Year Zero (4 page)

And not just women. Minorities of all kinds often forge alliances with powerful outsiders to get the majorities off their backs. This was a facet of all colonial societies. But the disproportionate number of French homosexuals who either collaborated with the Germans or used wartime Paris
as a sexual playground may also have had something to do with a common grievance against the respectable bourgeoisie. The fact that Nazi and Vichy propaganda was itself homophobic was not an impediment. Occupation was not necessarily endorsed; it was an opportunity.

“Fratting” with the Allied liberators was, in any case, more alluring than collaboration with the Germans, for it was not tainted with treachery. It is hard to know how much homosexual fraternizing went on, since this is obviously something people were rather discreet about. One case is beautifully described by Rudi van Dantzig, the dancer, writer, and choreographer of the Dutch National Ballet. He wrote a novel,
For a Lost Soldier
, based on his own experience after being evacuated from Amsterdam to a northern village during the “hunger winter” of 1944/45. When the Canadians reached his village, he was only twelve years old, but had yearnings he himself barely understood. A jeep stops on a country road. A hand is extended. He is hoisted on board. This is when Jeroen, the boy, meets Walt, the Canadian soldier, who would end up seducing him. But the book is not at all an indictment of pedophilia. On the contrary, it is written as an elegy: “The arm around me is warm and comfortable, as though I'm wrapped in a chair. I let it all happen almost with a sense of joy. And I think: ‘This is liberation. This is the way it should be, different from other days. This is a party.'”
¹⁷

Benoîte Groult is perfectly well aware of the material benefits of having sex with an American. She makes the link between sexual hunger and hunger for food quite explicit. Lying in bed under Kurt's body, she remarks, is like sleeping with a whole continent: “And you can't refuse a continent.” Afterwards, they ate: “My appetite was sharpened by four years of occupation and twenty-three years of chastity, well almost. I devoured the eggs hatched two days ago in Washington. Spam canned in Chicago. Corn ripened four thousand miles from here . . . It is quite something, the war!”

Spam, eggs, Hershey bars could be eaten right away. Stockings could be worn. But Lucky Strikes, Camels, Chesterfields, or Caporal cigarettes could be exchanged on the black market for more food. The GIs were supplied with plenty. This, as much as their broad shoulders, sweet smiles, straight hips, and fine uniforms, was an inestimable attraction. The easy
access to cigarettes alone made them into rich men in very poor countries. It was easy to conclude, then, that the women who slept with them were really no better than whores.

This was indeed what many people thought, especially women who barely scraped by, or men who were barred from the dance halls, cinemas, and recreation centers reserved for the liberators and their local girlfriends. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that some of the young women who latched on to Allied servicemen still wore headscarves to hide the evidence of recently shaved heads, the mark of punishment for those who had shortly before taken German lovers.

No doubt some women were freelance prostitutes, especially in the defeated countries where sexual services were the only way to keep oneself, or one's children, alive. But even in the case of women who switched with perhaps unseemly haste from German to Allied lovers, the reasons were not always straightforward or venal. A freshly shaved “horizontal collaborator” from a small town in France told a self-appointed committee of purgers who threatened her with further punishment for her “immoral” behavior: “I don't care if you shave my hair. I am no longer in touch with my husband [a former prisoner of war]. And I won't let that stand in the way of having fun with the Americans, if I choose to.”
¹⁸

Reading contemporary accounts and comments in the press, one might get the impression that the summer of '45 was one long orgy indulged in by foreign servicemen and local women, out of greed, or lust, or loneliness. This impression appears to be confirmed by statistics: five times more women were hospitalized in Paris for sexually transmitted diseases (aka VD) in 1945 than in 1939. In Holland more than seven thousand illegitimate babies were born in 1946, three times the number in 1939. High STD rates can be explained by the lack of medical supervision or contraceptives, poor hygiene in poverty-stricken areas, or any number of other reasons. The fact is that many women and men were simply looking for warmth, companionship, love, even marriage. Much as the early months of liberation offered the chance for wild abandon, people also longed for a return to normality. It should not be forgotten that the 277,000
legitimate Dutch births in 1946 constituted the highest figure in the recorded history of the nation.

•   •   •

BERGEN-BELSEN WAS LIBERATED ON APRIL 12.
British forces commanded by Lieutenant Derrick Sington were ordered to get there as quickly as they could. The war was not yet over, but conditions in the camp were so appalling that local people feared that a typhus epidemic—the same epidemic that had killed Anne Frank just weeks before—might spread to them. Since the German authorities could not or would not deal with the risk of a typhus outbreak, they agreed to let British troops enter Belsen, even though they were still at war.

Driving past piles of corpses and barracks stinking of excrement and rotting flesh, the soldiers could not quite believe what they were witnessing with their own eyes. Images from Belsen were among the first to be published in the Western press, and in Britain Belsen became the main symbol of Nazi mass murder. Brian Urquhart recalled that he had known about Nazi anti-Semitism: “Even so, the ‘final solution,' the actual extermination of millions of people, was simply unimaginable. We were completely unprepared for Belsen.”
¹⁹
What neither he, nor the other British soldiers, realized was that Belsen was not even an extermination camp. Those camps were in Poland, and most had already been destroyed by the Germans before retreating to the west.

Lieutenant Sington drove on, telling the survivors through a loudspeaker that they were free. Most were too far gone to respond in any way. Then he reached the main women's camp, still holding his microphone:

In a few seconds the car was surrounded by hundreds of women. They cried and wailed hysterically, uncontrollably, and no word from the loudspeakers could be heard. The compounds of the camp were planted with young birch trees and the women plucked leafy sprigs and small branches and hurled them on to the car.
²⁰

These women were among the lucky ones. They could still walk. A British medical student, who had volunteered to help, came across the following scene in one of the barracks:

I was standing aghast in the midst of all this filth trying to get used to the smell which was a mixture of post-mortem room, a sewer, sweat, foul pus, when I heard a scrabbling on the floor. I looked down in the half light and saw a woman crouching at my feet. She had black matted hair, well populated and her ribs stood out as though there were nothing between them . . . She was defecating, but she was so weak that she could not lift her buttocks from the floor and, as she had diarrhoea, the liquid yellow stools bubbled over her thighs.
²¹

The doctors and medical volunteers were desperate for more food, drugs, and medical equipment. They were faced with disease and famine on a scale they had never experienced, or even imagined was possible. Hundreds of people were still dying every day, sometimes from eating army rations that were too rich for their shrunken intestines. But the army is not always an efficient institution, and conditions in Germany were chaotic. One day in late April a mysterious consignment arrived containing large quantities of lipstick.

It turned out to be a godsend. The commanding officer of a British ambulance unit, Lieutenant Colonel Gonin, remembers:

I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet lips . . . At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
²²

Richard Wollheim, later to become a famous British philosopher, was an intelligence officer. Like Urquhart, he was sent briefly to Belsen, in May, when conditions were still terrible, but not quite as catastrophic as they had been. It had been decided somewhere in the army hierarchy that it would be a good idea to organize a dance party for the soldiers and the survivors at Belsen. Wollheim was told to organize the event. It was, alas, a disaster, for as the band of Hungarian camp guards (who had had a reputation for brutality), dressed up in national folk costumes, struck up a dance tune on their concertinas, there was a misunderstanding. Without a language in common, the women bared their arms to show their camp tattoos. The men, literally at a loss for words, grabbed the women's arms hoping for a dance. The women, terrified, started hitting the men, while the Hungarians played faster and faster.
²³

This, however, was an unusual mishap. There was another dance party held around the same time on a square between the barracks, with a Royal Air Force band providing the music. In the account of a British soldier, it was a huge success, even though some of the girls “could hardly walk,” while others “looked as though they'd break in two.” One very tall Canadian officer held a tiny girl, whose head only came up to his waist. They waltzed together. “She looked so happy, it was hard for those who saw her not to smile or cry.”
²⁴

This was perhaps a more typical story than Wollheim's, for many people who worked in the camps, from American rabbis to United Nations relief workers, remarked with various degrees of approval or disapproval on the speedy recovery of sexuality among the survivors. Like the lipstick, sexual desire restored a sense of humanity to people, who had been left with none.

If the birthrate in Holland was high in 1946, the birthrate in the displaced persons camps was higher. In the American occupation zone alone 750 babies were born every month in the DP camps. Nearly one-third of the Jewish women in the zone between the ages of eighteen and forty-five had already given birth or were expecting babies.
²⁵
Former concentration camps, including Bergen-Belsen, where so many thousands had died
under the worst possible conditions, had become sites of feverish sexual activity, as though the survivors couldn't wait to show to themselves and the world that they were still alive, and not just that, but capable of producing life.

Relief workers were sometimes shocked and spoke of DPs, often Jewish, giving “themselves up to debauch without restraint.” Some put it down to boredom. What was there to do but drink and have sex? Some were more moralistic. A French doctor working for a charity organization wrote with evident disapproval, “The moral standings of many of these survivors from the concentration camps is very low . . . sexual irregularity has reached appalling proportions.” But he concede;d that there were mitigating circumstances. One could not really blame the young girls who had passed through hell, and “are now seized by an irresistible desire for affection and forgetfulness, which they seek to satisfy with the means at their disposal.”
²⁶

Other observers had more elaborate explanations. A Polish relief worker named Marta Korwin believed that concentration camp victims had dreamed that an end to their torment would lead to the dawn of a perfect world: “All their past difficulties would be forgotten, freedom would take them back to a world where nothing had ever gone wrong . . .” When instead they found themselves living in the misery of DP camps, having lost their loved ones, with no hope, they escaped into drink or sex.
²⁷

All these explanations are perfectly plausible. But there was also a biological dimension. A people in severe crisis had to reproduce itself to survive. Many Jews in the DP camps were not death camp survivors, of whom there were few. Many came from parts of the Soviet Union, where they had found refuge from the Nazis. But most Jews had lost children, parents, siblings, or other relatives. Older people had little choice but to live with ghosts. But young people craved new family ties, others to live for. And biological regeneration was officially promoted by Zionists and other Jewish organizers. Marriages happened within weeks, even days after first encounters. Contraceptives were frowned upon in the Jewish DP camps.
People felt duty-bound to produce as many children as they could. Sex was not just a pleasure; it was an act of defiance against extinction.

•   •   •

TO BE A GERMAN
or Japanese in 1945 was obviously a rather different experience than being French, Dutch, or Chinese, let alone Jewish. This applies to the encounter with foreign troops too. The
Amis
(German slang for Yanks), or
Ameko
(the same in Japanese), as well as the Canadians, Australians, British, and Soviets came not as liberators, but as conquerors. The same was true, to some extent, even for many Italians, especially in southern Italy, where the Allied invasions made already hard lives even harder. Cities were bombed to pieces, economic conditions were dire. Prostitution was in many cases a necessity.

In Berlin, they were known as
Ruinenmäuschen
, “mice in the ruins,” girls and women prowling the rubble of their city trying to pick up a soldier for a bit of cash, some food, or cigarettes. Some girls, barely into puberty, plied their trade in improvised brothels in the ruins, run by black marketers. Boys had their own
Trümmerbordellen
(“ruin brothels”), where they sold themselves to American soldiers, one of whom, known as Tante (“Aunty”) Anna, became a notorious figure in the underworld of Frankfurt.