Year Zero (45 page)

Authors: Ian Buruma

BOOK: Year Zero

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It wouldn't last, of course. Nothing ever does. But that is no reason not to pay tribute to the men and women who were alive in 1945, to their hardships, and to their hopes and aspirations, even though many of these would turn to ash, as everything eventually does.

EPILOGUE

D
id the war really end in 1945? Some have claimed 1989 as the year that hostilities finally came to a close, for it was only then that Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other parts of east and central Europe were released from communist rule. The division of Europe, inflicted by Stalin in 1945, was one of the rawest wounds of World War II. Bad faith had followed bad faith. Czechoslovakia, a parliamentary democracy, was first carved up by Hitler in 1938, with the connivance of France and Britainâas Neville Chamberlain said, it was “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” In 1939, Britain had gone to war with Germany, supposedly to restore the integrity of Poland, a promise that was never fulfilled.

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 CitroÃ«n 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 BrÃ¼der
”) 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.