Year Zero (22 page)

Population transfers, mass expulsions, and shifting borders were commonplace in the policies of Stalin and Hitler. But Churchill had a different precedent in mind: the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, when it was agreed to move Greek Muslims to Turkey and Greek Orthodox Turkish citizens to Greece. In fact, much of the exchange had already taken place by 1923, as it were spontaneously, as a consequence of the Greco-Turkish War. The official exchange was a relatively bloodless affair. But what happened in eastern and central Europe in 1945 and 1946 was on a wholly different scale. There was an exchange of a kind, to be sure: Poles from eastern
Poland, which became part of the Ukraine, moved to Silesia, once part of Germany and now vacated by the Germans. But what really happened is that around eleven million people were kicked out of their homes, only very rarely in an orderly or humane manner.

Hans Graf von Lehndorff, the doctor from Königsberg who believed that humans behaved like savages because they had turned away from God, tried at one point to leave his bombed, burned-out, thoroughly looted native city by foot. He reckoned that squeezing himself into a westbound train, usually a coal or cattle car, was too dangerous. And so he walked in the cold rain through “a land without people”:

[past] unharvested fields . . . bomb craters, uprooted trees, army vehicles in ditches, and burned out villages. I looked for some shelter from the rain and the wind in a broken down house. I felt something moving. There was a sound of scraping on the brick floor. A few people in tatters were standing about staring into space. Among them were three children, who scrutinized me with some hostility. Apparently they had tried to get away from Königsberg too and got stuck here. Seized by the Russians, they weren't allowed to go anywhere, neither forward nor back. The last thing they ate were a few potatoes from a Russian truck that made a temporary halt. I didn't ask what price had been extracted. From the way they talked, it was clear that the women had to pay once again. My God, who can still derive any satisfaction from such ghosts?
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Far worse things happened. But this story, more than many other tales of sadistic violence, murder, and starvation, tells us something about the sense of helplessness of people who suddenly have no home. They could go neither forward, nor back; they were stuck in limbo in a depopulated land which was no longer theirs.

Lehndorff was right to be wary of trains. Not only would one be stuck for days in overloaded goods wagons, pressed together with many others, with no food, drink, or sanitary facilities, exposed to all weather, but one
was liable to be taken away to forced labor camps, or at the very least to be robbed on the way. Paul Löbe, a social democrat journalist arrested before by the Nazi regime, described what this was like on a trip through Silesia:

After the Russians disconnected the locomotive, we were detained for twenty-two hours. Similar stoppages happened several times . . . The train was plundered four times, twice by Poles, twice by Russians. This was a simple procedure. As soon as the train slowed down because of rail damage, the robbers climbed onto the wagons, snatched our suitcases and rucksacks, and threw them onto the embankment. After half an hour they jumped off and collected the spoils.
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In this time of lawlessness, when policemen and other officials often joined the looters, railway stations were the most dangerous places to be. Gangs of robbers preyed on anyone unfortunate enough to have to spend the night there. Women of all ages were also liable to be raped by drunken soldiers in search of diversion. One of the horrors of homelessness and the total loss of rights is that others are given the license to do anything they wish with you.

In some respects, what was done to the Germans in Silesia, Prussia, and the Sudetenland was a grotesque mirror image of what Germans had done to others, particularly to the Jews. They were barred from many public places; they had to wear armbands with the letter N (for
Niemiec
, German); they were not allowed to buy eggs, fruit, milk, or cheese; and they could not marry Poles.

Of course, this parallel has its limits. A friend of Ernst Jünger, the conservative writer and diarist, wrote to him from her prison in Czechoslovakia: “The tragedy of what is happening in the German, as well as the Hungarians parts of Czechoslovakia can only be compared to what happened to the Jews.”
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This is nonsense. There is still much dispute about the number of Germans who died in the deportations. Some German historians have claimed that more than one million died. Counterclaims
have been made for roughly half that number.
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Which is bad enough. There was, however, no systematic plan to exterminate all Germans. And sometimes, native Silesian or Sudeten Germans were given the choice to become Polish or Czech citizens, not an option that was ever open to Jews under Nazi rule.

German women, subjected to random sexual assaults from Soviet troops, Poles, or Czechs, described themselves as “
Freiwild
,” fair game. That is pretty much what all homeless people without any rights become. Silesia was known in the summer of 1945 as “the wild west.” The provisional head of the new Polish administration of
, formerly the German city Danzig, spoke of a “gold rush”: “On all roads and with all means of transport, everyone from all regions of Poland is heading for this Klondike, and their sole aim is not work but robbery and looting.”
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German houses, German firms, German assets of any kind, including the Germans themselves, were ripe for the plucking.

The ethnic cleansing of 1945 went further, however, than deportations, or turning people into slaves. Herbert Hupka, a half-Jewish inhabitant of Ratibor (Racibórz) in Upper Silesia, recalls being marched in the rain past his old school, where his father had taught Latin and Greek. He noticed a heap of torn and soggy books, by Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Franz Werfel, and other authors who had been banned by the Nazis. The books had been confiscated by the Nazi government and tossed into the Jewish cemetery. Somehow they ended up in the street, in Hupka's words, “ownerless, lying in front of the Gymnasium.”
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What was being systematically destroyed in 1945 was German culture, along with many of the people who lived it. Old parts of the German Reich and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, some of whose great cities—Breslau, Danzig, Königsberg, Lemberg, Brünn, Czernowitz, Prague—were centers of German high culture, often carried by German-speaking Jews, now had to be “de-Germanized.” Streets and shop signs were painted over, place names changed, German libraries pillaged, monuments demolished, inscriptions, some of them very old, erased from
churches and other public buildings; the German language itself had to be abolished. A report from Prague in
Yank
noted:

If you ask directions in German (in case you don't speak Czech), you'll get nothing but a fishy stare . . . It's not that the Czechs don't understand. German has been practically a second language with them for years. A Czech who was forced to work for the Germans in a Prague factory . . . puts it this way: “Please do not speak German here. That is the language of the beast.”
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There were various motives for erasing not just Germans and their culture from eastern and central Europe, but even memories of their presence. For communists it was a revolutionary project to get rid of a hated bourgeoisie. For noncommunist nationalists, such as President Edvard BeneÅ¡, it was a revenge for treachery: “Our Germans . . . have betrayed our state, betrayed our democracy, betrayed us, betrayed humaneness, and betrayed mankind.”
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A highly placed cleric in the Czechoslovak Catholic Church declared: “Once in a thousand years the time has come to settle accounts with the Germans, who are evil and to whom the commandment to love thy neighbor therefore does not apply.”
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But the sentiment all shared was articulated by Poland's first communist leader, Władisław Gomułka, at a Central Committee meeting of the Polish Workers' Party: “We must expel all the Germans because countries are built on national lines and not on multi-national ones.”
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In this way Hitler's project, based on ideas going back to the first decades of the twentieth century, or even well before, of ethnic purity and nationhood, was completed by people who hated Germany. Even if we take all the horrors of postwar ethnic cleansing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania into account, we shouldn't forget that the real destroyers of German culture in the center of Europe were the Germans themselves. By annihilating the central European Jews, many of whom were fiercely loyal to German high culture, they started the process.
Kicking the Germans out after the war was the quickest way for Poles and Czechs to finish the job.

•   •   •

IT WAS NOT OUT OF LOVE
for Germany that so many Jewish survivors found themselves in German DP camps in the summer and fall of 1945; it was because they felt safer in Germany, the country that had just done its best to murder them all—safer, at any rate, than in some of their native countries, such as Lithuania and Poland. At least they were unlikely to be persecuted in the DP camps under American and British guard. Tens of thousands of Jews who had survived the camps in Poland, fought with the partisans, or returned from exile in the Soviet Union, streamed into Germany during the summer. Naturally, even if the DP camps in Germany offered a temporary refuge, they were still far from home. But what was “home” anymore? Most survivors had no home, except perhaps in the imagination. Home had been destroyed. As some DPs put it: “We are not in Bavaria . . . we are nowhere.”
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The remnants of European Jewry were in many cases too battered to take care of themselves, and too frightened and angry to accept the help of others, especially if the helpers were Gentiles. The DP camps, which Jews usually shared with non-Jews to begin with, and even with former Nazis in some notorious cases of bureaucratic muddle and indifference, were squalid beyond belief. How could people who had been treated worse than the lowest of beasts suddenly recover their self-respect? It was one thing for General Patton, not known for his philo-Semitism, to call the Jewish survivors “lower than animals.” But even tough Palestinian Jews who arrived in Germany to help them could not hide their shock. In Hanoch Bartov's autobiographical novel
Brigade
, a soldier of the Jewish Brigade remarks: “I kept telling myself that these were the people we had spoken of for so many years—but I was so far removed from them that the electric wire might have separated us.”
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An American soldier wrote a letter home about his encounter with a Polish Jew “fresh out of Dachau.” The man “was crying like a child,” cowering in the corner of a public
toilet in Munich. “I didn't have to ask him why he cried; the answers were all the same anyway, and go like this: parents tortured to death; wife gassed to death and children starved to death, or any combination of such three.”
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If any people were in desperate need of a heroic narrative, it was the Jews, the worst victims among many victims—something, by the way, that was not yet widely acknowledged. The full horror of the Jewish genocide was still incomprehensible even to many Jews themselves. Dr. Salomon Schonfeld, chief Orthodox rabbi of England, reporting on the conditions of Jewish survivors in Poland in December 1945, could still come up with the following sentence: “Polish Jews agree that death at Oswiecim [Auschwitz] (with bathrooms, gas and some Red Cross services) was more humane than anywhere else.”
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Humane!

An attempt had already been made during the war in the Jewish press in Palestine to equate the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 with Masada, hallowed place of the suicidal last stand of the Jewish Zealots against the Romans in 73 CE. The headline of
Yediot Ahronot
on May 16, 1943, read: “The Masada of Warsaw Has Fallen—the Nazis Have Set Fire to the Remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto.” In fact, the Ghetto Uprising only really came into its own as a founding myth of the new state of Israel in the 1970s. Yet there were attempts immediately after the war to restore Jewish morale with heroic gestures. And they were all tightly connected with Zionism, a dream of a home promoted to inspire a broken people. Mention has already been made of the Jewish Brigade rolling into Germany from Italy with trucks announcing: “
Achtung! Die Juden kommen!
” (“Watch out! The Jews are coming!”). On July 25 Jewish representatives from camp committees all over western Germany issued a proclamation demanding entry to Palestine. The place they chose for this stirring event was the same Munich beer hall where Hitler had staged his failed coup in 1923.

The link between Jews in the Holy Land and the Diaspora was still tenuous, hence the need to compare Warsaw and Masada, as though Mordechai Anielewicz and the others had died in the ghetto for the good of
Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel). But Zionist youth groups had actively forged those links during the war, and afterwards too, in the camps, where Jewish survivors were quickly organized in kibbutzim. Major Irving Heymont, the U.S. official in charge of the Landsberg DP camp, was Jewish himself. Even so, he was unsure what to make of the kibbutzniks in his camp: “To add to my problems, I learned today that the young and best elements in the camp are organized into kibbutzim. It appears that a Kibbutz is a closely knit, self-disciplined group with an intense desire to emigrate to Palestine. There . . . they intend to organize their lives along the lines of idealistic collectivism. Each Kibbutz is very clannish and little interested in camp life.”
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