Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (4 page)

The physical devastation of Europe was more than merely the loss of its buildings and its infrastructure. It was more, even, than the destruction of centuries of culture and architecture. The truly disturbing thing about the ruins was what they symbolized. The mountains of rubble were, as one British serviceman put it, ‘a monument to man’s power of self-destruction’.
⁴⁹
For hundreds of millions of people they were a daily reminder of the viciousness that the continent had witnessed, and which might at any time resurface.

Primo Levi, who had survived Auschwitz, claimed that there was something almost supernatural about the way the Germans had destroyed everything in their wake. To him, the broken remains of an army base at Slutsk, near Minsk, demonstrated ‘the genius of destruction, of anti-creation, here as at Auschwitz; it was the mystique of barrenness, beyond all demands of war or impulse for booty’.
⁵⁰
The destruction wreaked by the Allies was almost as bad: when Levi saw the ruins of Vienna he was overcome by a ‘heavy, threatening sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil which was present everywhere, nestling in the guts of Europe and the world, the seed of future harm’.
⁵¹

It is this undercurrent of ‘anti-creation’ and ‘definitive evil’ that makes the destruction of Europe’s towns and cities so disturbing to contemplate. What is implied in all the descriptions of this time, but never overtly stated, is that behind the physical devastation is something far worse. The ‘skeletons’ of houses and framed pictures sticking out of the rubble of Warsaw are highly symbolic: hidden beneath the ruins, both literally and metaphorically, there was a separate human and moral disaster.

2

Absence

Death Toll

If the physical devastation of Europe defies easy comprehension, then the human cost of the war does so to an even greater degree. Any description of such things is necessarily inadequate. I am reminded of the novelist Hans Erich Nossack’s attempt to describe the aftermath of the Hamburg firestorm in 1943: ‘Oh, as I ride back in memory down that road into Hamburg I feel the urge to stop and give up. Why go on? I mean, why write it all down? Wouldn’t it be better to surrender it to oblivion for all time?’
¹
And yet, as Nossack himself realized, it is the duty of eyewitnesses and historians to record such events, even if their attempts to give them meaning are necessarily doomed to failure.

When describing catastrophes on such a vast scale, the historian is always presented with conflicting impulses. On the one hand he can present the raw statistics, and leave it to the reader to imagine what such numbers mean. In the aftermath of the war governments and aid agencies produced figures for just about every aspect of the conflict, from the numbers of soldiers and civilians killed to the economic effect of bombing on specific industries. Across Europe there was an official urge to measure, to estimate, to quantify – perhaps in what Nossack called ‘an attempt to banish the dead by means of numbers’.
²

On the other hand there is a temptation to ignore the figures altogether, and merely record the experiences of the ordinary people who witnessed these events. In the aftermath of the Hamburg firestorm, for example, it was not the fact of 40,000 deaths that upset the German population – it was the manner of these deaths. Stories of a raging inferno, of hurricane force winds and blizzards of sparks which set fire to people’s hair and clothes – these things capture the imagination far more effectively than raw numbers. In any case, as people instinctively understood even at the time, the statistics were not reliable. In a city where bodies were concealed beneath mountains of rubble, where some had been fused together by the intense heat while others were reduced to mere ashes, it was impossible to measure the number of dead with any kind of precision. Whatever approach one takes, it is impossible to convey more than the merest glimpse of what such a catastrophe actually means. Conventional history is simply not equipped to describe what Nossack called ‘something else … strangeness itself … the essentially not possible’.
³

In some respects the Hamburg firestorm can be considered a microcosm of what happened to Europe in the war. As with the rest of Europe, the bombing had transformed the city into a landscape of ruins – and yet there were still parts of it that lay serenely, miraculously, untouched. As happened in many other parts of the continent, whole suburbs were evacuated in the wake of the firestorm, and remained virtually deserted for years to come. The victims, again as elsewhere, came from many nationalities, and all walks of life.

However, there are also some stark contrasts between the fate of this city and that of the rest of the continent. Horrific as the bombing of Hamburg was, it actually killed less than 3 per cent of the population. The death rate in Europe as a whole was more than twice that. The number of people who died as a direct result of the Second World War in Europe is truly mind-boggling: between 35 and 40 million people in total.
⁴
That is the equivalent of somewhere between the entire prewar population of Poland (35 million) and that of France (42 million).
⁵
Or, to put it another way, it was the same number of deaths as would have occurred had the Hamburg firestorm been repeated every night for a thousand nights.

The total figure masks some huge disparities between countries. For example Britain’s losses, though horrific, were comparatively light. Approximately 300,000 Britons were killed in the Second World War - about a third as many as were killed in the First.
⁶
Likewise, over half a million French people were killed, around 210,000 Dutch, 86,000 Belgians and almost 310,000 Italians.
⁷
Germany, by contrast, lost almost 4.5 million soldiers and a further 1.5 million civilians. About as many German civilians died beneath Allied bombs alone as did Britons, Belgians and Dutchmen from all causes during the whole of the war.
⁸

2. The dead of Europe, 1939—45

Once again, the further east, the worse the casualties. Greece suffered about 410,000 war dead – a total that does not appear markedly worse than some of the other countries already listed until one realizes that Greece had a prewar population of only about 7 million. The war therefore killed about 6 per cent of all Greeks.
⁹
Likewise Hungary’s 450,000 war deaths represented almost 5 per cent of the population.
¹⁰
In Yugoslavia just over a million people were killed, or 6.3 per cent of the population.
¹¹
Deaths in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania probably amounted to between 8 and 9 per cent of all prewar Baits.
¹²
As a nation, Poland suffered the most proportionally: more than one Pole in every six was killed – a total of over 6 million people in all.
¹³

The highest absolute number of war deaths came in the Soviet Union: approximately 27 million people.
¹⁴
This incomprehensible figure once again necessarily hides huge regional variations. There are no reliable figures for the individual regions of Belarus or Ukraine, for example, which were not internationally regarded as separate countries at the time – but most estimates of Ukrainian war dead put the figure at between 7 and 8 million. If that figure is correct, one in every five Ukrainians was killed by the war.
¹⁵
The Belarusian death toll is reputed to have been the highest of all, with a quarter of the population killed.
¹⁶

Today, as in 1945, it is almost impossible to grasp what such statistics mean in practice, and any attempt to bring the figures to life is doomed to fail. One could say that the total death toll represents an average of one killing every five seconds, for almost six long years – but such things are impossible to imagine. Even those who experienced the war, who witnessed massacres, who saw fields full of dead bodies and mass graves brimming with corpses are unable to comprehend the true scale of the killing that took place across Europe during the war.

Perhaps the only way to come close to understanding what happened is to stop trying to imagine Europe as a place populated by the dead, and to think of it instead as a place characterized by absence. Almost everyone alive when the war ended had lost friends or relatives to it. Whole villages, whole towns and even whole cities had been effectively erased, and with them their populations. Large areas of Europe that had once been home to thriving, bustling communities were now almost entirely empty of people. It was not the presence of death that defined the atmosphere of postwar Europe, but rather the absence of those who had once occupied Europe’s sitting rooms, its shops, its streets, its markets.

From the distance of the twenty-first century, we tend to look back on the end of the war as a time of celebration. We have seen images of sailors kissing girls in New York’s Times Square, and smiling troops of all nationalities linking arms along Paris’s Champs Elysées. However, for all the celebration that took place at the end of the war, Europe was actually a place in mourning. The sense of loss was both personal and communal. Just as the continent’s towns and cities had been replaced by a landscape of crumbling ruins, so too had families and communities been replaced by a series of gaping holes.

The Vanishing of the Jews

Some absences were of course greater than others. The most obvious absence, particularly in eastern Europe, was that of the Jews. In an interview for the oral history project at London’s Imperial War Museum, Edith Baneth, a Jewish survivor from Czechoslovakia, summed up how this absence is still felt on a personal level today:

When it comes to the point of thinking of the families which we all lost, it can never be put right. They can’t be replaced – the second and third generations still feel it. When we have weddings and barmitzvahs, from other sides there are maybe fifty or sixty people from their family. When my son had his barmitzvah, and his wedding, there was no family whatsoever - that’s the way the second and third generation feel the Holocaust, they miss their family. My son hasn’t
experienced
a family life – having uncles, aunts, grandmothers, grandfathers. There is just that
hole.
¹⁷

In 1945, while most people counted the family and friends that they had
lost
to the war, Jewish survivors tended to count those they still
had left.
Sometimes there were none. In the memorial book for the Jews of Berlin, the deaths of entire extended families are listed alongside each other - from tiny children to their great-grandparents. There are six pages of Abrahams, eleven pages of Hirsches, twelve pages of Levys and thirteen pages of Wolffs.
¹⁸
Similar books could be made for any of the Jewish communities that used to exist throughout Europe. Victor Breitburg, for example, lost his entire family in Poland in 1944. ‘I was the only survivor out of fifty-four people in my family. I went back to Łód
to see if I could find some of my family members, but there was no one.’
¹⁹