PART 1
LIBERATION COMPLEX
CHAPTER 1
EXULTATION
When Allied troops in Germany liberated millions of prisoners of Hitler’s fallen Reich—in concentration camps, slave labor camps, prisoner of war camps—they expected to find them docile, suitably grateful, and happy to cooperate in any way they could with their liberators. Sometimes, no doubt, that is what happened. Often, however, they encountered what became known as the “Liberation complex.” In the slightly bureaucratic words of one eyewitness: “This involved revenge, hunger and exultation, which three qualities combined to make displaced persons, when newly liberated, a problem as to behavior and conduct, as well as for care, feeding, disinfection and repatriation.”1
The Liberation complex was not confined to inmates of DP (displaced person) camps; it could have been used to describe entire countries newly liberated, and even in some respects the defeated nations.
I was born too late, in too prosperous a country, to notice any effects of hunger. But there were faint echoes still of revenge and exultation. Vengeance, against people who had collaborated with the enemy or, worse, slept with him, continued to be exacted in a quiet, almost surreptitious way, mostly at a very low level. One did not buy groceries from a certain store, or cigarettes from another, for “everyone” knew that the owners had been “wrong” during the war.
Exultation, on the other hand, was institutionalized in Holland by turning it into a yearly ritual: May 5, Liberation Day.
As I remember it from my childhood, the sun always shone on May 5, with church bells ringing, and red, white, and blue flags snapping in the light spring breeze. December 5, the feast of St. Nicholas, may be a bigger family occasion, but Liberation Day is the great show of patriotic joy, or at least it was when I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. Since the Dutch did not liberate themselves on May 5, 1945, but were freed from German occupation by Canadians, British, American, and Polish troops, the annual outburst of patriotic pride is slightly odd. But still, since the Dutch, like the Americans and the British, like to believe that freedom defines the national identity, it makes sense that the German defeat became blurred in national consciousness with the collective memory of defeating the Spanish crown in the Eighty Years’ War straddling the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Sentimental tears come easily to someone of my generation, born just six years after the war, confronted with images of Scottish bagpipers walking through machine-gun fire on a Normandy beach, or French citizens singing the “Marseillaise,” not, of course, through any memories of our own, but through Hollywood movies. But I saw a little bit of the old exultation, precisely fifty years after May 5, 1945, when the entry of Canadian Army soldiers in Amsterdam was reenacted to celebrate the anniversary. The fact that Allied troops didn’t actually arrive in Amsterdam until May 8 is now beside the point. The original occasion must have been extraordinary. In the account of a British war correspondent on the spot: “We have been kissed, cried on, hugged, thumped, screamed at and shouted at until we are bruised and exhausted. The Dutch have ransacked their gardens so that the rain of flowers which falls on the Allied vehicles is endless.”2
Fifty years later, elderly Canadian men, medals pinned to tight and faded battle dress, rode into the city once more on the old jeeps and armored cars, saluting the crowds with tears in their eyes, remembering the days when they were kings, days their grandchildren have long tired of hearing about, days of exultation before the war heroes settled down in Calgary or Winnipeg to become dentists or accountants.
What struck me more than the old men reliving their finest days was the behavior of elderly Dutch women, dressed like the respectable matrons they undoubtedly were. These women were in a state of frenzy, a kind of teenage ecstasy, screaming like girls at a rock concert, stretching their arms to the men in their jeeps, reaching for their uniforms: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” They couldn’t help themselves. They, too, were reliving their hours of exultation. It was one of the most weirdly erotic scenes I had ever witnessed.
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IN FACT, AS ALREADY NOTED, the Canadians did not come to Amsterdam on May 5, nor was the war officially over on that date. True, on May 4, Grand Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and General Eberhard Hans Kinzel had come to the tent of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (“Monty”) on the Lüneburg Heath to surrender all German forces in northwest Germany, Holland, and Denmark. A young British army officer named Brian Urquhart saw the German’s rush along a country road to Monty’s HQ in their Mercedes-Benzes. Not long before that he had been one of the first Allied officers to enter the nearby concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, where most of the liberated prisoners “seemed beyond articulate speech, even supposing we had found a common language.” What he thought were logs from a distance were piles of corpses “as far as the eye could see.”3 When Admiral von Friedeburg, still dressed in a splendid leather greatcoat, was confronted a few days later with an American news report of German atrocities, he took this as an insult to his country and flew into a rage.
On May 6, another ceremony took place in a half-destroyed farmhouse near Wageningen where General Johannes Blaskowitz surrendered his troops to Canadian lieutenant-general Charles Foulkes. There was little left of Arnhem itself, after having been pounded to rubble in September 1944, when British, American, and Polish troops had tried to force their way through Holland in the military catastrophe known as Operation Market-Garden. One of the people who had seen this disaster coming was Brian Urquhart, then an intelligence officer working for one of the operation’s chief planners, General F. A. M. “Boy” Browning, a dashing figure with a great deal of blood on his hands. When Urquhart showed his commanding officer photographic evidence of German tank brigades waiting around Arnhem to blow the Allies away, he was told to take sick leave. No one, certainly not a lowly intelligence officer, was allowed to spoil Monty’s party.*
But still the war was not over, even in Holland. On May 7 crowds had gathered on Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam in front of the Royal Palace, cheering, dancing, singing, waving the orange flag of the Dutch royal family, in anticipation of the triumphant British and Canadian troops whose arrival was imminent. Watching the happy throng from the windows of a gentlemen’s club on the square, German naval officers decided in a last-minute fit of pique to fire into the crowd with a machine gun mounted on the roof. Twenty-two people died, and more than a hundred were badly injured.
Even that was not the very last violent act of the war. On May 13, more than a week after Liberation Day, two men were executed. They were German anti-Nazis, who had deserted from the German army and hidden among the Dutch. One had a Jewish mother. They emerged from their hiding places on May 5, and turned themselves in to members of the Dutch resistance, who handed them over to the Canadians. They then fell victim to a typical wartime muddle. When Montgomery accepted the German surrender on May 4, there were not enough Allied troops in Holland to disarm the Germans or feed the POWs. For the time being German officers were allowed to remain in command of their men. The two unfortunate German deserters were placed among other German soldiers in a disused Ford assembly plant outside Amsterdam. A German military court was hastily improvised by officers keen to assert their authority for the very last time, and the men were sentenced to death. The Germans asked the Canadians for guns to execute the “traitors.” The Canadians, unsure of the rules and unwilling to disrupt the temporary arrangement, complied. And the men were swiftly executed. Others apparently met a similar fate, until the Canadians, rather too late, put a stop to such practices.4
The official date for the end of the war in Europe, V-E Day, was in fact May 8. Even though the unconditional surrender of all German troops was signed in a schoolhouse in Rheims on the evening of May 6, the celebrations could not yet begin. Stalin was furious that General Eisenhower had presumed to accept the German surrender for the eastern as well as western fronts. Only the Soviets should have that privilege, in Berlin. Stalin wanted to postpone V-E Day till May 9. This, in turn, annoyed Churchill.
People all over Britain were already busy baking bread for celebratory sandwiches; flags and banners had been prepared; church bells were waiting to be tolled. In the general confusion, it was the Germans who first announced the end of the war in a radio broadcast from Flensburg, where Admiral Doenitz was still nominally in charge of what remained of the tattered German Reich. This was picked up by the BBC. Special editions of the French, British, and U.S. newspapers soon hit the streets. In London, large crowds gathered around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, expecting Churchill to announce victory so the biggest party in history could finally begin. Ticker tape started raining in the streets of New York. But still there was no official announcement from the Allied leaders that the war with Germany was over.
Just before midnight on May 8, at the Soviet HQ in Karlshorst, near my father’s old labor camp, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the brutal military genius, at last accepted the German surrender. Once more, Admiral von Friedeberg put his signature to the German defeat. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, expressionless, rigid, every inch the Prussian soldier, told the Russians that he was horrified by the extent of destruction wrought on the German capital. Whereupon a Russian officer asked Keitel whether he had been equally horrified when on his orders, thousands of Soviet villages and towns were obliterated, and millions of people, including many children, were buried under the ruins. Keitel shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.5
Zhukov then asked the Germans to leave, and the Russians, together with their American, British, and French allies, celebrated in style with teary-eyed speeches and huge amounts of wine, cognac, and vodka. A banquet was held in that same room the following day when Zhukov toasted Eisenhower as one of the greatest generals of all time. The toasts went on and on and on, and the Russian generals, including Zhukov, danced, until few men were left standing.
On May 8, crowds were already going crazy in New York. They were also pouring into the streets in London, but a peculiar hush still fell over the British crowds, as though they were waiting for Churchill’s voice to set off the celebrations. Churchill, who had decided to ignore Stalin’s wish to postpone V-E Day till the ninth, would speak at 3 P.M. President Truman had already spoken earlier. General Charles de Gaulle, refusing to be upstaged by Churchill, insisted on making his announcement to the French at exactly the same time.
Churchill’s speech on the BBC was heard on radios around the world. There was no more room to move on Parliament Square outside Westminster, where loudspeakers had been installed. People were pressed against the gates of Buckingham Palace. Cars could no longer get through the crowds in the West End. Big Ben sounded three times. The crowd went quiet, and at last Churchill’s voice boomed through the loudspeakers: “The German war is therefore at an end . . . almost the whole world was combined against the evil-doers, who are now prostrate before us . . . We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad . . .” And here his voice broke: “Advance Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God save the King.” A little later, he made the V for Victory sign on the balcony of the Ministry of Health. “God bless you all. This is your victory!” And the crowd yelled back: “No it is yours!”
The Daily Herald reported: “There were fantastic ‘mafficking’ scenes in the heart of the city as cheering, dancing, laughing, uncontrollable crowds mobbed buses, jumped on the roofs of cars, tore down a hoarding for causeway bonfires, kissed policemen and dragged them into the dancing . . . Motorists gave the V-sign on their electric horns. Out on the river tugs and ships made the night echo and re-echo with V-sirens.”
Somewhere in that crowd were my eighteen-year-old mother, who had been given time off from her boarding school, and her younger brother. My grandmother, Winifred Schlesinger, daughter of German-Jewish immigrants, had every reason to be happy, and her worship of Churchill knew no bounds. But she was nervous that her children might get lost in the “excited, drunken crowd—especially Yanks.”
In New York, five hundred thousand people celebrated in the streets. Curfew was lifted. The clubs—the Copacabana, the Versailles, the Latin Quarter, the Diamond Horseshoe, El Morocco—were packed and open half the night. Lionel Hampton was playing at the Zanzibar, Eddie Stone at the Hotel Roosevelt Grill, and “jumbo portions” of food were on offer at Jack Dempsey’s.
In Paris, on the Place de la République, a reporter for the Libération newspaper watched “a moving mass of people, bristling with allied flags. An American soldier was wobbling on his long legs, in a strange state of disequilibrium, trying to take photographs, two bottles of cognac, one empty, one still full, sticking from his khaki pockets.” A U.S. bomber pilot thrilled the crowd by flying his Mitchell B-25 through the gap under the Eiffel Tower. On the Boulevard des Italiens “an enormous American sailor and a splendid negro” decided to engage in a competition. They pressed every woman to their “huge chests” and counted the number of lipstick marks left on their cheeks. Bets were laid on the two rivals. At the Arc de Triomphe, a bigger crowd than had ever been seen offered thanks to General de Gaulle, who flashed a rare smile. People belted out the “Marseillaise,” and the Great War favorite, “Madelon”:
There is a tavern way down in Brittany
Where weary soldiers take their liberty
The keeper’s daughter whose name is Madelon
Pours out the wine while they laugh and “carry on” . . .
O Madelon, you are the only one
O Madelon, for you we’ll carry on
It’s so long since we have seen a miss
Won’t you give us just a kiss . . .
And yet V-E Day in Paris was regarded by some as a bit of an anticlimax. France, after all, had already been liberated in 1944. Simone de Beauvoir wrote that her memory of that night was “much more confused than my memories of our other, earlier festivities, perhaps because my feelings were so confused. The victory had been won a long way off; we had not awaited it, as we had the Liberation, in a fever of anxiety; it had been foreseen for a long time, and offered no new hopes. In a way, this end was like a sort of death . . .”6
Muscovites, on the other hand, swept into the streets as soon as V-E Day was announced in the early morning of the ninth. Masses of people, many of them still in their nightgowns and pajamas, danced and cheered through the night, crying “Victory! Victory!” In a letter to the British historian Martin Gilbert, one of Stalin’s interpreters, named Valentin Berezhkov, recalled: “The pride that victory was finally won over a treacherous and foul enemy, the grief for the fallen (and we did not know then that nearly thirty million were killed on the battlefields), hopes for a lasting peace and continued cooperation with our wartime allies—all this created a special feeling of relief and hope.”7
Libération of May 8 was probably right: this was above all a party for the young. “It was only the young who felt exuberant. Only the young jumped onto the jeeps, which resembled a grandstand at the Longchamp races, running through the Champs-élysées, flags around their heads and songs on their lips. And that is the way it should be. For the young the danger is over.”
My grandmother in England, pining for her husband still serving in the British Army in India, could not share her children’s exuberance. Her feelings were no doubt shared by many people who worried about faraway husbands or sons, or had lost far too much to rejoice. The reaction of this daughter of immigrants was also peculiarly English. “I missed you too much to celebrate,” she wrote to my grandfather, “so I improved the shining hour by doing a bit of extra work in the garden.”
My father cannot even remember the day the war officially ended. He vaguely recalls the sound of Russian guns fired in celebration. Marshall Zhukov mentions this in his memoir: “We left the banquet hall [on May 9] to the accompaniment of a cannonade from all types of weapons . . . the shooting went on in all parts of Berlin and its suburbs.”8 But my father was used to the sound of guns, and made no special note of it.
Brian Urquhart, the young British intelligence officer, stuck in northern Germany, fresh from the shock of witnessing Belsen, could not feel total joy either: “It is difficult to reconstruct what I actually felt at the time on such an overwhelming occasion. Nearly six years from despair to victory, many friends gone, fantastic waste and destruction . . . I wondered about all those nameless faces in war photographs, refugees, prisoners, civilians under bombing, Russians in the snow and wreckage of their country, crewmen on sinking freighters—how many of them would their families see again?”9
But such thoughts did not dampen the spirits of revelers in New York, Paris, and London. It was a festival of youth, but also of light. Quite literally. “The City Lights Up!” was the May 9 headline of the New York Herald Tribune. “The Night Sky of London was Aglow Again” said the London Daily Herald on May 8. In Paris the lights of the Opéra were lit for the first time since September 1939, in red, white, and blue. One after the other, the lights went back on illuminating the Arc de Triomphe, the Madeleine, and the Place de la Concorde. And the Herald Tribune proudly reported “large floodlighted Stars and Stripes, Union Jack and Tricolor” waving in front of their building on the Rue de Berri.
New York City had been going steadily darker since the “dimout” on April 1942, and then the “brownout” since October 1943. Only the torch on the Statue of Liberty remained dimly lit. But by 8 P.M., May 8, according to the New York Daily News, “all the jewels in Broadway’s crown were full aglow, and the great chunky masses of humanity seemed to swim in the light and their spirits were warmed by it.”
Nelson’s Column on London’s Trafalgar Square was picked out by a searchlight. St. Paul’s, standing almost alone in the midst of the bombed City financial district, was bathed in floodlights. Cinemas lit up Leicester Square in lurid colors. And then there was the soft red glow of tens of thousands of bonfires lit all over London and beyond, all the way up to Scotland.
It wasn’t just the relief that lights could be switched on again now that bombs and “doodlebugs” (German flying bombs) were no longer to be feared. There was something symbolically moving about the return of light. Reading these accounts I was reminded of a story I was told once by a Russian academic in Moscow. French literature was her subject and her passion. She had dreamed all her life of seeing France and other parts of western Europe, places she knew only from books. At last, in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her dream came true; she was allowed to travel to Paris by train. I asked her what had impressed her most. She said it was the moment her train passed from East to West Berlin in the night, and suddenly there were lights.
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FESTIVALS OF LIGHT, universal and as old as the first torch lit by man, often have a mystical origin, relating to the seasons and the beginning of new life. Some recollections of the early days of liberation have a distinct air of religious exultation. This is especially true of the rapturous reception of Allied soldiers by the female population. Maria Haayen, a young woman from The Hague, remembers seeing the first Canadian tank rumbling towards her, with the head of a soldier peering from the gun turret: “All the blood drained from my body, and I thought: there comes our liberation. And as the tank came nearer, I lost my breath and the soldier stood up—he was like a saint.”10
This feeling was perhaps more common among young women, but it was shared by men. One Dutchman recalled that it “was a privilege even to touch the sleeve of a Canadian uniform. Each Canadian private was a Christ, a saviour . . .”11
In one important sense, the experience of the Allied soldiers in liberated countries in the summer of 1945 might be compared to what happened about twenty years later, when the Beatles arrived. Then, too, liberation was expressed as a form of mania, which was above all erotic. In 1945, men in countries such as Holland, Belgium, and France, and even more so in defeated Germany and Japan, were either absent, or in captivity, or poor, underfed, and demoralized. Foreign occupation and defeat had more or less destroyed male authority, at least temporarily. A Dutch historian at the time put it like this: “Dutch men were beaten militarily in 1940; sexually in 1945.”12 The same could be said for France, or Belgium, or any number of countries which had known occupation. One of the consequences of war was that many women had lost much of their female subservience. They had taken jobs, worked for the resistance, or been left to take care of their families. They were, in the deeply disapproving French phrase of the time, hominisée; they had begun to behave like men.
Compared to the skinny Dutchmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, unwashed, shabbily dressed, the spruce Canadians and tall Americans, well-fed, well-paid, sharp-looking in the sexy uniforms of conquerors, must indeed have looked like gods. In the words of one of many Dutch women who ended up marrying a Canadian: “Let’s face it, after what we had been through the Canadians looked delicious.”
Nothing expressed the eroticism of liberation better than the music accompanying the Allied troops, music that had been banned by the Nazis: swing music, jazz, Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood,” Tommy Dorsey, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, “Hey! Ba-Ba-Re-Bop.” In Paris, young people danced to “Victory discs,” jazz records distributed to American troops. And the Franco-American spirit entered French chansons too. The hit song of 1945, sung by Jacques Pills, went: