Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (6 page)

Widows and Orphans

If the killing created some gaping ‘holes’ in the fabric of European society, there were also other, more subtle demographic absences, as if a single thread had been entirely removed from the tapestry. The most striking of these, and the one that was felt almost universally, was the absence of men. Photographs of provincial Britain on VE Day show street parties full of women and children celebrating the end of the war - apart from the old, or the occasional soldier on leave, men are mostly missing from the pictures. The people in these photographs are smiling, because they know that the absence of their menfolk is only temporary. In other parts of Europe there were no such certainties. Most German soldiers, and those from other Axis countries, were interned at the end of the war – many of these men would not be returning for years to come. And of course millions of men of all nationalities would never return. ‘In our thousands of miles that we travelled in Germany,’ wrote one British major after the war, ‘the most outstanding fact of all was the total absence of men between the ages of 17 and 40. It was a land of women, children and old men.’
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In many other parts of Europe entire generations of young women were doomed to spinsterhood, for the simple reason that most of the local young men were dead. In the Soviet Union, for example, there were over 13 million more women than men by the end of the war. The loss of men was felt most harshly in the countryside, where 80 per cent of the collective farm workers were women. According to the census of 1959, a third of all Soviet women who had reached the age of twenty during the decade 1929—38 remained unmarried.
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If Europe had become a continent of women, it was also a continent of children. In the chaotic aftermath of the war, many children had been separated from their families and were living together in gangs for safety. In 1946 there were still some 180,000 vagrant children living in Rome, Naples and Milan: they were forced to sleep in doorways and alleys, and kept themselves alive by theft, begging and prostitution. The problem was so great that the Pope himself appealed to the world for help for Italian children ‘wandering aimlessly through towns and villages, forsaken and exposed to many dangers’.
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In France they were often found sleeping in haystacks by farmers. In Yugoslavia and eastern Slovakia partisans found half-starved groups of them living in woods, caves and ruins. In the summer of 1945 there were 53,000 lost children in Berlin alone.
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One such child was found by British Lieutenant-Colonel William Byford-Jones living inside a crack in the Kaiser Wilhelm monument in Berlin. When he asked her what she was doing there she told him that it was the safest place she could find to sleep: ‘No one can find me. It is warm here, no one comes up.’ When the German Social Welfare Office came to fetch her it took hours of patient enticement to coax her out.
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Such stories point to another devastating absence in the fabric of Europe – the absence of parents. The problem was particularly bad in those parts of Europe that had been most devastated by the war. In Poland, for example, there were well over a million ‘war orphans’ – a term that in British and American official jargon meant those children who had lost at least one parent.
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In Germany there were probably a million more: in the British quarter alone there were 322,053 registered war orphans in 1947.
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The lack of fathers, or indeed any male role models, was so common that it was considered quite normal by the children themselves. ‘I can only remember one boy who had a father,’ says Andrzej C., a Pole from Warsaw, who lived in a succession of displaced persons camps immediately after the war. ‘Men were very strange creatures, because there were hardly any of them about.’
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According to UNESCO, a third of all children in Germany had lost their fathers.
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This lack of parents, and of parental supervision, could sometimes have unexpected perks. Andrzej C., for example, acknowledges the hardship of his childhood, but remembers with relish some of the games that he and the other boys used to play in and around the displaced persons camps of southern Germany. Andrzej himself had the opportunity to play with toys that most children today could only dream of.

We children were like feral dogs. Life was very interesting then! The fear was gone, the sun was shining, and there were interesting things to find … Once we found an unexploded artillery shell. We knew that was dangerous, so we kept it in a stream for a time because we didn’t know what to do with it … Eventually we put the shell in another bonfire and ran to the opposite side of the valley to see what happened. There was a massive explosion. We never thought that maybe someone might come along at the wrong time – we were completely thoughtless. Another time we found some German machine gun ammunition, lots of it. So we put it in a metal stove someone had thrown away in the forest, put some wood in and lit the stove. That was fantastic! It blew holes in it until it was like a sieve!

On other occasions Andrzej and his friends built bonfires out of jerrycans full of petrol, burned their eyebrows off by setting fire to smokeless powder, threw mortar shells at one another, and even found and fired a Panzerfaust anti-tank rocket: ‘That was also very good!’ His greatest fear throughout all this was not that he might be seriously injured, but that his mother might find out what he had been up to.

Once he even walked across a minefield in order to pick wild raspberries that were growing alongside some abandoned German army bunkers. ‘This was a few years after the war,’ he explains, ‘and the mines were visible. So we decided that we could walk across – after all, we could see them, so we were safe … We were stupid, and lucky. If you haven’t got brains, you’ve got to have luck. But they were lovely raspberries …’
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Andrzej was lucky in more ways than one. Not only did he avoid serious injury, but he still had his mother with him. Some time after the war his father, who had been fighting with the Polish 2nd Corps in Italy, also turned up. This was a luxury denied to some 13 million other European children.
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A significant proportion had lost both parents, and by September 1948 there were some – around 20,000 in total – who were still waiting to see if
any
relatives could be traced.
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Psychological studies of orphans show that they are often, understandably, far more susceptible to anxiety and depression than other children. They are more prone to erratic and anti-social behaviour, they are more likely to contemplate suicide, they have higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, lower self-esteem and poorer health.
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For young children, parents represent the solidity of the world and the way it works: when their parents are suddenly removed, they lose the foundations on which their understanding of the world is built. In addition to the normal process of bereavement, such children have to cope with the fact that the world, in their eyes, has become a place that is essentially unstable.

There is a sense in which the same process occurred in Europe as a whole during the war. The sombre atmosphere of absence changed the psychology of the continent on a fundamental level. Not only had tens of millions of individuals experienced the loss of friends, family and loved ones, but many regions were forced to cope with the extermination of entire communities, and all nations with the death of large slices of their populations. Any notion of stability was therefore lost – not only for individuals, but at every level of society.

If bereaved individuals are prone to act erratically, then the same is true of communities and even whole nations. If, in the coming pages, the reader begins to wonder why I am going into so much detail about what was lost during the war, it is worth keeping this in mind. Europe had suffered many upheavals before, but the sheer scale of the Second World War dwarfed anything that had happened for centuries. It left Europe not only bereft, but bewildered.

3

Displacement

If the Second World War killed more Europeans than any other war in history, it was also the cause of some of the biggest population movements the world has ever seen. Germany was awash with foreign workers in the spring of 1945. The country contained almost 8 million forced labourers at the end of the war, who had been brought to German farms and factories to work from every corner of Europe. In western Germany alone, UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, looked after and repatriated more than 6.5 million displaced persons. Most of them came from the Soviet Union, Poland and France, although there were also significant numbers of Italians, Belgians, Dutch, Yugoslavs and Czechs. A large proportion of these displaced persons were women and children. One of the many aspects of the Second World War that make it unique among modern wars is the fact that vast numbers of civilians were taken prisoner along with the traditional military captives. Women and children, as well as men, were effectively treated as war booty. They were enslaved in a way that had not been seen in Europe since the time of the Roman Empire.
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To make the situation in Germany even more complicated, millions of Germans were displaced within their own country. By the beginning of 1945 there were an estimated 4.8 million internal refugees, mostly in the south and east, who had been evacuated from bombed cities and a further 4 million displaced Germans who had fled the eastern reaches of the Reich in fear of the Red Army.
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When we add the nearly 275,000 British and American prisoners of war, this makes a grand total of at least 17 million displaced persons in Germany alone.
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This is a fairly conservative estimate, and other historians have placed the figure far higher.
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In Europe as a whole, according to one study, over 40 million people were forcibly displaced for varying periods during the war.
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As the end of hostilities approached, huge numbers headed out onto the roads to begin the long journey home. Derek Henry, a British sapper with the Royal Engineers, first began to encounter such groups near Minden in mid-April 1945.

We had been told to be on the lookout for pockets of German troops still putting up a fight but fortunately all we came across were thousands of DPs and refugees of every nationality, all heading towards us and the West: Bulgarians, Rumanians, Russians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and Poles —you name it, they were there, some in small groups of two or three each with their pitiful bundle of belongings heaped on to a pushbike or in a farm cart, others in large groups, piled onto overcrowded buses or on the backs of lorries, it was never ending. Whenever we stopped they would descend on us, hoping for some food.
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Later, according to US intelligence officer Saul Padover, ‘Thousands, tens of thousands, finally millions of liberated slaves were coming out of the farms and the factories and the mines and pouring onto the highways.’
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Reactions to this huge torrent of displaced people differed widely, depending on the person who witnessed it. For Padover, who had little time for Germans, it was ‘perhaps the most tragic human migration in history’, and simply more evidence of German guilt. For the local population, who were understandably nervous of such large groups of disgruntled foreigners, they represented a threat. ‘They looked like wild creatures,’ wrote one German woman after the war, ‘one could be afraid of them’.
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For those overwhelmed military government officers whose job was to gain some sort of control over them, they were merely a ‘swarming mass’.
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They filled the roads, which were already too damaged to accommodate them, and were only able to feed themselves by looting and robbing shops, stores and farmhouses along the way. In a country where the administrative systems had collapsed, where the local police force had all been killed or interned, where shelter was non-existent, and where food was no longer being distributed, they represented an impossible burden and an irresistible threat to the rule of law.

But this is to view these people from the outside. To the displaced themselves, they were simply people trying to find their way to safety. The lucky ones were gathered up by French, British or American soldiers, and transported to displacement centres in the west. But in a huge number of cases there were simply not enough Allied soldiers to deal with them. Hundreds of thousands were effectively abandoned to look after themselves. ‘There was nobody,’ remembers Andrzej C., who was just nine years old when the war came to an end. He, his mother and his sister had been forced labourers on a farm in Bohemia. In the last weeks of the war they were rounded up and taken to the Sudeten town of Carlsbad (modern Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), where the last of their German guards finally deserted them. ‘We found ourselves in a vacuum. There were no Russians, no Americans, no British. An absolute vacuum.’
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His mother decided to head westwards towards the American lines because she thought it would be safer than handing themselves over to the Soviet troops. They spent several weeks walking into Germany, crossing the American lines repeatedly as the US troops fell back towards their designated zone of occupation. Andrzej remembers this as an anxious time, far more stressful even than being a prisoner of the Germans.