Doris L. Bergen - The Holocaust: A New History

This book ends in May 1945, but the legacies of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust extend much further. Perhaps one account can begin to illustrate some of the personal and political repercussions of the history described in the previous chapters. Like many stories that end in death, the details can only be pieced together in a fragmentary way, but they are nonetheless significant.

This account begins in the mid-1930s in the Soviet Union. Frightened by manifestations of antisemitism under Stalin, a young Russian Jew whom we will call N decided to leave his home and move west. He settled in France, where he built a life for himself until the Germans invaded in 1940 and his existence again became precarious.

For a while N succeeded in evading the Nazi dragnet, but sometime in 1942 or 1943 German or French police rounded him up, along with many other foreign Jews living in France and sent him east to a Nazi camp. Against terrible odds, N survived more than a year as a prisoner and slave of Nazi Germany. In mid-April 1945, when British troops arrived at the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, N was one of the inmates liberated. Under the terms of an Allied agreement, N, a citizen of the Soviet Union, was turned over to Soviet authorities. Instead of relief from years of torment at Nazi German hands, he soon found himself again on a deportation transport, this time to Siberia. Suspicious of the loyalty of Soviet citizens who had spent years outside the country, Stalin had tens of thousands of people like N Jews, POWs, forced labourers sent directly from their liberation to labour camps and prisons in remote regions, where they toiled in massive industrialisation projects.

N did not survive this second round of abuse. Ns son, who lived through the war in France and later moved to New York, spent years trying to trace his father through the Red Cross and other international organisations. Decades after the war ended, he received the news he had long feared: his father had died in Siberia.

The fate of N highlights several facts about the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War. The arrival of Allied forces and the collapse of Nazi Germany were not miracles that could undo or even stop the spirals of violence and misery unleashed by years of brutality. Although in hindsight it is easy to speak of liberation, for many individuals and groups of people, the end of the war meant continued and even new forms of misery. The defeat and demise of Hitlers Germany unleashed a massive movement of people within Europe, some of it voluntary, much of it coerced. Wartime atrocities created urgent demands for justice, even as the enormity of the crimes committed and the overwhelming death and destruction made any kind of restitution painfully inadequate and often impossible. Whether they had been victims, perpetrators, or bystanders in Nazi barbarity and many Europeans had reason to count themselves in more than one of those categories people faced the challenge of building lives for themselves and what was left of their families and communities with scarce resources and restricted freedom and in a climate of distrust and grief.

As Allied troops moved into German-held territory in the last stages of the war, they encountered shocking scenes. The Soviets were the first to reach the major killing centres. Even they, many of whom had experienced and witnessed Nazi German brutality firsthand, were stunned by the horror of places like Auschwitz-Birkenau. Soldiers from the United States and Britain who fought their way into Germany from the west were even less prepared for what they found: mass graves, abandoned camps, cattle trucks full of corpses and emaciated, dying prisoners.

On 15 April 1945, the first British tanks entered the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Terrorised and enfeebled, inmates of the camp could not believe they were free. And in fact, freedom did not come easily. After initial contact, the British tanks moved on. For the next forty-eight hours, the camp was only nominally under British control. Hungarian soldiers whom the Germans had stationed there as guards remained in command. In two days they shot more than eighty Jews and non-Jews for such offences as taking potato peels from the kitchen. Even after British troops entered Belsen in force, for more than two weeks three hundred inmates continued to die daily of typhus and starvation. Horror on the scale of the Holocaust did not simply disappear with the arrival of the Allied liberators.

The images captured on film by photographers and journalists who accompanied and followed Allied forces horrified people back home, just as the sights themselves stunned and sickened the soldiers who saw them first hand. Decades later those images continue to haunt us and to shape the way we perceive and present atrocities in our own time. The questions they raise remain pressing even though they have almost become clichs: How could human beings do such things to other people? How can we go on living in a world where crimes and suffering of such magnitude are possible?

For those who survived, the end of the Second World War brought the realisation of all that had been destroyed. Alone, without family or friends, often far from what had been their homes, many survivors, particularly Jews, had nowhere to go. Separated from their parents for years, some Jewish children no longer knew their birth names or even that they came from Jewish families. Many Jews had seen their Gentile neighbours turn against them, denouncing them to Nazi officials and stealing their possessions. Could they now simply go back as if nothing had happened? In Poland, Ukraine, Hungary and elsewhere, Jewish survivors who returned home to search for family members or reclaim their property were often met with violent hostility from the new owners. Some Jews were attacked and beaten; some were killed.

Non-Jewish victims of Nazism faced their own problems as they discovered that true liberation was impossible in hostile surroundings. Gypsies who had managed to live through the Nazi assault were no more welcome in many places after May 1945 than they had been before or during the war. Few non-Gypsies realised or cared that Nazi Germany had singled out the Roma for particular abuse. Only decades after the war would Gypsies gradually begin to be acknowledged legally and unofficially as victims of Nazism. In some places for example, in the western zones of occupied Germany homosexual men were released from Nazi prisons and concentration camps only to be arrested again and incarcerated under old or new laws that criminalised homosexuality. Jehovahs Witnesses, thousands of whom endured imprisonment in Hitlers Germany, faced renewed persecution, especially under communism in East Germany. Looking back at Nazism and the Holocaust, we often vow never again, but for the Jews hounded out of Polish cities and towns by pogroms in 1945 and 1946, the Jehovahs Witnesses sitting in communist jails in the 1950s and the Gypsies crippled and left homeless by arson attacks in Romania in the 1990s, a more apt slogan might have been Still?

The Second World War sparked the movement of the largest number of people in the shortest period of time that the world had ever known. Refugees, fugitives, displaced persons, deportees and expellees jammed the roadways and waterways of Europe and spilled over into Central Asia and the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of people, like the Russian Jew N, were transported eastward, against their will, as prisoners and labourers of the Soviet Union. More of the wave of motion, however, was westward. An estimated ten million refugees poured into the western zones of occupied Germany alone, those parts controlled by the United States, Britain and France.

The motivations of those fleeing west varied. Some had experienced communism in Stalins Soviet Union and would risk anything to avoid a return to that misery. Some were ethnic Germans whose families had lived in Eastern Europe for generations. Nazi authorities had begun evacuating them already before the war ended, aware that they would be targets for revenge. Many ethnic Germans had eagerly served the cause of race and space and benefited from the deprivation and expropriation of their neighbours. In some cases, Soviet and local authorities expelled ethnic Germans, both to remove potential troublemakers and to free up space for resettlement programmes of their own. Ethnic Germans were forced out of western Poland, for example, at least partly because the Soviets needed homes for Poles they had pushed out of the eastern parts of the country, territories annexed to the Soviet Union after 1945. Other East Europeans, who like many ethnic Germans had collaborated with Nazism, also had reasons to flee west, now that their German protectors had retreated. Fearing the wrath of their neighbours, they sought security or at least anonymity. The Red Armys horrific record of rape and plunder as its troops penetrated deeper into central Europe added another urgent reason for many people to try to escape westward.