by Ian Buruma
But in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet empire, there was hope that the gash running through the spine of Europe might heal at last. More than that: hope that the world would finally come together briefly flickered again in that miraculous year, despite what happened in China in June, when citizens asking for an end to their dictatorship were murdered by their own soldiers. Now there was only one Big Power left. There was talk of a new world order, even of the end of history. The Berlin Wall was finally breached.
My sisters and I decided to celebrate the eve of hope, December 31, 1989, at the Berlin Wall, with our father. He had been back to Berlin only once before since he saw its destruction in 1945. In the shadow of a family calamity, we had spent Christmas and New Year’s in Berlin in 1972. It was a depressing occasion. The city was dark and freezing. Crossing the border between West and East was a long and tiresome process, with snarling border guards checking the bottom of our car with mirrors to make sure we weren’t carrying contraband or human cargo.
In 1972, East Berlin was still much as my father remembered it. Despite the pumped-up grandeur of empty Stalinist avenues, it was a dark city with the ruins of war still visible. Drawing up in his brand-new Citroën to the gates of the old factory where he had been forced to work for the Nazi war effort gave him a certain grim satisfaction. It was a large, forbidding-looking building of red brick, a kind of Wilhelminian industrial fortress. Nearby was the camp where my father was housed in flimsy wooden barracks, open to ice, fleas, lice, snow, and Allied bombs. Everything was still there, as though the past was quite literally frozen: the watchtower, the crater which the inmates used as a public toilet, as well as a public bath.
In 1989, the camp was gone, transformed, I think, into a parking lot with a shabby stand hawking sausages in a vapor of greasy curry sauce.
The sun was shining as we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, something that had been unthinkable for almost four decades. Anyone who might have attempted it would have been shot. I remember the flush of excitement on my father’s face as we joined Germans from East and West, as well as Poles, Americans, Japanese, French, and others from all corners of the globe, tasting the simple freedom of taking a short stroll through the very center of Berlin. There were still men in uniform, but they looked on, powerless to intervene, some of them with smiles, relieved that they didn’t have to shoot a fellow citizen. For once, all seemed well with the world.
The night of December 31 was cold, but not freezing. We could hear the crowds cheering from a long way off as we approached the Brandenburg Gate, our father proceeding with a certain reluctance; he was not keen on crowds, particularly German crowds. Nor did he like loud bangs; they brought back too many memories. Tens of thousands of people, most of them young, had gathered near and on top of the wall, singing, shouting, popping corks off bottles of the sweet sparkling wine Germans call Sekt. There was a smell of Sekt everywhere. People were showering one another with the sticky foam.
Some were chanting: “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”). Others sang: “We are one people!” But there was nothing nationalistic or menacing in the air of that night. It was an international crowd, a kind of political Woodstock without rock bands, celebrating freedom, togetherness, and hope for a better world, in which the bitter experiences of the past would not be repeated; no more barbed wire, or camps, or killing. It was good to be young. If ever Beethoven’s anthem of “All Men Will Be Brothers” (“Alle Menschen werden Brüder”) had meaning, it was on that extraordinary New Year’s Eve in Berlin.
Suddenly, at around a quarter past midnight, we realized we had lost our father in the crowd, which had grown so dense that it was difficult to move. We looked for him everywhere, as fireworks exploded and rockets lit up the sky. The noise was deafening. Laughing faces around us, illuminated by the fireworks, now looked slightly hysterical. There was no way we could find our father in this mass. Without him, our appetite for celebration waned. We were worried and returned to our hotel.
Hours later, after we had found some fitful sleep, the door opened, and there he was, his face plastered with a bandage. Just as the Berlin crowds saw the new year in with a bang, round about the stroke of midnight, pretty much on the same spot where my father once had to dodge British bombs, Stalin Organs, and German sniper fire, a firecracker had somehow found its way to him and hit him right between the eyes.
My father, S. L. Buruma (far left), with his fellow students in Utrecht
Soviet soldiers dancing in Berlin
Dutch girls celebrating with a Canadian soldier
British sailors and their girlfriends on VE Day in London
A GI fraternizing with a Japanese girl in a Tokyo park (Associated Press/ Charles Gorry)
Dutch citizens cheering the bombers dropping food in May 1945
A “horizontal collaborator” is jeered by a mob in Holland.
Greeks receiving Allied aid
A woman being tarred for collaboration in Amsterdam
Delousing an inmate at Bergen-Belsen
Starved POWs at a Japanese camp in Malaya
The British Army setting fire to the last hut at Bergen-Belsen
Taking a break from clearing rubble in Berlin
Refugee children in Berlin
A Japanese man in the ruins of his home in Yokohama
Greek women mourning the dead (Associated Press)
A German army general is tied to the stake before his execution in Italy. (Associated Press)
German POWs tend to American graves near Omaha Beach in Normandy. (Associated Press/Peter J. Carroll)
German children walking into school in Aachen
General Yamashita is sworn in at his trial in Manila.
General de Gaulle in Lorient, a former U-boat base in France that was badly damaged by Allied bombs (AFP/Getty Images)
Laval testifying in Paris at the trial of Marshal Pétain (seated, right, behind Laval)
The Dutch National Socialist leader Anton Mussert is arrested by the Dutch resistance in The Hague.
The Japanese surrender to the Royal Air Force in Saigon.
Indonesian freedom fighters
Winston Churchill campaigning for reelection
Clement Attlee after his election victory (Associated Press)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I cannot imagine how I could have written this book without my stint as a fellow of the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library. Thanks to its excellent director, Jean Strouse, her invaluable deputy director, Marie D’Origny, and the ever helpful Paul Delaverdac, the center is a writer’s paradise.
While doing my research, I benefited greatly from the advise of Robert Paxton, Fritz Stern, Hata Ikuhiko, Avishai Margalit, Ben Bland, and Geert Mak. At the NIOD research institute in Amsterdam, I was given a great deal of help by David Barnouw and Joggli Meihuizen.
Mark Mazower and Geoffrey Wheatcroft were kind enough to read the manuscript at various stages and managed to save me from making errors I would never have caught. Any infelicities that might remain in the text are, of course, entirely my own responsibility.
Andrew Wylie, Jin Auh, and Jaqueline Ko, of the Wylie Agency, have offered me their constant support, for which I am deeply grateful. Scott Moyers was involved in the book first as my agent at the Wylie Agency, then as my editor at The Penguin Press, and was equally superb in both capacities. Thanks also to Mally Anderson, at The Penguin Press, who has seen the book through to its completion.
Finally, I owe a great debt to my father, Leo Buruma, and my friend, Brian Urquhart, who have taken the time to relate their personal experiences of 1945. As a small token of my gratitude and esteem, I dedicate my book to them.
I am grateful to my wife, Eri, for her patience and encouragement.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1: EXULTATION
1. Quoted in Ben Shephard, Th
e Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 69.
2. Martin Gilbert, The Day the War Ended: May 8, 1945: Victory in Europe (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 128.
3. Brian Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 82.
4. This story is well told in David Stafford, Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).
5. From Zhukov’s memoir, quoted in Gilbert, The Day the War Ended.
6. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1963), 30.
7. Gilbert, The Day the War Ended, 322.
8. Ibid., 319.
9. Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, 85.
10. David Kaufman and Michiel Horn, De Canadezen in Nederland, 1944–1945 (Laren, The Netherlands: Luitingh, 1981), 119.
11. Michael Horn, “More Than Cigarettes, Sex and Chocolate: The Canadian Army in the Netherlands, 1944–1945,” in Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 16 (Fall/Winter 1981), 156–73.
12. Quoted in Horn, “More Than Cigarettes, Sex and Chocolate,” 166.
13. Ibid, 169.
14. Quoted in John Willoughby, “The Sexual Behavior of American GIs During the Early Years of the Occupation of Germany,” Journal of Military History 62, no. 1 (January 1998), 166–67.
15. Benoîte Groult and Flora Groult, Journal à quatre mains (Paris: Editions Denoël, 1962).
16. See Patrick Buisson, 1940–1945: Années érotiques (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009).
17. Rudi van Dantzig, Voor een verloren soldaat (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1986).
18. Buisson, 1940–1945, 324.
19. Urquhart, A Life in Peace and War, 81.
20. Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 (New York: Schocken Books, 2005).
21. Ibid., 99.
22. Ibid., 133.
23. Richard Wollheim, “A Bed out of Leaves,” London Review of Books, December 4, 2003, 3–7.
24. Shephard, After Daybreak, 138.
25. Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 188.
26. Shephard, The Long Road Home, 299.
27. Ibid., 70.
28. Norman Lewis, Naples ’44: An Intelligence Officer in the Italian Labyrinth (New York: Eland, 2011), 52.
29. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 126.
30. Ibid., 102.
31. Theodore Cohen, Remaking Japan: The American Occupation as New Deal, Herbert Passin, ed. (New York: Free Press, 1987), 123.
32. Letter to Donald Keene, in Otis Cary, ed., From a Ruined Empire: Letters—Japan, China, Korea, 1945–46 (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha, 1984), 96.
33. William L. Worden, “The G.I. Is Civilizing the Jap,” Saturday Evening Post, December 15, 1945, 18–22.
34. For more information on the panpan culture, John Dower’s Embracing Defeat is an excellent source.
35. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 134.
36. John LaCerda, The Conqueror Comes to Tea: Japan Under MacArthur (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1946), 51.
37. Ibid., 54.
38. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 579.
39. Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 79.
40. Klaus-Dietmar Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1995), 201.
41. Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 69.
42. Willoughby, “Sexual Behavior of American GIs,” 167.
43. Groult, Journal à quatre mains, 397.
44. MacDonogh, After the Reich, 236.
45. Nosaka Akiyuki, Amerika Hijiki [American Hijiki] (Tokyo: , 2003). First published 1972.
46. MacDonogh, After the Reich, 369.
47. The Times (London), July 9, 1945.
48. Willoughby, “Sexual Behavior of American GIs,” 158.
49. New York Times, June 13, 1945.
50. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005).
51. Nagai Kafu, Danchotei Nichijo II (Tokyo: Iwanami Pocket Books, 1987), 285.
52. Ibid, 278.
53. Quoted in Donald Keene, So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 149.
54. LaCerda, The Conqueror Comes to Tea, 23–24.
55. Henke, Die Amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, 199.
56. Ibid.
57. Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 204.
58. Elizabeth Heineman, What Difference Does a Husband Make? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 100.
59. Quoted in Willoughby, “Sexual Behavior of American GIs,” 169.
60. Keene, So Lovely a Country, 171.
61. Willoughby, “Sexual Behavior of American GIs,” 160.
62. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin, David Moore, tr. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), 39. First published 1952.
63. Quoted in Herman de Liagre Böhl in De Gids, periodical, May 1985, 250.
64. Ibid., 251.
65. Buisson, 1940–1945: Années érotiques, 411.
CHAPTER 2: HUNGER
1. J. L. van der Pauw, Rotterdam in de tweede wereldoorlog (Rotterdam: Boom, 2006), 679.
2. New York Times, May 12, 1945.
3. Shephard, After Daybreak, 109.
4. Edmund Wilson, Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches Among the Ruins of Italy, Greece, and England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1948), 125.
5. Ibid., 120.
6. Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation: 1944–1949, revised edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 103. First published 1994.
7. Stephen Spender, European Witness (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), 107.
8. Ibid., 106.
9. Wilson, Europe Without Baedeker, 136.
10. Ibid., 146.
11. Ibid., 147.
12. Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary 1944–1948 (Budapest: Corvina in association with Central European University Press, 1996), 193–94.
13. Carl Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht für das Kriegsministerium der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 142.
14. Spender, European Witness, 15.
15. New York Herald Tribune, December 31, 1945.
16. Cary, ed., From a Ruined Empire, 54.
17. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 103.
18. Ibid., 63.
19. MacDonogh, After the Reich, 315.
20. Ronald Spector, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York: Random House, 2007), 56.
21. Quoted in Bessel, Germany 1945, 334.
22. New York Times, October 27, 1945.
23. Julian Sebastian Bach Jr., America’s Germany: An Account of the Occupation (New York: Random House, 1946), 26.
24. Daily Mirror, October 5, 1945, quoted in Shephard, The Long Road Home, 129.
25. Quoted in Shephard, The Long Road Home, 156.
26. Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1380/15, paragraph 296, quoted in Cohen, Remaking Japan, 143.
27. MacDonogh, After the Reich, 479.
28. Statement to Congress quoted in Cohen, Remaking Japan, 145.
29. Quoted in Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 181.
30. Cohen, Remaking Japan, 144.
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31. Ibid., 142.
32. Herman de Liagre Böhl, De Gids, 246.
33. Willi A. Boelcke, Der Schwarzmarkt, 1945–1948 (Braunschweig: Westermann, 1986), 76.
34. Sakaguchi Ango, Darakuron, new paperback version (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 2008), 228. First published in 1946.
35. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 139.
36. Fujiwara Sakuya, Manshu, Shokokumin no Senki (Tokyo: , 1984), 82.
37. Quoted in Bessel, Germany 1945, 337.
38. Zuckmayer, Deutschlandbericht, 111.
39. Irving Heymont, Among the Survivors of the Holocaust: The Landsberg DP Camp Letters of Major Irving Heymont, United States Army (Cincinnati: The American Jewish Archives, 1982), 63.
40. Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 755.
41. See Shephard, The Long Way Home, 235.
42. Yank, August 10, 1945, 6.
43. Quoted in Stafford, Endgame, 1945, 507.
44. Alfred Döblin, Schicksalsreise: Bericht u. Bekenntnis: Flucht u. Exil 1940–1948 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1986), 276.
CHAPTER 3: REVENGE