Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  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.

  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 annivers
ary. 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 quie
t, 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.