Year Zero (13 page)

Unfortunately, Hoenisch's story, like many recollections of German victims, is marred by a peculiar obtuseness about the suffering of others. He remarks how lucky he was not to have been sent to Auschwitz after his release, one of those “famous Polish death camps [after the war], from which no German came out alive.”
²⁷
This same language creeps into
other accounts by German conservatives. In his diary of 1945, the soldier-writer Ernst Jünger mentions Russian “extermination camps” and compares “anti-Germanism” to anti-Semitism. Newspapers, he notes, are “indulging” in anti-German sentiment, “like an orgy.”
²⁸

There is little evidence even in the most self-pitying of German accounts that many Poles indulged in collective retaliation spontaneously. But clearly many innocent German civilians were falsely accused of having been Nazis, or in the SS, and suffered horribly. The detention camps, often in former Nazi concentration camps, were very brutal. And Germans in Silesia lost their civil rights if they opted not to be citizens of Poland, which was in any case impossible if they could not speak Polish. Without rights, people were at the mercy of any militiaman or petty official. Simply being unable to follow a roll call in Polish in a camp could mean a rain of fists, clubs, or worse.

Libussa Fritz-Krockow was about to sell a carpet from her family home to the Polish mayor's wife, who had paid her a pittance on several occasions before for valuable items. She was caught in the act by a militiaman. Germans were not allowed to sell their possessions. For this crime, Libussa was shackled in a pillory so people could spit in her face. But, she relates, “the Poles generally just cleared their throats, or spat on the ground, while the Germans crossed to the other side of the street.”
²⁹

The worst cases of anti-German violence were no doubt committed by the Militia. They ran the concentration camps, tortured prisoners, killed at random, and put people in pillories, sometimes for no reason at all. Hastily pulled together, the Militia found many of its recruits among the most unsavory Poles, often very young criminals. One of the most notorious killers, Cesaro Gimborski, the commandant of the Lamsdorf camp, was just eighteen. More than six thousand people, including eight hundred children, were murdered under his command. Like a child amusing himself by tearing wings from a fly, Gimborski, by all accounts, took pleasure in his power.

Some of the most ferocious militiamen had survived German camps, so vengeance was surely a factor. But once again, bloodlust was inflamed
by material and class envy. Teachers, professors, businessmen, and other members of the upper bourgeoisie were popular targets. The Polish guards, ably assisted by German turncoats, found particular enjoyment in torturing prisoners of high status. A professor imprisoned in Lamsdorf was beaten to death for the simple reason that he wore “intellectual glasses.” One is reminded, both by the guards' youth and their favored victims, of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, or the Red Guards in China. Setting teenagers upon teachers and other authority figures is never very difficult. In this case, a history of ethnic conflict made the sadism even keener.

More or less the same things happened in other parts of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, filled with German-speaking citizens who were first handed to non-Germanic governments in 1919, then became privileged citizens of Hitler's Reich, and finally were kicked out by former neighbors, employees, or sometimes even friends. Germans subjected to the full force of revenge in Czechoslovakia agreed that the greatest menace came from teenage boys, encouraged by the adults, some of whom had good reasons to be vengeful. Many Czechs and Slovaks had suffered after Hitler annexed the Sudetenland in 1938; some had survived Dachau, Buchenwald, and other German concentration camps. As was true in Upper Silesia, the bad blood had a history, going back as far as the seventeenth century when the Protestant Bohemian nobility was wiped out by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. Since then, Germans had had the upper hand over Czechs and Slovaks. Non-Germans were the servant class and the peasants. So there, too, the summer of 1945 was the time for class, as well as ethnic, revenge. And there too, encouragement came from the top.

The Czech president in exile during the war, Edvard BeneÅ¡, a Czech nationalist who once had had dreams of a harmonious multiethnic Czechoslovakia, now decided that the German problem should be solved once and for all. In a radio broadcast in 1945, he declared: “Woe, woe, woe, thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate you!”
³⁰
In April, May, and June, various decrees deprived Germans of their property rights. “Extraordinary People's Courts” were created to judge Nazi criminals, traitors, and supporters. In October, all those who had acted against “national
honor,” which might almost have applied to all Germans, were to be punished as well.

Czechs, like other human beings, will do their worst if they are officially set upon defenseless people. Torture prisons were established in Prague and other cities. Suspected SS men were strung up from lampposts. More than ten thousand German civilians were packed into the Strahov football stadium, where thousands were machine-gunned just for sport. The Revolutionary Guards (RG) were the Czech equivalent of the Polish Militia, young hoodlums given official license to act out their violent fantasies. They led the mobs, stoning Germans in the streets, and otherwise molesting citizens who had once been privileged, or wore “intellectual glasses.” But they had the support of the army, and the newly liberated country's top officials, too.

One story—by no means the most horrific—will have to suffice to give an impression of what it was like during those wild summer months, before the violent orgy, like the sexual abandon in other parts of Europe, petered out, and a new order was imposed. It is the story of a German actress named Margarete Schell. Born in Prague, Schell was famous before the war for her performances in the theater and on the radio. On May 9, she was arrested by four Revolutionary Guards, one of whom was her local butcher. Along with other German women, she was taken to the railway station to sweep away the rubble left by an air raid. Made to carry heavy paving stones, she was struck with rifle butts and kicked with heavy army boots. The mob cried: “You German pigs! Fattening yourselves all those years, well, you have your Führer to thank for this!”

Things escalated quickly from there: “I had nothing to cover my head, and my hair seems to have annoyed the crowd . . . Some recognized me and screamed: ‘She was an actress!' Unfortunately I had manicured and lacquered nails, and my silver bracelet put the mob into an even greater frenzy.”
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German women were made to eat pictures of Hitler. Hair hacked off their own heads was stuffed into their mouths. Schell was sent to a slave labor camp where she was flogged by Revolutionary Guards for no reason
she could discern. Yet, she was less obtuse than some other Germans in central and eastern Europe. Not all the Czech guards behaved badly. One Guard, seeing that she could barely walk anymore, let alone work in her ruined shoes, offered to find her a pair of sandals. And Schell noted: “When I hear this RG man's description of spending seven months in a German concentration camp, we really shouldn't be surprised by the way we are treated.”
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Schell understood the true nature of Czech resentment too. Still wondering why she was singled out for a specially savage beating one day, she remembered how people had told her that the commandant found her “too refined.” In the diary entry of the same day, August 8, she mentions a vicious female guard in the camp kitchen. “The women,” she observes, “are the worst everywhere. It clearly has to do with their rage, because they can see perfectly well that, despite our current labor as servants, we still remain what we always were.”
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Edvard Beneš was not a communist. But he tried to be friendly with Stalin, and, mindful of the way his country had been let down by the Western democracies before, he unwisely forged an alliance with the Soviet Union. This devil's pact would end in a Communist Party takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. But the seeds of revolution had already been sown, in the kind of rage so acutely observed by Margarete Schell in the kitchen of her concentration camp. The year 1945 in Czechoslovakia, especially in those areas that had been dominated by Germans for centuries, was like the Terror, except that, unlike in France two centuries before, it came before the Revolution.

•   •   •

ONE OTHER THING IN SCHELL'S DIARIES
is worth mentioning. She describes how she was taken to a house that used to be occupied by Gestapo agents. Her group of prisoners was ordered to clean up after the house painters and move in new furniture. The man overseeing their labor happened to be a Jew. Yet he treated Schell and her fellow German prisoners decently. “Having spent five years in a concentration camp, he said,
where he lost both his parents and his sisters, he didn't wish to abuse anyone. He knew what being a prisoner was like. Although he had a perfectly sound reason to hate all Germans, he didn't take it out on us.”
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This may be untypical, a rare instance of compassion at a time of licensed inhumanity. But in fact, while vengeance was being taken all over Europe, on Germans, on traitors, on women who had offended against national dignity, on class enemies, and on fascists, the people who had suffered most showed extraordinary restraint. This was not because Jews lack the base instincts that drive other people to revenge. It was certainly not because Jews in 1945 had any fond feelings for the people who had tried to exterminate them. To be sure, most survivors of the camps were too sick, or too numb, to feel up to any act of vengeance. But there were cases of crude justice in some of the camps. And some Jewish-American interrogators of suspected Nazis might have shown more than professional enthusiasm for the task. An inquiry investigating rather severe treatment of German SS officers in a prison near Stuttgart revealed that 137 of them “had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation Team.”
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Most of the interrogators had Jewish names.

But these were individual cases. There was no organized attempt by Jews to get their eye for an eye. The reason, again, was not for the lack of desire; it was political. The desire in 1945 was very much alive. In 1944, a Jewish Brigade was formed inside the British Army. After the German defeat, the Brigade was stationed in Tarvisio, on the border of Italy and Austria, and then added to the occupation forces in Germany. To stop individual acts of revenge on Germans, a natural temptation among men who had lost their families in the Holocaust, the Brigade issued a commandment: “Remember the blood feud is everyone's, and every irresponsible act causes everyone to fail . . .” Another commandment reminded the troops that the display of the Zionist flag in Germany was a sweet enough revenge.
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Instead of allowing individuals to exact rough justice, the Brigade formed its own group of avengers, known as the Lick My Ass Business, or
Tilhaz Tizi Gesheften
(TTG), led by a man named Israel Carmi. Acting on information extracted from prisoners or military contacts, members of TTG would leave Tarvisio at night on missions to assassinate notorious SS officers and others who were thought to be responsible for murdering Jews. Once the British Army caught on to these activities, the Brigade was moved out of Germany to less inflammatory territories in Belgium and the Netherlands. We don't know exactly how many Nazis they killed, but the number was probably not more than a few hundred.

One man who refused to give up on his desire for vengeance was Abba Kovner, a Lithuanian Jew whose soulful eyes and long curly hair made him look less like a killer than a romantic poet, which he also was. Indeed, in Israel he is still known chiefly for his poetry. Born in Sebastopol, Kovner grew up in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where he joined the socialist wing of the Zionist movement before the war. In 1941 he managed to escape from the Vilna ghetto and hid in a convent before joining partisans in the forest. After Germany's surrender, Kovner and some other survivors, mostly Polish and Lithuanian Jews, were convinced that the war was not actually over, indeed should not be over. They formed a group named
Dam Yehudi Nakam
, Jewish Blood Will Be Avenged, Nakam for short. One of their principles, devised by Kovner, was: “The idea that Jewish blood can be shed without reprisal must be erased from the memory of mankind.” Without proper vengeance, Kovner believed, someone would attempt to annihilate the Jews again. “It will be more than revenge,” he wrote. “It must be the law of the murdered Jewish people! Its name will be DIN [Hebrew acronym for ‘The blood of Israel is vengeful'] so that posterity will know that in this merciless, uncompassionate world there are both judges and judgment.”
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Kovner's bleak Old Testament view in 1945 went far beyond secret assassinations to get rid of a few SS men. This would be a score settled between nations. Only the death of six million Germans would be a sufficient price for what the Germans had done to the Jews. Years later, living on a kibbutz, Kovner admitted that his scheme showed signs of derangement. As he said, “it was an idea that any sensible person could see
was mad. But people were almost mad in those days . . . and perhaps worse than mad. It was a terrible idea, born of despair, with something suicidal about it . . .”
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What is interesting is how and why Kovner's notion of “an organized, unique vengeance” failed.

The plan was to put deadly chemicals into the water supplies of several major German cities. To secure the poison, Kovner visited Palestine. There was some sympathy for his feelings, but he found little enthusiasm for mass murder, even of former Nazis. The priority of Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders was to build a new state for the Jews, and they needed the goodwill of the Allies. Rescuing the remnants of European Jewry and transforming them into proud citizens of Israel was the goal. There was no chance of going back to normal life in Europe. Europe represented the past. Getting caught up in schemes to murder Germans was a waste of time at best. And so, even though Kovner never divulged the full scale of his plans, the paramilitary arm of the Zionist movement, the Haganah, had no interest in helping him.