Year Zero (14 page)

The rest of the story was almost farcical. Despite the lack of official cooperation, Kovner did manage to procure poison from a chemical laboratory at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Two brothers, named Katzir, one of whom, Ephraim, later became Israel's fourth president, worked as laboratory assistants there. Thinking that Kovner would only use the poison to kill SS officers, an objective few people would have quarreled with, they gave him a particularly lethal substance; one milligram could kill a substantial number of people.

Carrying a duffel bag filled with the cans of poison labeled milk powder, in December 1945 Kovner and a comrade named Rosenkranz boarded a ship bound for France. They had forged identity papers and posed as British army soldiers, even though Kovner spoke no English. Kovner was seasick for much of the time. Just as they were nearing Toulon, Kovner's name was announced on the ship's public address system. Thinking that he had been identified and his mission was compromised, Kovner threw half the “milk powder” cans overboard and told Rosenkranz to destroy the rest if things should go wrong.

In fact, Kovner had not been identified at all, nor was his mission detected. He was arrested on the correct assumption that he was travelling on forged papers. But the poison never reached Europe. In a fit of panic, Rosenkranz had thrown the rest overboard. The water supplies of Nuremberg, among other places, were safe, and hundreds of thousands of German lives were spared. There was a halfhearted attempt by some of Kovner's friends to poison the food in a detention camp for Nazis. Even this came to nothing much. A few men got ill; no one died.

Jewish revenge, then, was never carried out, because there was no political support for it. The Zionist leadership sought to create a different kind of normality, of heroic Israelis tilling the desert land and fighting their enemies as proud citizen-soldiers, far from the war-bloodied lands of Europe. They looked self-consciously to the future. That, too, would be full of bloodshed, and ethnic and religious conflict, but it would not be German blood. Abba Kovner never could adapt to a life of the future. Haunted by the past, he wrote tragic poems, and woke up screaming most nights.

He wrote about his sister:

From the promised land I called you,

I searched for you

among heaps of small shoes.

At every approaching holiday.

And about his father:

Our father took his bread, bless God

forty years from the same oven. He never imagined

a whole people could arise from the ovens

and the world, with God's help, go on.
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•   •   •

SPEAKING ABOUT FRANCE
during the war, Tony Judt wrote that for active resisters or collaborators, “their main enemy, more often than not, was each other: the Germans were largely absent.”
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The same thing could be
said about many countries under foreign occupation: Yugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, China, Vietnam, Indonesia. Occupation forces, like all colonial governments, exploit tensions that existed before. Without the Germans, Vichy's reactionary autocrats would not have come to power, and neither would Croatia's murderous Ante Pavelić and his fascistic Ustaša. In Flanders, the Flemish National Union worked with the Nazi occupiers in the hope of emancipating themselves from the Francophone Walloons in a German-dominated Europe. In Italy and Greece, fascists as well as other right-wingers collaborated with the Germans for their own gain, but also to fend off the left.

And in China? When the Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei, in 1972, apologized to Chairman Mao for what his country had done to the Chinese during the war, Mao, who was not without a macabre sense of humor, told his foreign guest to relax: It is us who should thank
you
, he said; without you we would never have come to power. Mao was right. What happened in China was the most dramatic example of unintended consequences. The Japanese shared with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists a horror of communism; there were even some attempts at collaboration; one faction of the Nationalists did, in fact, collaborate. But by fatally wounding the Nationalists, the Japanese helped the Communists win the civil war which was simmering in 1945 and came to a climax soon after.

The civil war in China, as in Greece, had begun well before the invasions by foreign armies. In France and Italy civil war was not far under the surface. And the European practice of divide and rule in Asian colonies created enough bad blood for any number of social conflicts to erupt. But by exploiting these divisions, the Germans and Japanese made them lethal.

Communists and leftists had played a major role in anti-Nazi, or antifascist resistance, while the German and Japanese efforts at empire-building tainted many figures on the right with collaboration. The French Communist Party, proud of its resistance record, called itself “
le Parti des Fusillés
,” the party of the executed. Even fellow leftists who resisted the Stalinist line adopted by the Party were denounced by communists as unpatriotic or even as collaborators—“Hitlerotrotskyists.” The history of armed resistance
of the left, not unreasonably, led to revolutionary demands for a new order. After the war, the Soviet Union exploited these demands, at least in countries within its sphere of influence, while the Western Allies disarmed and helped to crush some of the very forces who had fought on their side against Germany and Japan. Not only that, but it was with Allied help that some members of the old collaborationist elites came back to power. These were the seeds that would later develop into the Cold War.

Collaboration was not always a straightforward matter, however. In Yugoslavia, Tito's communist Partisans negotiated in 1943 with the Germans, because Tito wanted a “free hand” to attack the Serbian royalist Chetniks (or
). In the autumn of the same year, the Chetniks collaborated with the Germans to fight off Tito's Partisans. The Bosnian Muslims cooperated with anyone who would protect them: the Croatian fascists, Serbian Partisans, even the Nazis. And all these temporary alliances were made in opposition to domestic, not foreign, enemies.

In France, most collaborators did not work directly for the German occupiers, but for a French government under Marshal Philippe Pétain. With German help, the Vichyistes thought they would restore France, the true France, of Church, family, and patriotism, shorn of liberals, Jews, Freemasons, and other blots on
La France profonde
. Italian fascists could not really be called collaborators until 1943, when Italy was occupied by German troops, and the authority of Benito Mussolini's fascists was reduced to a tiny Nazi puppet state on Lake Garda. But the previous twenty years of Italian fascism had engendered enough loathing for the left to embark on a ferocious campaign of vengeance once the Germans started leaving.

Harold Macmillan, the later British prime minister, was Churchill's plenipotentiary for the Mediterranean countries. In April 1945, he was driven to Bologna in an army jeep for a meeting with the Allied military commander, who had just installed himself in the splendid and undamaged Municipio, or town hall. He found the bodies of two well-known local liberals lying in state, with tearful crowds passing by to pay their last respects. The two liberals had been shot by members of the fascist Black Brigade, who had fled town just a day before. “The coffins were open,”
Macmillan noted in his diary, “so that friends and admirers could see the faces of their leaders for the last time. They had been shot against the wall of the Municipio—the bloodstains were clear. Above the place where they had stood were already flowers and—pathetically—photographs of men and women of all ages who had been put to death during recent months by the Fascist Black Brigade.”

After quoting this passage from his diary, Macmillan goes on to say: “The Prefect—a Fascist—had failed to make his escape in time. He had been shot by the partisans next to his last victim. You could see the brains spattered against the brick and the blood on the ground.”
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Macmillan then went off to have lunch, and observed that the Italian cooks who had previously served Italian food to German officers now served American food to the Allied officers. “There was a moral in this,” he wrote, without quite divulging what that moral might have been.

Among the victims of the partisan reprisals in April 1945 were Mussolini himself, with his mistress, Clara Petacci. They were caught while attempting to escape to Austria with German soldiers from an antiaircraft unit. When they were stopped at a roadblock manned by partisans, the Germans were told to go on their way; the partisans had no more interest in them. But the Italians had to stay behind. Mussolini, despite wearing a German army greatcoat over his red-striped Italian general's riding trousers, was recognized. On April 28, he, Clara, and fifteen fascists picked at random were machine-gunned in front of a country villa on Lake Garda. The following day, they were hung, like game, upside down from a girder at an Esso gas station on a shabby square in Milan, exposed to the wrath of the mob. Soon their faces were barely recognizable.

Edmund Wilson was shown the spot where it happened a month later. The names of the executed were still daubed in black on the girder of the now abandoned Esso station. Wilson wrote: “Over the whole city hung the stink of the killing of Mussolini and his followers, the exhibition of their bodies in public and the defilement of them by the crowd. Italians would stop you in the bars and show you photographs they had taken of it.”
⁴²

But this was just one instance of possibly twenty thousand killings of
fascists and collaborators in the north of Italy between April and July. Eight thousand in Piedmont. Four thousand in Lombardy. Three thousand in Emilia. Three thousand in Milan province.
⁴³
Many were summarily executed by partisans, dominated by communists. Others were quickly tried in makeshift people's courts, the so-called justice of the piazza. The killings were swift and sometimes involved innocents. Known fascists were gunned down together with their wives and children. Most recipients of rough justice were police officers and fascist government officials. Even those already in prison were not safe. On July 17, the Schio prison near Vicenza was raided by masked partisans, who murdered fifty-five incarcerated fascists. Some of these avengers were hardened resistance fighters. Some were the kind of last-minute heroes who swelled the ranks of the resistance everywhere, once the real fighting was over. Some were criminals who used their new “patriotic” status to blackmail rich businessmen or landowners, or loot their properties.

In Italy, too, however, revenge often had a political agenda; it was a revolutionary settling of scores. Communist partisans saw the purges as a necessary struggle against capitalism. Since big corporations, such as Fiat in Turin, had worked with Mussolini's regime, they were seen as legitimate targets. Even though the most powerful businessmen from Turin or Milan had usually managed to save their skins by crossing the Swiss border, or buying potential killers off with black market goods, the corpses of lower-ranking figures did have a way of ending up dumped in front of the gates of local cemeteries.

Seriously worried about a communist revolution in Italy, the Allied Military Government quickly tried to disarm the partisans, many of whom had fought bravely against the Germans. Conservative Italian politicians supported this effort, not surprisingly, since some of them had been close to the fascists themselves. Indeed, the slowness of the provisional Italian government in Rome to punish the fascists was one reason why the “justice of the piazza” came about in the first place.

As a sop to the pride of former partisans, parades were organized in various cities, with Allied commanders, flanked by Italian notables,
taking the salute of partisan military units decked out in scarves denoting their different allegiances: red for the leftists, blue for the Christians, green for the
autonomi
, mostly deserters from the Italian army. Many had given up their weapons, but by no means all. The radical left remained strong, and sometimes armed. Still, as it turned out, conservatives needn't have worried. There was to be no revolution in Italy. In return for extending his empire to central Europe, Stalin agreed to leave the Mediterranean to the Western Allies. But murderous reprisals still went on, and the fear of communism in Italy, as well as a bitter sense of betrayal on the left, would continue, in some cases well into the twenty-first century.

Edmund Wilson, whose sympathies were always on the left, viewed these proceedings with distaste. The main American contribution to Italy's postwar democracy, he noted, was “calling one of our telephone exchanges Freedom; and, after our arming and encouragement of the Partisans through the period when they were serving our purpose, we are now taking their weapons away from them, forbidding them to make political speeches, and throwing them in jail if they give any trouble.” He was aware that the hands of the left, too, were bloody, but, he argued, “the new Italian revolution was something more than a savage vendetta, and it is hardly, I believe, a movement whose impetus can be curbed at this point.”
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