been given the chance to exercise real leadership, and Wilhelmina had made the most of it. As was true of Winston Churchill and the British, World War II had been her “finest hour.” She had stopped her defeatist government from capitulating, kept Holland in the fight, and inspired and united her people, thus gaining “a victory that assured her a place in Dutch history second to none,” Louis de Jong wrote. In doing so, she greatly strengthened the House of Orange. Thanks to the queen, the Dutch monarchy had become not merely a “stabilizing element” in the country, Time magazine observed in May 1946, but “the spokesman for all elements of the people.”

  In September 1948, Wilhelmina, citing ill health and advancing age, abdicated after fifty-eight years on the throne, giving way to her daughter, Juliana. She retreated to a small house in a suburb of The Hague, spending much of her time painting and babysitting her three granddaughters. But before she died in 1962, she had the satisfaction of seeing her country finally making some of the dramatic social changes she had championed more than a decade earlier, including the so-called depillarization of Dutch life—a breakdown of the rigid, centuries-old divisions between various segments of society, including that between Catholics and Protestants.

  In much of the rest of western Europe, the stasis of the immediate postwar era also began to crumble, giving way to profound economic and social shifts.“The idea that the world as it was before the war could simply be restored…was surely an illusion,” the Dutch writer Ian Buruma remarked. “It was an illusion held by governments as much as by individual people….But the world could not possibly be the same. Too much had happened, too much had changed.”

  Indeed, one of the earliest harbingers of change occurred even before the war ended, involving, of all countries, conservative France. On March 23, 1944, Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government granted voting rights to women, a decision reflecting the enormous role that women had played in the French resistance. As it happened, twelve members of the provisional assembly approving the measure were women, the first in French parliamentary history. In 1946, just months after women’s suffrage was inscribed in the country’s new constitution, Frenchwomen cast their first-ever ballots in national elections.

  In the rest of Europe, too, former resistance members began having an impact on their countries’ political life, even though, in many cases, it took much longer than they had originally hoped. A considerable number eventually moved into positions of prominence and responsibility in their local and national governments, helping to enact significant social and economic reforms that in just a few years would culminate in the modern welfare state and change the face of western Europe.

  Such an extraordinary transformation would not have been possible without the economic bounty of the United States, a country whose president had wanted nothing more to do with Europe once the war was over. At the Yalta Conference in early 1945, Franklin Roosevelt had made it clear that he had little interest in further close collaboration or partnership with the United States’ Western Allies, whose empires and global influence were fast disintegrating. Serenely confident of
his own country’s power, he envisioned the Soviet Union as its main ally in dealing with postwar international problems.

  The onset of the Cold War, however, put an end to that notion, as well as to Roosevelt’s plan for a speedy U.S. withdrawal from European affairs. Having spent much of the war pacifying the Soviets, the U.S. government—now led by Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman—launched a campaign to contain them. To do so, Washington realized it must not only maintain but increase its wartime involvement with Europe. Specifically, the Truman administration realized it must take urgent steps to assist European countries if total economic collapse and the spread of communism were to be warded off. “It is now obvious that we grossly underestimated the destruction to the European economy by the war,” said U.S. undersecretary of state William Clayton after a fact-finding tour across the Continent in the spring of 1947. “Millions of people in cities are slowly starving.”

  In June 1947, George Marshall, now Truman’s secretary of state, outlined what came to be known as the Marshall Plan, a far-reaching program to jump-start the economic recovery and reconstruction of Europe. For the countries of western Europe, the Marshall Plan offered resurrection from disaster. For their wartime eastern allies, Czechoslovakia and Poland, it spelled calamity.

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  ON JULY 12, 1947, U.S. officials held a meeting in Paris to discuss and explain the workings of the Marshall Plan. Every country in Europe was invited, and almost all agreed to attend. Among those who accepted were Poland, now in thrall to the Soviets, and Czechoslovakia, which, despite a strong communist presence, still retained traces of democracy. As Andrei Zhdanov, a top Soviet official and one of Stalin’s closest allies, dourly put it, the Soviets had achieved a “complete victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie in every East European land except Czechoslovakia, where the power contest still remains undecided.”