Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (5 page)

When all the losses are added up, the ‘hole’ Edith Baneth speaks of came to engulf not only entire families but entire communities. In Poland and Ukraine there were dozens of large cities where Jews made up a sizeable proportion of the population before the war. Wilno, for example, which is today known as Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, was home to between 60,000 and 70,000 Jews before the war. By the middle of 1945 perhaps only 10 per cent of them had survived.
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Jews also made up around a third of the population in Warsaw – some 393,950 people in total — and yet when the Red Army finally crossed the Vistula at Warsaw in January 1945 they found only 200 Jewish survivors in the city. Even by the end of 1945, when handfuls of survivors had trickled back to the city, there were never more than 5,000.
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Jewish communities in rural areas fared just as badly. In the vast tracts of countryside around Minsk in Belarus the Jewish presence was reduced from about 13 per cent of the population to just 0.6 per cent.
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In Volhynia, a mostly rural backwater of prewar Poland, 98.5 per cent of the Jewish community were killed by the Germans and their local militias.
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In all, at least 5,750,000 Jews were killed during the Second World War, making it the worst and most systematic genocide in history.
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Once again, such statistics are difficult to understand until one begins to imagine what they might mean on a more human scale. Alicia Adams, a survivor of Drohobycz in Poland, puts the events she witnessed in stark terms:

Not only my parents, my uncles, aunts and my brother, but also all my childhood friends and all the people I knew in my childhood – the
whole population
of Drohobycz was wiped out, about thirty thousand people, they were all shot. So it wasn’t only my closest family being killed, I watched everybody. I watched somebody being killed
every
day – that was part of my childhood.
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For those Jews who escaped or survived, returning to the empty and abandoned neighbourhoods of eastern Europe was a uniquely depressing experience. The famed Soviet writer Vasily Grossman had grown up in Ukraine, but was living in Moscow at the time of the German invasion. When he returned as a war reporter at the end of 1943 he found that all his friends and family had been exterminated. He was one of the first to write about what would soon become known as the Holocaust:

There are no Jews in the Ukraine. Nowhere – Potava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin – in none of the cities, hundreds of towns, or thousands of villages will you see the black, tear-filled eyes of little girls; you will not hear the pained voice of an old woman; you will not see the dark face of a hungry baby. All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been brutally murdered.
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With the effective removal of an entire race from most of the continent a unique culture, built up over centuries, was also lost.

This was the murder of a great and ancient professional experience, passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and of members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of everyday traditions that grandfathers had passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bitter, this was the destruction of hearths and cemeteries, this was the death of the nation which had been living side by side with Ukrainians over hundreds of years …
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The Jews were one of the few groups who came close to understanding the enormity of what had happened to Europe during the Second World War. The fact that they had been singled out and herded together gave them a unique perspective: they could see that the mass killings were not merely a local matter, but were taking place all over the continent. Even children understood this. The eleven-year-old Celina Lieberman, for example, tried to keep her Jewish identity alive despite being hastily fostered out to a Christian couple in Ukraine in 1942. She used to apologize to God each night for accompanying her new parents to church, because she solemnly believed herself to be the last Jew alive.
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And yet, even in the midst of this despair, there were still some small seeds of hope. Celina Lieberman was
not
the last Jew alive. After the war had passed on, Jews began to emerge from hiding even in the most unlikely places. Thousands had survived in the forests and swamps of Lithuania, Poland and Belarus. Thousands more had spent the war hidden in the basements and attics of sympathetic Gentiles. Even in destroyed Warsaw handfuls of Jews emerged from the ruins, like the biblical Noah stepping onto the shores of a changed world. They had weathered the flood of the Holocaust by hiding in sewers, tunnels and purpose-built bunkers – their own personal arks. Perhaps the greatest miracle, although it might not have felt it, was the survival of Jews in the concentration camps of Europe. Despite the best efforts of the Nazis to starve and work them to death, some 300,000 Jews lived to be liberated by the Allies in 1945. In all, some 1.6 million European Jews managed to escape death.
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The war also provided some rare examples of states acting honourably towards Jews in the face of serious pressure from the Nazis. For example, Denmark passed no anti-Jewish laws, expropriated no Jewish property, and ousted no Jews from government posts. When they discovered that the SS were planning to round up the country’s 7,200 Jews, the Danish people conspired to evacuate almost the entire community in secret to Sweden.
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The Italian people also resisted all attempts to deport Jews, not only in Italy itself but in the territories it had conquered.
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When the SS demanded the deportation of Bulgaria’s 49,000 Jews, the king, the parliament, the church, the intellectuals and the farmers vehemently opposed the measures. Indeed, the Bulgarian farmers were said to be ready to lie down on the railway tracks to prevent the Jews being taken. As a consequence, Bulgaria was the only country in Europe to see its population of Jews actually
increase
during the war.
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Finally, there are some astonishing examples of individuals who were willing to risk their lives in order to save Jews. Some of these people, like the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, are well known; but since 1953 more than 21,700 others have been recognized by the state of Israel for saving Jews.
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Some of these people sheltered Jews despite their own intense prejudices against them. One Dutch clergyman, for example, admitted to feeling an intense aversion towards Jews, whom he thought ‘unbearable … very different to us, another kind, typically of another race’. And yet he was still willing to be arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp for helping them to escape the Nazis. It is from such unlikely sources that hope sprang during and after the war, not only for Jews but for the European people as a whole.
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Other Holocausts

While the extermination of the Jews was the most visible, continent-wide genocide, there were other equally devastating absences on a local scale. In Croatia 592,000 Serbs, Muslims and Jews were killed by the Ustashe regime in an attempt to ethnically cleanse the entire country.
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In Volhynia, after the Jews had been exterminated, tens of thousands of Poles were killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Bulgarians massacred Greek communities in the areas they invaded along the northern edge of the Aegean, and Hungarians did the same to Serbians in the Vojvodina region of Yugoslavia.

In many areas of Europe, unwanted ethnic groups were simply driven out of their towns and villages. This occurred all over central and eastern Europe at the beginning of the war, as the old empires clawed back the territory they had lost in the aftermath of the First World War. But the most dramatic exodus of an ethnic group occurred in 1945, when several million Germans were driven out of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania by the advancing Red Army, leaving a landscape of ghost towns behind them. When these parts of eastern Germany were handed over to Poland in the aftermath of the war, the arriving Poles described an eerie absence of life in what appeared to be otherwise perfectly normal streets. Some of the houses had dishes of food still on the tables, as if they had been abandoned in a hurry. ‘Everything was empty,’ remembers Zbigniew Ogrodzinski, one of the first Polish officials to be appointed in the German city of Stettin in the spring of 1945. ‘You went into houses, and everything was there – books on the shelves, furniture, everything. There weren’t any Germans at all.’
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In some rural parts of eastern Germany the absence of life seemed total. In the summer of 1945, a British major described his journey through the German province of Mecklenburg as he went to negotiate an exchange of goods with his Russian counterpart.

Our road lay for the first kilos through the Forest of Rabensteinfeld, and then through good agricultural land, until we arrived at Crivitz. This journey was the most eerie I have ever made. The only humans we saw were old Red Army soldiers and sentries. The farms were deserted, barns emptied, fields devoid of cattle and horses, no fowls, in short a dead land. I can’t remember seeing anything living (other than a few Red soldiers) on that 18 kilo journey to Crivitz. I never heard a bird sing or saw any wild creatures.
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During the course of just six years, the demographics of Europe had changed irredeemably. The density of Poland’s population fell by 27 per cent, and some areas in the east of the country were now barely populated at all.
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Countries that had once been ethnically mixed had been ‘cleansed’ so extensively that, to all intents and purposes, they now included only a single ethnic group.
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As well as an absence of people, therefore, there was an absence of community, and an absence of diversity: large areas of Europe had become homogeneous. This process would only accelerate in the months after the war.

If the wholesale massacre of entire communities made the landscape seem eerie to outsiders, it was far more disorienting for the few who still lived amongst the emptiness. The survivors of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in the Limousin region of France, for example, have never since fully come to terms with what happened to them. In the summer of 1944, in reprisal for local Resistance activity, all the town’s men were rounded up and shot. The women and children were driven into the church, which was then set on fire. After the war the authorities decided not to rebuild the village, but to construct a new town nearby – Oradour itself was to be preserved for ever exactly as it was on the day of the massacre. It is still a ghost town today.
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Similar massacres, equally brutal, occurred in countless local communities across Europe. Perhaps the most infamous massacre of them all was that at Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, where the entire male population was shot in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German deputy Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. The children of the village were then taken to the Chelmno concentration camp, where they were gassed, and the women were incarcerated at Ravensbrück as slave labour. The village itself was then burned, and bulldozed, and the rubble carted away to allow the grass to grow over where the buildings had once stood. The purpose of this massacre was not merely to punish the local community for resisting the occupation, but to entirely delete that community, as if it had never existed. The Nazis then used the systematic destruction of the village as an advertisement of what would happen to any other village found to be even remotely involved in Resistance activities.
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The psychological impact of such total erasure of a community should not be underestimated. In 1945, after the liberation of the concentration camps, the surviving women of Lidice headed back to their village. They were unaware of what had happened to their community until they encountered Czech soldiers at the border. One of these women, Miloslava Kalibová, later described her reaction:

The soldiers lowered their heads and many of them had tears in their eyes. We said ‘Oh no! Don’t say there is even worse to come …’ One of the soldiers spoke to me and I learnt from him that three years earlier all the men had been shot … Killing little boys. Killing all the men just like that … And worst of all, gassing the children. It was an enormous shock.
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When she arrived at the village she found ‘only barren plains’. Nothing of the original village existed except in her own memory, and the memories of her fellow survivors.
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Such experiences were, at a local level, every bit as devastating as the Holocaust. The destruction of towns and villages was a loss not only to the surviving inhabitants of those places, but also to the whole surrounding area, and by extension to the continent as a whole, which, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was deprived of a ‘cargo of memories … a cluster of traditions’.
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Lidice, along with thousands of other villages, was switched off like a light.