Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  For my father, the idea of going home was not complicated. Although correspondence with his family had ceased in 1944 when the Allies liberated part of the Netherlands, cutting off his hometown from communications with Germany, he had a home to go back to. In the summer of 1945 he was transported to the Dutch border from a British DP camp in Magdeburg by British army trucks, by train, and by bus. The reception committee at the Dutch border town of Enschede questioned him and other returnees on whether their work in Germany had been voluntary or not. Those who were suspected of voluntary labor forfeited their right to food rations, and the trouble they faced was but a small harbinger of an issue that would obsess the Dutch for decades, like a national scab that had to be picked over and over: who had been “good” and who “wrong,” brave or cowardly, collaborator or resister, hero or villain. (In fact, of course, few people fell neatly into either category.) It was a tedious way to be welcomed back. But my father was impressed by the politeness of his interlocutors: he was no longer used to meeting officials who weren’t barking at him.

  By the time he arrived in his hometown, Nijmegen, my father’s feelings were more complex. He had left Berlin as an utterly ruined city. So he was used to destruction. It must still have been quite disorienting to walk through the old center of Nijmegen, many of whose handsome buildings, some dating back to the Middle Ages, were gone too, demolished by an accidental American bombing raid in 1944. After years of longing to go home, my father suddenly had cold feet. He could not bring himself to walk the fairly short distance to the family house. The reasons are no longer clear in his memory. Perhaps it was because he could not be sure that his parents were still alive, or that the house would still be there. Or perhaps he feared that the longed-for reunion might be awkward; so much had happened in the meantime.

  In the event, he did go home. The whole family had survived. The reunion was joyous. He soon found his old place in society; he fitted back in. He was one of the lucky ones.

  For others, displacement was a more lasting condition, and coming home was a disappointment, or worse. Extreme experiences created chasms of incomprehension between people. Everyone felt that they had a story to tell. How could someone who survived Auschwitz possibly convey what he or she had lived through to people back home who had barely even heard of death camps?

  The Hungarian writer Imre Kertész wrote an account of this incomprehension in his novel Fateless (1992).2 The author himself, an assimilated Budapest Jew, had been a prisoner in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Only fourteen when he was deported, he came of age, as it were, in the camps. His fictional alter ego, György, returns to Budapest, still dressed in the ragged striped jacket of Buchenwald, his face pinched and blotched like that of an old man. Strangers are living in his old family apartment now, unfriendly, suspicious people who slam the door on him. This was not an unusual experience for camp survivors, especially Jews, who were not expected to come back, and were often resented if they did. In a way, however, the reunion with old Jewish neighbors who had managed to stay in Budapest is even more painful. They tell him that “life wasn’t easy at home either.” Hearing where he had been, they give him friendly advice: he should simply “forget the terrors,” only think of the future. This was like something another solicitous person, a “democratic” journalist whom György had just met on the tram, had said: the important thing was that the “Nazi pits of hell” were over, finished.

  What György failed to make people understand is that he hadn’t been to hell; his experience was not metaphysical; he had been in concentration camps. How could he forget and just think of the future, as though his past life had been a bad dream or a horror film? Life in the camps was neither voluntary nor pleasant, but it was still life, his life. You could not ignore continuity. The problem was that people who had not experienced anything similar could not possibly imagine what it had been like, nor did they wish to, hence the flight into abstractions, “hell,” or “the terrors,” which should be forgotten as quickly as possible.

  The people described at the end of Kertész’s novel, the journalist and the neighbors, Mr. Steiner and Mr. and Mrs. Fleischmann, meant well. This was not always the case when people who spent the war at home were confronted with camp survivors, or others who came back, such as POWs, or foreign workers in the Third Reich. Suffering is a personal matter. Most of us like to have our own suffering recognized. The suffering of others, especially if it was clearly worse, can be a source of irritation, and perhaps even guilt: “Life wasn’t easy at home either.”

  The sometimes frosty reception of Jewish survivors coming home, not just to Poland and other blood-soaked nations in central Europe, but to western European countries such as the Netherlands, too, owed something to a vague and not wholly repressed guilty conscience, as well as anti-Semitic prejudices which had, if anything, been strengthened by the years of German occupation—propaganda sticks.

  This was by no means only true of collaborators or Nazi sympathizers. When a young woman named Netty Rosenfeld emerged from hiding after the liberation of the southern Netherlands in 1944 and applied for a job at a radio station run by the Dutch resistance, she was told that Rosenfeld was not a suitable name for public broadcasting. After all, she had to understand that there were already enough Jews working for Radio Herrijzend Nederland (Netherlands Reborn). The station had been nicknamed “Jerusalem Reborn.” One lesson Jews surely should have learned from their unfortunate experience was not to push themselves to the front of the queue and presume to dominate society again. And this was meant as friendly advice.

  A man named Siegfried Goudsmit wrote the following story in September 1945 in Paraat, a left-wing newspaper founded by the Dutch resistance:

  A bus stop. Passengers waiting for the bus to Amsterdam. Among them two Jews. One of whom sits down on the bench . . . A non-Jewish “lady” does not approve and tells him that he should remain standing. “Other people have a right to this seat.” Yes, madam, in other circumstances I would have stayed standing, but I just got out of hospital where I was taken in a state of exhaustion after my return from a German concentration camp and, as you can see, I am still rather weak. “If only they’d kept you in the concentration camp. We’ve got enough of your kind here as it is” . . .3

  Other survivors of the Nazi camps were reminded that they were not the only ones who suffered; Dutch people went hungry too, or lost their bicycles, or whatnot. Jews were told not to make too many claims, to not be too assertive. They should know their place, and above all show gratitude.

  A former resistance paper, called De Patriot, published a letter about the problem of anti-Semitism in postwar Holland. This appeared on July 2, 1945:

  There can be no doubt that the Jews, specifically because of German persecution, were able to enjoy great sympathy from the Dutch people. Now it is appropriate for the Jews to restrain themselves and avoid excesses; they should be constantly mindful of their duty to be grateful and that this gratitude should be primarily expressed by redressing that which can be redressed for those who fell victim on the Jews’ behalf. They can thank God that they came out alive. It is also possible to squander this sympathy [from the Dutch people] . . . The [Jews] are truly not the only ones who suffered . . .4

  No wonder, then, that most Jewish survivors chose to remain silent. Silent about the fact that 75 percent of the roughly 150,000 Jews living in the Netherlands in 1940 did not survive. Silent about the mere five thousand who returned from the camps. Silent about the able assistance given to the Nazi killers by Dutch bureaucrats, policemen, and jurists. Silent about the silence, while the deportations went on, train after train after train.

  The early postwar years saw a flurry of war monuments in the Netherlands, monuments to resistance fighters, to fallen soldiers, to national suffering, to the sacrifice of brave individuals. The first monument to the Jewish catastrophe was erected in 1950, in Amsterdam, near the old Jewish market, the seventeenth-century Portuguese synagogu
e, and the abandoned and subsequently gutted houses of Jews who had been dragged from their homes. Made of white stone, the monument has a star of David on top and five reliefs carved into the surface, depicting the love, the resistance, the fortitude, and the mourning of the Dutch Gentile population. It is called the Monument of Jewish Gratitude.

  The fact is, Jewish survivors were an embarrassment. They did not fit the heroic narrative that was being hastily constructed in the wreckage of the war, in the Netherlands, in France, or indeed in any country where people sought to forget inconvenient, painful truths about the past. Men and women who had survived the humiliations of wartime occupation as best they could, by keeping their heads down and looking the other way when bad things happened to others, pretended to have been heroes all along. I grew up, at primary school in the 1950s, with proud stories from teachers of petty acts of resistance, such as sending German soldiers the wrong way when they asked for directions, and so on.

  My favorite boyhood author was named K. Norel, whose books were full of tales of brave deeds by young resisters, with such plucky titles as Driving Out the Tyranny; Stand By, Boys; or Resistance and Victory. There was no place for Jews in the roster of real or imaginary heroes. The old prejudices had not died. Here is a passage from Norel’s Driving Out the Tyranny: “The Jews may not be heroes, but they are certainly shrewd. Only once the Nazis started grabbing Jewish money and possessions, did the Jews wake up. And with a vengeance. With great cunning they managed to withhold millions from the enemy.”

  • • •

  IN FRANCE, where the Gaullist government tried, after a time of wild reprisals, to close the deep fissures in society by acting as if most citizens had stood up bravely against the German foe, returning POWs did not fit the mood of self-serving though perhaps necessary make-believe, either. There were no celebrations at the homecoming of shabby-looking men, in threadbare old-fashioned uniforms, held responsible for the shameful defeat in 1940. In “the France that fought, the only France, the real France, the eternal France” (de Gaulle’s words on the day after the liberation of Paris), there was no room for these men. All they could hope for was a food ration coupon, some cash, a doctor’s checkup, and a few bars of the “Marseillaise” (if the group was large enough to merit a musical welcome).

  That Vichy propaganda had chosen to depict the POWs as brave combatants who were enduring imprisonment for the greater glory of France didn’t help after the war, either. Roger Ikor, later to become a celebrated writer, was taken prisoner in May 1940 and, despite being of Jewish origin, was incarcerated with other French POWs in Pomerania. In his memoir, he writes: “Mute, incapable of protesting, we represented the perfect partisans for Pétain and his gang. Wasn’t it natural for him to associate us with the purest blood of France? For exactly the inverse reason, the Gaullists held us in contempt. Two million prisoners, and prisoners tainted with Pétainism at that, this embarrassed the cocks-of-the-walk and their certain idea of France. Hadn’t we let ourselves be captured instead of resisting bravely like they did? So we had to be cowards, not of the purest blood, but the most polluted.”5

  And so, on their return, the POWs were commonly treated with cold formality and silent disdain, or at best, condescension. They were met at repatriation centers by bossy officials in uniform, often women, who sometimes outranked these men who had spent their war behind barbed wire and were not shy about showing it.

  The author Marguerite Duras, herself in the resistance, wrote a description of this in her memoir The War:

  People keep on arriving. Truck after truck . . . The prisoners are dumped at the center in groups of fifty . . . The poor boys look at the hall, they all smile. They’re surrounded by repatriation officers. “Come along, boys, get in line!” They get in line and go on smiling . . . These last few days I was at the Gare de l’Est, where one of the women rebuked a soldier from the Legion and pointed to her stripes. “No salute, my boy? Can’t you see I’m a captain?”6

  Duras was very much on the left, and had a special loathing for the kind of rank-pulling officials she described. They were reactionaries, who, in the words of Dionys Mascolo (“D.”), her lover and comrade in the left-wing resistance, will “be against any resistance movement that isn’t directly Gaullist. They’ll occupy France. They think they constitute thinking France, the France of authority.”7 They would construct the heroic narrative of “eternal France” to their own advantage.

  There is another more harrowing description in Duras’s memoir. Her husband, Robert Antelme, also a left-wing resister, had been arrested and deported to Buchenwald. Although she had already taken up with “D.” during the war, Duras still longed to see her husband alive. That is why she had been going back and forth to the repatriation centers and the Gare de l’Est train station, anxious for any news of his survival. When Antelme was found by chance in a German camp by the later president François Mitterrand, he could barely speak, let alone walk. But the longed-for reunion in Paris occurred at last:

  Beauchamp and D. were supporting him under the arms. They’d stopped on the first floor landing. He was looking up.

  I can’t remember exactly what happened. He must have looked at me and smiled. I shrieked no, that I didn’t want to see. I started to run again, up the stairs this time. I was shrieking. I remember that. The war emerged in my shrieks. Six years without uttering a cry. I found myself in some neighbor’s apartment. They forced me to drink some rum, they poured it into my mouth. Into the shrieks.

  Then, a short while later, she sees him again, still smiling:

  It’s from this smile that I suddenly recognize him, but from a great distance, as though I was seeing him at the other end of a tunnel. It’s a smile of embarrassment. He’s apologizing for being here, reduced to such a wreck. And then the smile fades, and he becomes a stranger again.8

  My father was not in Buchenwald. Nor did he have a wife in the Dutch resistance who had taken a lover and would soon divorce him. His return home was far less dramatic. But something in this passage from Duras’s memoir hints at the source of his fear of going home too, the fear of being a stranger.

  • • •

  IF HOMECOMING WAS DIFFICULT FOR FRENCH POWS, this was even more true of Germans or Japanese. Their shoulders bore not just the burden of a national defeat, which would have been hard enough, but they faced the contempt and even hatred of their own people for having been responsible for a calamitous war, for committing unspeakable crimes, for having lorded it over the nation as arrogant warriors, and coming back as abject losers. This was not entirely fair, of course. Other people, including millions of women, had cheered them on their way to war, waving flags, singing patriotic songs, and celebrating their victories, some real, some the fictions of government propaganda. The common soldier in a highly authoritarian state whipped into a frenzy by official hysteria was no more responsible for the consequences than the ordinary civilians who had vociferously cheered him on. In Germany, at least, the Nazis could be blamed for everything. The Japanese, lacking their own version of the Nazi Party, blamed their catastrophe on “the militarists,” and, by extension, on anyone associated with the armed forces. This was also the view promoted in postwar U.S. propaganda, faithfully echoed in the Japanese press.

  As the Japanese essayist Sakaguchi Ango wrote, the kamikaze pilots (Tokkotai) “are already black market hoodlums today.”9 This fall from grace, this mass awakening from a national delusion, was blamed squarely on the men who were sent to die for the emperor and had the shameful misfortune of coming back alive. There was a Japanese expression current just after the war, Tokkotai kuzure, “degenerate kamikazes”—young men whose morbid idealism had collapsed into a binge of whoring and drinking.

  Resentment against Japanese soldiers’ throwing their weight around was already there before the defeat in 1945, even though voicing it would have been extremely risky. When people saw the quick shift from wartime violence to criminal behavior in peacet
ime, the proud image of the Imperial armed forces was tarnished even further. At the end of the war military warehouses were still full of goods, anything from weapons to blankets and clothes, essential items for a destitute population. After large-scale organized looting by senior military officers and their civilian cronies, often gangsters with sinister wartime histories, they were empty. Slowly the goods found their way onto the black market, where they went for prices most people could ill afford.

  Bringing back millions of young men, trained to kill for their country, into civilian life is never a smooth process. The shameful odor of defeat only makes it harder. It seems entirely fitting that a radio program that was started in the summer of 1946 to provide information about missing persons should have included a special segment, broadcast twice daily, especially for disoriented veterans, called “Who Am I?”10

  The demoralized warriors, already emasculated by military failure, faced more blows when they came back to homes that were destroyed, or to marriages gone sour. One of the common themes in German or Japanese films and books about the immediate postwar period is the rift between returning soldiers and wives who had taken lovers in order to relieve loneliness or simply to survive. The theme is as old as war itself: on his return from Troy, Agamemnon is murdered in his own house by his wife, or her lover, or both, depending on which version of the story you read. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) is one of the finest German examples: Maria’s husband, fresh from the horrors of the eastern front, literally finds his wife naked in the arms of a black American soldier. In this case, it is the lover who dies. A much less well-known Japanese example is Ozu ’s film A Hen in the Wind (1948). Quite uncharacteristically for Ozu, the movie ends in high melodrama, with the jealous husband throwing his wife down the stairs for having had sex with another man in his absence. Limping from her injury, the wife still pleads for his forgiveness. And finally all ends well in a gush of tears.