Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  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.”41

  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 Beneš, it was a revenge for treachery: “Our Germans . . . have betrayed our state, betrayed our democracy, betrayed us, betrayed humaneness, and betrayed mankind.”42 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.”43 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.”44

  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.”45

  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.”46 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.”47

  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.”48 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.”49

  Quite a few survivors actually dreamed of the United States as a new home. The streets in Föhrenwald, one of the largest Jewish DP camps in Bavaria, were given such alluring names as “New York,” “Michigan,” or “Wisconsin Avenue.”50 But however attractive, the United States did not welcome what was left of European Jewry, certainly not straight after the war. And it was the youth, the relative fitness, the discipline, the high morale, the idealism, the stress on sports, agricultural work, and self-defense, that gave the young Zionists from central Europe such cachet among the survivors. Ten days after the German defeat, Rabbi Levy, the British army chaplain, wrote a letter to the London Jewish Chronicle praising the Zionists in Belsen: “Shall I ever forget . . . those meetings within the huts when we sat and sang Hebrew songs? Will the world believe that such a spirit of obstinacy and tenacity is possible? Two days ago I met a group of young Zionists from Poland. They were living in one of the filthiest of the blocks but their own corner was spotless.”51

  The toughest of the tough guys in Belsen was a small, wiry man named Josef Rosensaft. He fit the image of the Jewish hero. Born in 1911 in Poland, he rebelled as a young man against the religious strictures of his Hasidic family and became a left-wing Zionist. In July 1943, he was rounded up with his wife and stepson in the ghetto and shoved into a train bound for Auschwitz. Somehow he managed to escape from the train and jumped into the Vistula River under machine-gun fire. Rearrested in the ghetto, he managed to escape once more, only to be caught again and sent to Birkenau, the death ca
mp connected to Auschwitz. After two months of slave work in a stone quarry, he was transported to another camp, from which he escaped in March 1944. Captured again in April, he was tortured for several months in Birkenau, without revealing who had helped him to escape. By way of a stint in Dora-Mittelbau, where prisoners were worked to death in dank underground tunnels constructing V-2 rockets for the German military, he ended up in Bergen-Belsen.

  Rosensaft was not a member of the educated urban Jewish elite. He could only speak Yiddish, but that was not the only reason why he insisted on Yiddish as the language of negotiation with the Allied authorities—much to the annoyance of his British interlocutors. It was a matter of pride. As the leader of the Central Committee of liberated Belsen Jews, he wanted Jews to be treated as a distinct people with a common home, which in his mind could only be Palestine. Jews needed to be separated from prisoners of other nationalities, should be allowed to run their own affairs, and should get ready to move on to the land of the Jews.52

  Similar sentiments were voiced in other camps too. Major Irving Heymont was often irritated by the demands of the Jewish committee in Landsberg. But in a letter home, he quotes from a speech by one of the camp representatives, an agronomist from Lithuania named Dr. J. Oleiski, which he finds “very illuminating.” Dr. Oleiski recalls his time in the ghetto when the Jews, “looking through the fences over the Vilna to Kovno and other Lithuanian towns,” sang “I Want to See My Home Again.” But today, Oleiski continued,

  after all that, after the concentration camps in Germany, after we stated definitely that our former home was changed into a mass grave, we can only grope and clasp with our finger tips the shadows of our dearest and painfully cry: I can never more see my home. The victorious nations that in the 20th century removed the black plague from Europe must understand once and for all the specific Jewish problem. No, we are not Polish when we are born in Poland; we are not Lithuanians even though we once passed through Lithuania; and we are neither Roumanians though we have seen the first time in our life the sunshine in Roumenia. We are Jews!!

  Heymont was neither a Zionist nor, it seems, a religious man. In fact, he never divulged his family background, since he feared this might complicate his delicate task in Germany. But despite his many irritations, he was not unsympathetic to Dr. Oleiski’s aspirations, including the goal of “BUILDING A JEWISH COMMONWEALTH IN PALESTINE” (capital letters in the original text). Indeed, wrote Heymont, “the more I think about this, the less angry I become with the committee. As a group, the committee is vitally interested in protecting the rights of the people and in getting them out of Germany. By rights of the people, I mean their treatment as a free people and not as wards or charity cases.”53

  The idea of transforming Jews from being a persecuted minority, abject and eager to please the majorities amongst whom they lived, tempted into hopeful assimilation yet forever looking over their shoulders, from “charity cases” into a proud nation of warriors working their own sacred soil—this ideal existed long before the Nazi genocide. The ideal came in many varieties, socialist, religious, even racialist. And the different factions were in constant and sometimes acrimonious competition. As soon as people were well enough to vote, political parties were formed in Belsen and other camps. David Ben-Gurion, another Polish tough guy and leader of the Zionist movement in Palestine, saw early on how Jewish suffering could help the project he so fervently believed in. In October 1942, he told the Zionist Executive commission in Palestine: “Disaster is strength if channeled to a productive course; the whole trick of Zionism is that it knows how to channel our disaster not into despondency or degradation, as is the case in the Diaspora, but into a source of creativity and exploitation.”54

  This sounds more than a little ruthless, the earliest instance of “instrumentalizing” the Holocaust. A firm rejection of softness was certainly part of Ben-Gurion’s style, necessary perhaps to foster a new heroic story for the Jews. A practical man, he saw displays of sentiment as unproductive. But in 1942, Ben-Gurion, too, was still unaware of the scale of the Jewish catastrophe in Europe. Very few people were. One of the first men who seemed to have understood was a Zionist member of the Rescue Committee for European Jewry named Apolinari Hartglass. Already in 1940, he warned that the Nazis were “exterminating the [Jewish] population in Poland.” However, even Hartglass, when refugees from Poland confirmed his worst suspicions in 1942, responded: “If I believed everything you’re saying, I’d kill myself.”55 Ben-Gurion knew facts. Like most people, he could not yet imagine the truth.

  Even so, both Hartglass and Ben-Gurion could be accused of exploiting human misery to their own political ends. In a memorandum to the Rescue Committee in 1943, Hartglass stated that seven million European Jews would probably be killed, and that there was nothing much the Jews in Palestine (the Yishuv) could do about it. However, he wrote, if only a handful of Jews could be rescued, “we must at least achieve some political gains from them. From a Zionist point of view we will achieve this political gain under the following conditions. A: If the whole world knows that the only country that wants to receive the rescued Jews is Palestine and that the only community that wants to absorb them is the Yishuv.”56

  In October 1945, Ben-Gurion decided to see the former concentration camps in Germany for himself. He made short, dry, factual notes in his diary. About Dachau: “I saw the ovens, the gas chambers, the kennels, the gallows, the prisoners’ quarters, and the SS quarters.” In Belsen: “Until April 15 this year 48,000 Jews were here . . . Since then 31,000 have died . . . (of typhus, tuberculosis)”57 Ben-Gurion’s goals, according to the biographer Shabtai Teveth, were more in the heroic mold. He envisaged “the survivors of the death camps fighting their way onto the shores of Palestine, breaking through a blockade of British soldiers.” Teveth remarks drily, “His examination of the skeletal survivors must have been like that of a commander reviewing his troops before battle.”58

  Word of Ben-Gurion’s tour soon got around, and he was mobbed by DPs wherever he went. Heymont knew he was in Landsberg only when he “noticed the people streaming out to line the street leading from Munich. They were carrying flowers and hastily improvised banners and signs. The camp itself blossomed out with decorations of all sorts. Never had we seen such energy displayed in the camp. I don’t think a visit from President Truman could cause as much excitement.”59 To the people in the camp, Heymont observed, Ben-Gurion “is God.”

  The most famous speech Ben-Gurion gave on this trip to Germany was at a hospital for camp survivors in the old Benedictine monastery of St. Ottilien near Munich, not far from Dachau. For once, at the sight of the Jewish orphans, his eyes welled up with emotion. But he swiftly pulled himself together: “I will not try to express the feelings within me . . . such a thing is impossible.” Instead he put it to his audience, some of them still in striped prisoners’ garb:

  I can tell you that a vibrant Jewish Palestine exists and that even if its gates are locked the Yishuv will break them open with its strong hands . . . Today we are the decisive power in Palestine . . . We have our own shops, our own factories, our own culture, and our own rifles . . . Hitler was not far from Palestine. There could have been terrible destruction there, but what happened in Poland could not happen in Palestine. They would not have slaughtered us in our synagogues. Every boy and every girl would have shot at every German soldier.60

  Strong . . . power . . . our own rifles . . . These heroic words offered by the Zionist leader were precisely what the British didn’t want to hear, even though in 1917 the British foreign secretary Arthur James Balfour had promised to make Palestine into “a national home for the Jewish people.” The British were in a bind, for in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the government had promised the Arab population of Palestine that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Since the Arabs made up 91 percent of the roughly seven hundred thousand people in P
alestine, this was going to be a problem. Hence the White Paper, issued by the British government in 1939, limiting Jewish emigration to Palestine to ten thousand persons a year between 1940 and 1944, to which twenty-five thousand might be added in case of an emergency. The emergency came; just enough Jews made it to Palestine to fill the utterly inadequate quota. Ben-Gurion now insisted on moving at least a million Jewish survivors there by all possible means, legal or not. President Truman, shocked by a report on the condition of Jewish DPs in Germany,61 argued in a letter to British prime minister Clement Attlee that at least one hundred thousand Jews should be permitted to emigrate. He added: “As I said to you in Potsdam, the American people, as a whole, firmly believe that immigration into Palestine should not be closed and that a reasonable number of Europe’s persecuted Jews should, in accordance with their wishes, be permitted to resettle there.”62

  What Truman did not say in his letter was that he did not wish those hundred thousand Jews to settle in the United States. The reason why the British actively tried to stop Jews from moving to Palestine, sometimes with the use of force against people who had barely survived Nazi death camps, was practical. Palestine was still a British mandate. Britain, even under a Labour government, wished to keep its influence in the Middle East as the gateway to India. The Arabs, towards whom British Foreign Office sympathies tilted anyway, would be up in arms if too many Jews were allowed to settle in a majority Arab land. From the British point of view this would be inopportune. And so Jews who tried to land illegally were liable to be clubbed by British soldiers, shoved back onto their ramshackle boats, or even shot.