Цитаты из книги Year Zero

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.

And so the Korean People’s Republic was doomed. What followed was a tragedy. The country would effectively be split into two, with Kim Il-sung in charge of the provisional Communist Party government in North Korea, and Rhee controlling the South. Keene’s Korean friends in Tsingtao soon proved to be more correct than even they could possibly have anticipated. The ghastly Korean War, started by an invasion from the North in 1950, ended in a stalemate after more than two million civilian deaths. Seoul, having survived World War II more or less intact, lay in ruins, as did Pyongyang in the North. The North continued to be ruled by a tyrannical quasi-imperial dynasty, and the South endured decades of military rule.

The fact is, Jewish survivors were an embarrassment. They did not fit the heroic narrative that was being hastily constructed in the wreckage of the war, in the Netherlands, in France, or indeed in any country where people sought to forget inconvenient, painful truths about the past. Men and women who had survived the humiliations of wartime occupation as best they could, by keeping their heads down and looking the other way when bad things happened to others, pretended to have been heroes all along.

A similar scene took place in Pyongyang three days later, when a relatively obscure Korean guerrilla fighter, a pudgy man in his thirties with a pudding-bowl haircut, who had spent most of the war in a Soviet army training camp near Khabarovsk, was welcomed by the top Soviet commanders as “a national hero” and “an outstanding guerilla leader.” Seventy thousand people had been mobilized to pay tribute to “General Kim Il-sung,” who, in his capacity “as a representative of the grateful Korean people,” delivered a speech written by his Soviet handlers honoring the Soviet army.

Left-wing ideals, infused with a great deal of patriotism, inspired former members of the resistance just as they had British socialists. Communists, social democrats, even many Gaullists, did not fight Vichy and the Germans only for the love of the traditional douce France. They had political ideals for which so many of them gave their lives, and wanted them to be implemented after the war, preferably by the ex-resisters themselves. The National Council of the Resistance, dominated by the left, was designed to be a kind of government-in-waiting.

Laval never shared the strong anti-Semitism of the French far right. He, too, had Jewish friends and worked closely with Jewish colleagues. Yet he was minister of state in 1940 when, unprompted by the Germans, the Vichy French statut des juifs (statute on Jews) deprived Jews of their civil rights. He later tried to save French-born Jews from deportation, but only at the price of delivering tens of thousands of foreign-born Jews into the maw of the Third Reich. This included naturalized French citizens who were deprived of their citizenship during the war.

One thing Pierre Laval, the highest-ranking minister in two Vichy governments, and Anton Mussert, “the Leader” of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), had in common was that they saw themselves as honorable men, patriots who had done everything in their power to serve the interests of their countries. They faced their executioners, after being swiftly tried for treason in the fall and winter of 1945, convinced that they were dying as martyrs and would one day be not only vindicated but recognized as saviors. The other thing they had in common was that they died as the most hated men in their respective nations. There were worse, more brutal people.

The fact that many Russians had worn German uniforms under duress, that the women and children, brought to Germany as slaves or lowly workers, had never worn German uniforms, or that a large number of Cossacks had never even been citizens of the Soviet Union and thus were not legally obliged to be “returned” at all, bothered neither Eden nor the Soviet leadership. In the latter case, this had something to do with heroic narratives too, though not quite in the same way as in France or the Netherlands. The idea that so many Russians and other Soviet citizens had fought the Soviet Union, some quite willingly, and that others might have chosen to work in Germany just to survive, was an embarrassment. In the official story, all citizens of the Soviet workers’ paradise had resisted the fascist enemy. To surrender was a crime. Those who fell into German hands had to be traitors, and would be dealt with as such.

Not only did Ishii, and his able staff of Unit 731, including a microbiologist named Kitano Masaji, experiment with bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases, but thousands of prisoners were used for anything that took the doctors’ fancy. The human guinea pigs, mostly Chinese, but also Russians and even a few American POWs, were known as “logs,” or “monkeys.” Some were exposed to freezing experiments, some were hung upside down to see how long it would take before they choked, some were cut open without anesthesia and had organs removed, and some were injected with lethal germs.