How to survive the end of the war. On mud, oil in dolphins' lungs and lynching of French women
Let us disrupt the festive atmosphere today, and instead of remembering the fallen soldiers, let us salute the heroes who were doomed to survive the war.
Surviving the war was one thing; surviving the peace was quite another.
(Tony Judt)
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Today is our day off in the Czech Republic. We commemorate the end of the Second World War in Europe.
We remember the fallen. It makes sense; we are glad we do not share their fate because nobody wants to die. And there's also a bit of irrational guilt in that remembrance; it could have been us, and it wasn't. Psychologists have come up with a name for it: survivor syndrome. For those who made it out of the concentration camps alive or for members of the Jewish ethnic group who avoided the Holocaust altogether, this syndrome has often complicated their lives. I recommend reading Sophie's Choice by Wiliam Styron, as Sophie's partner struggles with this syndrome.
But we bury the fallen, lay a wreath on their graves, come every year to dust them off, and otherwise live on. So, let's just remind ourselves what that means. People in and after the war experienced things that fill the headlines today when they happen to just one person. What we see today as the suffering of a few individuals was a daily reality for most of the population after the World Wars (both the First and Second).
Nature, landscape and mud
When the North goes to war with the South and the country goes to war,
thistles now grow in the fields instead of cotton.
I translated a popular song about the American Civil War that people sing at campfires in my country. Its lyrics cover a lot.
Thistles or nothing grew instead of cotton, wheat, barley, vegetables, or vines.
Because the land was scorched, reeking of poison, threatening with unexploded ammunition, craters from shells were gaping and instead of green meadows, mud puddles with the imprints of tank tracks stretched into the distance. The second case fits better with the Eastern Front, where many significant tank battles occurred.
When we think of the war, we think of shattered houses, caved-in roofs and bullet holes in the masonry. Rightly so.
But we should also remember the countryside and the landscape. Nature recovers; strangely enough, the ashes make farmland quite fertile. But people needed to eat now; they couldn't wait for natural repair mechanisms to kick in. And to make the muddy ground that the war machine had created fertile again meant exposing oneself to the dangerous unexploded ammunition and landmines that one encounters on the former battlefield.
Today, we dread the thought that, for example, our child might find a poorly secured revolver on a visit to a neighbour with a gun license.
Children after 1945 routinely found guns, bombs, and ammunition, all functional or worse, semi-functional.
Nature can handle scorched earth, but what about the chemicals? Recently, the EU has been dealing with a ban on lead in commercially available ammunition. Those who know anything about it understand the pointlessness of this ban, as the amount of lead that gets into the wild at the hands of hunters or sport shooters is negligible. However, lead is poisonous. And if I'm saying that today's fear of lead in this quantity is pure paranoia, though, imagine how much toxic lead from ammo, sulfur from gunpowder, heavy metals or other poisons must have ended up in the soil and water after 1945.
What about whales and dolphins? Can they even breathe?
We watched the American war movie Greyhound with Tom Hanks at home yesterday. By the way, I highly recommend the film because it depicts the reality of a warship in the Pacific, including details like feet bloodied by heavy boots and the pervasive fatigue on endless patrols. But I was struck by another idea while watching the film.
When a tanker sinks today, it's an environmental disaster. We are familiar with the images of animals choking on oil and birds with their wings glued together. Over 450 military vessels were destroyed during the Pacific war; add to that the tens of thousands of aircraft that also ended up in the ocean, and above all, the civilian ships, often carrying oil, that the U-boats were responsible for sinking. I would not swear on the numbers, but they are certainly large enough to make us realise how much oil ended up in the sea. Now imagine the dolphins. It only makes us marvel at the regenerative potential of nature. But only today. Then, with tens of millions of fallen sailors, nobody thought about seagulls and dolphins.
We have to live on, but where?
When this war is over, we will live again...
(Michal Tučný)
Yeah, but where will we live? If on the eastern front, I wrote mainly about farmland destroyed by tanks and grenades, I think of cities on the western front, especially in Germany. Bombed-out cities. In war, people are without water, electricity, heat, or a roof over their heads.
Our generation was able to experience this during their holiday in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. We were amazed to pass by houses with bullet holes in them, where nobody lived anymore because they lacked a roof.
Despite a particular affection for tourists (and their money), the local Croatians jealously guarded "their land," even if it meant just a few meters of beach for a beach umbrella. And there were stray dogs and cats everywhere. In a country where, not so long ago, a neighbour murdered a neighbour, the fate of animals was of no concern to anyone. As mild-mannered tourists from peaceful central Europe, we bought pellets for the stray cat and fed it throughout our vacation. When we handed the pellets to the landlady and asked her to continue feeding them after we left, she didn't understand. But the war in Yugoslavia, as cruel and crazy as it was, was a different war after all.
A photo of our beloved Yugoslavian kitty… to make the article less serious.
In many places, no stone was left unturned in Germany in 1945. Today, it is a tragedy when one loses one's house and when the inhabitants lose a whole town; it is the reality of war. Water? Food?
There was food, but it was rationed. History students are often amazed to learn that the rationing system persisted in Czechoslovakia until 1953. The rationing system did not mean food was for everyone; that was not its purpose. The point was that those who could afford it should not buy more. It wasn't about everyone getting something. With a ration card, you still had to pay for it; you didn't get anything for the card itself. And many people lacked money to buy food.
We want to live on, but with whom?
...we'll go and kiss our mistresses and wives again.
(Michal Tučný)
World war means, among other things, social disruption. The First World War represented a significant breakthrough in this respect because it completely subverted women's roles in society and brought about a substantial crisis of male identity. Men suffered in the trenches throughout the war, looking forward to coming home and everything as it had been. Meanwhile, their wives had done all the men's work at home, kept the family alive, taken over the family economy and welcomed their husbands. Still, they would not return to the role of innocent mistresses. Men often felt useless and misunderstood. We women today benefit from the courage of those ladies who took matters into their own hands during the First World War and continued to do what they had learned after the war.
The Second World War brought no such change in this respect. But still. How many lovers and wives had waited 6 years for a man who might or might not return? Imagine, for example, a minor tragedy in Vichy, France, that could have quickly happened.
A man returns as a hero to a liberated France. He finds his wife on the list of those executed without mercy by the People's Court for "horizontal collaboration" (as an affair with a German was then known in France). She had four children to support, faced unimaginably tricky moral choices, and then paid the price. How many men have come back with trauma or without a leg and failed to fulfil their role in the family? They succumbed to alcohol and morphine addiction and couldn't bear their disability. And also, how many didn't come back, and the family had to make do without them? I'll leave the emotional side of such a condition to the classics.
"To die alone, anyone could do that, but to lose a husband or a son, you would only see what that is - you would see -"
Live on, no questions asked. Better not to think, not to remember…
They ask, "Hero, what did you do during the war?"
(Michal Tučný)
The quopted song is a funny lighthearted tramp song. The men in the song answer the question: "I was lying in the field, and I was eating peanuts."
Many a hero coming back in 1945 would love to be able to provide such an answer because he came back from the war knowing what horrors he was responsible for.
However, historical research suggests that these questions were not asked in 1945. What was more important was to survive, build, repair, and move on together.
You were sentenced to live knowing what you were responsible for and what those with whom you were repairing the destroyed village were responsible for. You needed them, and they needed you. What you did not need was their and your past. You might have suspected that your neighbour had ratted out an innocent neighbour for collaboration. But because you yourself, in a mob frenzy during the people's court, demanded death without proof, you preferred to remain silent.
You are glad to have a place to live, perhaps in the house left by the expelled Germans or the murdered Jews, but grateful for a roof over your head, you prefer not to ask.
In Germany, the question, "Daddy, what did you do during the war? And Mom, Dad, who did you vote for when the Nazis came to power?" was only asked in the 1960s and in East Germany after 1989. In 1945, nobody had the time or the mood for it.
Maybe that's a good thing. Because you have to live. If our ancestors worldwide hadn't decided then, amid that nightmare, that they would instead build the world, even if it seemed a hopeless place to live in, we wouldn't be here.
So today, let us remember not only those who died in World War II but especially those who survived. Even if no one puts wreaths on their graves.
Futher reading:
Tony Judt: Postwar
Max Hastings: Armageddon
Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands