Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (7 page)

That was a really hungry time, because there was nothing. We begged, we stole, we did whatever we could. We dug potatoes from the fields … I used to dream about food. Mashed potatoes with bacon on top – that was the highest of the high. I couldn’t think of anything better. A heap of golden steaming mashed potatoes!

He travelled in a whole stream of refugees, made up of separate groups that did not seem to mix with one another. His group had about twenty people in it, most of them Poles. The local people they passed on the way were far from sympathetic to their plight. When Andrzej was given the task of grazing a horse that one of the men in his group had acquired, a German farmer shouted at him to ‘Bugger off!’ At other times they were refused water, had dogs set on them and, as Poles, were even blamed for starting the war and bringing this whole misfortune upon Germany – an accusation that must have felt doubly ironic, given the huge disparity in their relative predicaments.

The sights Andrzej encountered during his month-long trek towards safety were branded into his memory. He remembers walking past a German field hospital in a forest, where he saw men with broken arms in wire cages, some who were bandaged from head to foot, others ‘stinking like hell, decaying alive’. There was nobody there to help them, because all the medical staff had run away. He remembers arriving at a Polish prisoner-of-war camp where the inmates refused to come out, despite the fact that the gates were now wide open, because nobody had given them an order to do so. ‘They were soldiers and they thought somebody was going to give them orders to march somewhere. Who – where - they had no idea. They were absolutely lost.’ He saw groups of prisoners in pyjama uniforms, still working the fields under German civilian guards. Later on he entered a valley where thousands upon thousands of German soldiers were sitting quietly, a few bonfires dotted between them, guarded by just a handful of American military police.

When they finally passed through the American checkpoints at Hof in Bavaria they were directed to a building with a red flag flying over it. This caused a few moments of panic because his mother thought they were being sent to a Soviet camp, until she realized that this was the flag of UNRRA – a red flag with white lettering on it. They had reached safety at last.

The dangers and difficulties that refugees like Andrzej had to overcome should not be underestimated. These might not have been immediately apparent to a nine-year-old boy, but they were all too obvious to the older generation. Mr and Mrs Druhm were Berliners in their late sixties when the war ended. After spending a short time surrounded by the lawlessness of the Red Army they decided to risk travelling to their daughter’s house on the other side of the Elbe, ninety miles away. It was a decision not taken lightly, and their journey was beset with problems from the very beginning, especially once they reached the countryside outside Berlin.

In places there were still skirmishes going on. We heard shooting and often had to stop until it was quiet. In these remote parts the soldiers didn’t know the war was over. Then there were often bridges gone and roads so damaged that we had to go back and find another route … We had many heart breaking incidents, like trudging miles and then not getting any further and having to go back. Once we went along quite a deserted wide main road. We saw a big board up with Russian writing and went on but not feeling very safe. Suddenly we were shouted at. We couldn’t see anyone but then a shot whizzed by my ear and scraped my collar. We realised that we were not meant to be there, so turned back and had miles to go round to get to where we wanted.

The devastation they encountered along the way hinted of recent violence, both of the war itself and of the occupying Soviet troops.

In the woods were sofas and feather beds and mattresses and pillows, often burst or cut open and feathers all over the place, even on the trees. There were babies’ prams, glasses of conserved fruit, even motor bikes, typewriters, cars, carts, bars of soap, a pile of pen-knives and new shoes from a shop … We also saw dead horses, some looking and smelling horrible …

And finally there were the other displaced persons on the road, who posed just as much of a potential threat to an ageing German couple as the Soviet soldiers did.

There were many people of all nationalities going in the opposite direction to us, mostly forced labourers going home. Many of them had babies and they were just stealing anything they wanted, horses and carts from the farmers, sometimes a cow tied to the back, and cooking utensils. They looked like wild creatures …
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The Druhms at least had the advantage of being able to knock on farmers’ doors and ask for help from their fellow countrymen. Most of these ‘wild creatures’ had no choice but to steal from the local population. They were not welcome, and in any case, after years of being brutalized by German guards were not inclined to trust any Germans at all.

Twenty-year-old Polish girl Marilka Ossowska was one such person. By April she had already spent two years in Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald, before finally escaping from a death march towards Czechoslovakia. After witnessing the brutality of the liberating Soviets, she and a group of other ex-prisoners decided that they might be safer if they made their way towards the American lines. She too was shocked by the sheer volume of people on the roads.

Germany in 1945 was one huge ants’ nest. Everyone was moving. This was how the eastern territories of Germany looked like. There were Germans escaping from the Russians. There were all these prisoners of war. There were some of us – not that many, but still … It was really incredible, teeming with people and movement.
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She and two Polish friends hooked up with three French labourers, two British prisoners of war and a black American soldier. Together they made their way towards the River Mulde, which at that time marked the border between the Russian and American armies. As they travelled they begged from local German farmers, or intimidated them into handing over some food. The presence of a black man certainly helped in this respect: the American, who was normally quite reserved in Marilka’s presence, deliberately played up to German racial prejudices by stripping himself naked, putting a knife between his teeth and dancing at them like a savage. Seeing this, the terrified housewives were only too keen to hand over baskets of food and get rid of him. Then he would put his clothes back on and continue the journey as normal.

In the Saxon town of Riesa, about halfway between Dresden and Leipzig, Marilka and her two friends finally tricked some Russian soldiers into giving them some transport. They met two bored-looking soldiers guarding a store of hundreds of looted bicycles, and immediately turned on the charm. ‘Oh, you must be lonely!’ they said. ‘We can come and keep you company.
And
we know where some schnapps is!’ The delighted guards gave them three bicycles so that they could go and fetch this fictitious schnapps, and never saw them again.

After six days of cycling the group finally reached Leipzig in the American zone, where the women were loaded into lorries and taken to a camp in Nordheim near Hanover. From here Marilka hitchhiked to Italy, and was finally transported to Britain at the end of 1946. She did not return to Poland for another fifteen years.

These few stories must be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times to give even a snapshot of the chaos that existed on the roads of Europe in the spring of 1945. Swarms of refugees, speaking twenty different languages, were obliged to negotiate a transport network that had been bombed, mined and neglected through six years of war. They congregated in cities that had been utterly destroyed by Allied bombing raids, and which were incapable of accommodating even the local population, let alone the huge influx of newcomers. That the various military governments and aid agencies were able to round up the majority of these people, feed them, clothe them, locate missing relatives and then repatriate most of them within the next six months is nothing short of a miracle.

However, this rapid process of repatriation could not erase the damage that had been done. The population displacements of the war had had a profound effect on the psychology of Europe. On an individual level it was traumatic not only for those who were displaced, but also for those they left behind, who often spent years wondering what had happened to the loved ones snatched from their midst. On a communal level it had also been devastating: the forced conscription of all the young people had deprived communities of their main breadwinners and left them vulnerable to starvation. But it is on the collective level that the wartime displacements were perhaps most significant. By normalizing the idea of uprooting whole sections of the population, they provided a template for the more comprehensive
postwar
population movements. The pan-European programme of ethnic expulsions that would take place after the war was made possible only because the concept of stable communities, unchanged for generations, had been destroyed once and for all. The population of Europe was no longer a fixed constant. It was now unstable, volatile – transient.

4

Famine

One of the few things that united Europe during the war was the ubiquitous presence of hunger. International trade in foodstuffs had faltered almost as soon as war broke out, and ceased altogether when the various military blockades began to take hold around the continent. The first foods to disappear were imported fruits. In Britain, the public attempted to take this with good humour. Signs began to appear in greengrocers’ windows, claiming ‘Yes, we have no bananas’ and in 1943 the feature film Millions Like Us began with an ironic on-screen definition of an orange, supposedly for those who could not remember what one looked like. On the continent one of the shortages that made itself most immediately felt was of coffee, which became so scarce that the population was forced to drink a variety of substitutes made from chicory, dandelion roots or acorns.

Other, more serious shortages soon followed. Sugar was one of the first things to become scarce, as well as perishable goods like milk, cream, eggs and fresh meat. In response to such shortages, rationing was introduced in Britain, across most of continental Europe, and even in the United States. Neither were the neutral countries immune to shortages: in Spain, for example, even staple foods such as potatoes and olive oil were tightly rationed, and the huge drop in imported goods forced the people of Switzerland to make do with 28 per cent fewer calories in 1944 than they had before the war.
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Over the course of the next five years eggs were almost universally powdered in order to preserve them, butter was replaced with margarine, milk was reserved for young children, and traditional meats such as lamb, pork or beef became so scarce that people began rearing rabbits in their back gardens and allotments as a substitute. The struggle to stave off famine was every bit as important as the military struggle, and was taken just as seriously.

The first country to topple over the brink was Greece. In the winter of 1941-2, just six months after being invaded by Axis troops, more than 100,000 people starved to death. The coming of war had thrown the country into administrative anarchy and, coupled with restrictions on people’s movement, this had caused a collapse of the food distribution systems. Farmers began to hoard their foodstuffs, inflation spiralled out of control and unemployment soared. There was also a near complete breakdown of law and order. Many historians have blamed the occupying German troops for sparking the famine by requisitioning food stores, but in truth these food stores were often looted by local people, partisans or individual soldiers.
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Regardless of what caused the famine, the results were catastrophic. In Athens and Thessaloniki the mortality rate increased threefold. In some of the islands, such as Mykonos, the death rate was as much as nine times its usual level.
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Of the 410,000 Greek deaths that occurred during the whole of the war, probably 250,000 were due to starvation and related problems.
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The situation became so parlous that in the autumn of 1942 the British took the unprecedented step of raising their blockade to allow ships carrying food through to the country. By agreement between the Germans and the British, relief flowed into Greece throughout the rest of the war, and continued to do so for almost all of the chaotic period that followed liberation at the end of 1944.

If the effect of war on Greek food distribution was fairly instantaneous, in western Europe the full force of the shortages took much longer to materialize. Holland, for example, did not feel the worst effects of famine until the winter of 1944-5. Unlike in Greece it was not administrative chaos that caused Holland’s ‘Hunger Winter’, but the Nazis’ long-term policy of depriving the country of what it needed to survive. Almost from the moment the Germans arrived in May 1940 they had begun to requisition everything: metals, clothing, textiles, bicycles, food and livestock. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped into Germany. Holland had always relied on importing food and fodder for its livestock, but these imports ceased in 1940, leaving the country to struggle on with what little was left after the German requisitions. Potatoes and bread were severely rationed throughout the war, and the people were forced to supplement their diet with sugar beets and even tulip bulbs.
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By May 1944 the situation was desperate. Reports coming from inside Holland warned of impending disaster unless the country were liberated soon. Once again, the British raised their blockade to allow aid through, but only to a very limited degree. Churchill was worried that regular food aid would simply end up in German hands, and the British Chiefs of Staff feared that the German navy would use the aid ships as guides through the mined waters of the Dutch coast. So the people of Holland were forced to wait for the liberation and starve.
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