Year Zero (11 page)

Japanese who fled farther south, mostly on foot, to escape the Soviet troops often fared little better. Food ran out. Typhus broke out on lice-infested bodies. Babies were stifled to death to stop their cries from alerting vengeful Chinese, Koreans, or Soviet soldiers. Small children were handed over to Chinese peasants in the hope that they might at least survive that way. All in all, more than eleven thousand Japanese settlers lost their lives in these ordeals, about one-third by committing suicide.

Stories of Soviet violence spread fast, provoking odd measures to appease the Red Army troops. In the city of Andong, on the border of Manchuria and Korea, the Japanese community decided to greet the Soviet troops with a welcoming committee. Japanese children were issued with little red flags, an arch was erected at the railway station, festooned with more red flags and slogans expressing the deep feelings of friendship for the Soviet Union, and the local Japanese notables had prepared effusive speeches of welcome. They waited, and waited, and waited. The children fell asleep, still clutching their flags. It was already late at night when the Japanese finally heard that the Red Army had decided to take a different route, and would not be coming to Andong just yet.

Japanese accounts tend to leave out the suffering of Chinese at the hands of Soviet troops, but it is true that Japanese civilians suffered more. Their wealth, or assumed wealth, was clearly an incentive. The witness quoted earlier related: “Soviet soldiers swaggered about town, as though they owned it, with wrist watches on both arms, cameras dangling from their shoulders, fountain pens stuck in rows in their coat pockets.”
¹¹
As was the case of Soviet troops in Germany, many soldiers were unfamiliar with the trappings of the modern world. When watches stopped working, because their new owners had failed to wind them up, they were angrily tossed away—only to be picked up by Chinese urchins who sold them on the black market. Electric ceiling fans filled some soldiers with such fear that they would shoot their guns at them.

Still, the looting of civilians by Soviet soldiers would not have been on anything like this scale were it not for official encouragement, or indeed example. What is stealing a few watches compared to the wholesale looting of Japanese factories, mines, railways, and banks? The only way the Soviets could justify this—not that they tried very hard to do so—was by treating it as a right in the people's war against fascism, which was, in communist propaganda, simply an extension of capitalism. Theft was part of the revolutionary project. In any case, humiliation, unless it is the humiliation of the poor thrust into a world of the relatively rich, cannot really account for Soviet behavior in northeastern China. Germany was a different matter. And there Soviet violence was even worse.

The surest way to repay humiliation with humiliation is to rape the women, in public, in front of the men, who are helpless to do anything about it. It is the oldest form of terror in human conflict, and not specific to Russians. Dr. Hans Graf von Lehndorff was right about that. But the justifications people use for their savagery are not always the same. The disparity in wealth, as well as racialism, created a vicious circle of mutually hostile propaganda that made Soviet behavior in Germany especially brutal. Germans were told to fight to the death, rather than to see their women fall prey to the “Asiatic” or “Mongol” barbarians. The harder the Germans resisted, the more the “barbarians” wanted to exact their price
for brutality that had been far greater in scale than anything they did to the Germans. But here too vengeance was related to the war against capitalism. German women were not just depicted in Soviet propaganda as Nazis, just as bad as the men, but as fat, pampered, rich Nazis. In one Russian cartoon, a wealthy German woman, her daughter, and her maid, surrounded by loot from Russia, frantically look for something to use as a white flag of surrender. Ironically, a caricature of a German woman (“Miss Veronica Dankeschön”) in a U.S. Army magazine, plump, blond, her skirt embroidered with swastikas, looks identical. The only difference is that the GIs were warned to stay away from Miss Veronica to avoid VD, while the Soviet soldiers were invited to seize what was their due. As the Russian ex–slave worker says to her former mistress in another Soviet cartoon: “Now you'll see, Frau. I've come to collect.”
¹²

And collect they did. The anonymous author of
A Woman in Berlin
described in harrowing detail the humiliation visited on women, which showed the kind of disgust expressed by the soldier who wanted to smash his fist into all those neat little gewgaws in bourgeois German homes. On one of the many occasions that she is raped by a soldier, while others await their turn, she notes how her attacker barely seems to notice her. She is an object too, “which makes it all the more frightening when he suddenly throws me onto the bed . . . I feel fingers at my mouth, smell the reek of horses and tobacco. I open my eyes. Adroitly the fingers force my jaws apart. Eye looks into eye. Then the man above me slowly lets his spittle dribble into my mouth . . .”
¹³

Raping German women, especially those who appeared to have unlimited wealth, and especially in front of the emasculated ex-warriors of the “master race,” made the despised
Untermenschen
feel like men again. In the words of a senior Soviet officer in Berlin, “in the first flush of victory our fellows no doubt derived a certain satisfaction from making it hot for those
Herrenvolk
women.”
¹⁴
However, it went on well beyond that first flush of victory. In its wild form, freed from any official restraints, the raping of German women continued through the summer of 1945. After that, Soviet military and civilian officials tried to crack down, at least
sporadically, sometimes with draconian measures, including the death penalty. In fact, the risk of being raped by a Soviet soldier ceased only once the troops were confined to their barracks in 1947.

•   •   •

IF THE WISH TO OVERCOME
humiliation and restore masculine pride is one plausible explanation for the violence of Soviet soldiers in German lands, it might also explain the vengeful behavior of men who had suffered far less than the Soviets. During the so-called wild purge (
l'épuration sauvage
) in France, which took place in 1944, before the war was even over, about six thousand people were killed as German collaborators and traitors by various armed bands with links to the resistance, often communists. Double that number of women were paraded around, stripped naked, their heads shaven, swastikas daubed on various parts of their anatomy. They were jeered at, spat on, and otherwise tormented. Some were locked up in improvised jails, and raped by their jailers. More than two thousand women were killed. Similar scenes, though not nearly on the same scale, took place in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and other countries liberated from German occupation. Sometimes, the naked women were tarred and feathered in the traditional manner of vengeful mobs.

Female collaboration with the enemy was mostly about sex. Unlike treason, this was not a crime that existed in any legal code before. One could call it tactless, selfish, indecent, an affront, but not a crime. So a new law was devised in France, in 1944, to deal with such cases. People who had undermined the national morale by unpatriotic behavior, such as sleeping with the occupiers, were guilty of “national unworthiness” (
indignité nationale
) and stripped of their civil rights.

All kinds of people, men and women, were purged, often with extreme violence, after May 1945 in France. About four thousand people lost their lives. Many had been guilty of treason; others were purged for reasons of personal vengeance, or for political reasons, if they stood in the way of the Communist Party, for example. But popular wrath fell disproportionately,
and most publicly, on women accused of “horizontal collaboration.” This, too, can be explained at least partly through a common sense of humiliation. The submission of France by superior German force was often described in sexual terms. The rampant German army, representing a powerful, virile nation, had forced weak, decadent, effeminate France to submit to its will. Horizontal collaboration, the giggling young
française
perched on the knees of the Boche, swilling fine French champagne, was the most painful symbol of this submission. And so it was the women who had to be punished with maximum disgrace.

Already before national liberation, and the wild purge, Frenchwomen had been given the right to vote for the first time, in April 1944 to be exact. The following sentences, from
Le Patriote de l'Eure
, a resistance newspaper, published in February 1945, reveal a great deal about contemporary attitudes to the women who had strayed into the wrong arms:

Soon we shall see these women voting side by side with our valiant ordinary French women, good mothers, wives of prisoners of war. But surely we should not allow those who sniggered at us, who threatened us, who swooned in the arms of the Boches, to have any say in the destiny of France reborn.
¹⁵

Contrast the sniggering, swooning floozies with those virtuous mothers and POW wives, and one senses the shame, as well as the strong puritanical streak. The horizontal collaborators were not only unpatriotic, but also threats to bourgeois family morals. Add to this the always toxic element of economic envy, and righteous indignation becomes truly explosive. From the indictments of the wicked women it is not always clear which was considered worse, the sexual immorality or the material benefits that came with it. Sleeping with the enemy was bad enough, but living better than everyone else made it a far graver crime. The case of one Madame Polge, wife of a well-known football player in Nimes, serves as a grim illustration.

During the occupation, Mme Polge became the mistress of the local
German commander, whose French family name was Saint Paul. In exchange for her services, she received all manner of material benefits. In the words of a contemporary newspaper,
Le Populaire
, Mme Polge “admitted to having two or three liters of milk delivered every day, as well as fresh game, twice or three times a week, from the Boche commandant. She was also able to keep her house nice and warm, as well as having her hair done, and all that without paying a centime . . . And meanwhile working-class people and their children were dying of hunger . . .”
¹⁶
Mme Polge was sentenced to death. Shaven and stripped, she was driven through the streets to the execution ground. After she was shot, her corpse was displayed to the good people of Nimes, who covered it in spit, and prodded it with a broomstick, the final indignity befitting a modern witch.

The most enthusiastic persecutors of
filles de Boches
were usually not people who had distinguished themselves in acts of courage during the war. Once Liberation came to formerly occupied countries, all kinds of men managed to present themselves as members of resistance groups, strutting around with newly acquired armbands and Sten guns, disporting themselves as heroes as they hunted for traitors and bad women. Vengeance is one way of covering up a guilty conscience for not standing up when it was dangerous. This too appears to be a universal phenomenon, of all times. As the truly heroic Polish dissident Adam Michnik once put it, when he protested against purging former communists after 1989, he had nothing to be ashamed of before, so he had no need to prove that he was a hero by pointing fingers at others now. This humane attitude, always rare, was not exactly common in 1945.

Greed, prejudice, and a guilty conscience might help us understand the most perverse form of revenge in 1945, the persecution of Jews in Poland. The ancient Jewish community in Poland was almost annihilated. Three million Polish Jews were murdered during the Nazi occupation, either shot or gassed, mostly on Polish territory. Ten percent managed to survive, hidden by Polish Gentiles, or living in exile in far-flung parts of the Soviet Union. The physically and mentally wounded survivors who came staggering back to their hometowns and villages, after having lost all
or most of their friends and relatives, usually found that they were no longer welcome. Worse than that: they were often threatened and driven out of town. Other people had moved in to their houses. The synagogues were destroyed. What possessions they might have left behind had long ago been stolen by others, frequently former neighbors. And it was a rare person who was willing to give anything back.

This happened in other parts of Europe as well. Quite a number of Jews returning home to Amsterdam, Brussels, or Paris found that they had no home left there, either. But in Poland, especially outside the main cities, Jews were in physical danger. There were cases of families being pulled off trains, robbed of all their possessions, and killed on the spot. More than a thousand Jews were murdered in Poland between the summers of 1945 and 1946. Even in the cities, they were not always safe.

In August 11, 1945, a rumor started in Krakow that Jews had killed a Christian child in the synagogue. This was an updated version of an age-old anti-Semitic canard. People spoke darkly of Jewish survivors using Christian blood to revive their ravaged health. Soon, a mob gathered, led by policemen and militiamen. The synagogue was attacked, Jewish homes were plundered, and men, women, and children were beaten up in the streets. Several people (the exact number is not known) were murdered. It was a bloody pogrom against people who had only just survived a genocide. Badly wounded Jews were taken to the hospital, where some of them were assaulted again while awaiting surgery. One female survivor recalls “the comments of the escorting soldier and the nurse, who spoke about us as Jewish scum whom they had to save, and that they shouldn't be doing this because we murdered children, that all of us should be shot.” Another nurse promised to rip the Jews apart as soon as surgery was over. A railway man at the hospital remarked: “It's a scandal that a Pole does not have the civil courage to hit a defenseless person.”
¹⁷
This man, true to his word, proceeded to beat a wounded Jew.