World War II plunged Europe into chaos, but surviving peace was not much easier, especially between 1945 and 1948. In an atmosphere of utter misery, thousands of orphaned children began to wander aimlessly among the rubble, grouping together as herds to defend themselves. Women were also protagonists of the postwar period, when they were forced to get ahead in a Europe almost without men where violence became part of daily life.
Of all the worries, getting food was the one that most united the Europeans. Food shortages were endemic everywhere except Sweden and Switzerland. In Naples, Keith Lowe recounts in Wild Continent (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2014), they stole all the fish from the municipal aquarium, while in Berlin children were seen collecting grass from parks to eat and in East Prussia they consumed dogs. In some areas, there were even episodes of cannibalism...
All over Europe there were armed gangs looting and killing at will, to the point that “events that a few months earlier would have provoked a response of general indignation stopped upsetting the population”, notes Anne Applebaum in The Iron Curtain. The destruction of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Debate, 2017).
Those who had managed to survive by stealing did not stop because the war was over, for their troubles, far from disappearing, worsened. In addition, there were still plenty of weapons and no one was capable of imposing law and order.
To all this, many people returned to their former places of residence and found that their homes "had been occupied by wartime squatters who angrily demanded their rights and refused to abandon them," explained historian Tony Judt in Postwar. (Taurus, 2006).
This fact affected, especially, Jews and ethnic minorities. "Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Dutch, French and other nationalities thus became complicit in the Nazi genocide, at least as beneficiaries," Judt noted.
From the east, for example, came the Balts, Poles, Cossacks, Hungarians, Romanians, and Ukrainians fleeing the horrors of war or trying to escape communist rule. But all over Europe there were women who had lost their husbands and children; men who had lost their women; men and women who had lost their homes and their children; families who had lost farms and stores...
There were also small children who wandered alone, carrying a bundle and a tag attached to their clothing. Their mothers had been separated from them for some reason, or had died and been buried by other displaced people somewhere along the road.
The result of this gigantic resettlement, which lasted more than five years in some cases, was a much less cosmopolitan Europe than it was before 1939 (when cities like Trieste, Sarajevo, Thessaloniki, Odessa or Vilnius were a melting pot of languages, religions , cultures and nationalities) and ethnically more homogeneous.
Judging by photographs from the time, the overall picture of the two halves of Europe was similar: acres of rubble, tangles of wire, barren land, smoking ruins, and in between, people drenched in hate and pain trying to survive.
“Imagine,” Lowe writes, “a world without institutions. It is a world in which the borders between countries seem to have dissolved, leaving a single endless landscape where people travel in search of communities that no longer exist. There are no more governments, neither at a national nor even a local level. There are no schools, no universities, no libraries, no access to any kind of information. The radio works from time to time, but the signal is remote, and almost always in a foreign language. No one has seen a newspaper for weeks. There are no trains or motor vehicles, telephones or telegrams, post office, or communication of any kind except that which is transmitted through word of mouth.
There were no banks either, but this was not a problem, because money no longer had any value. There were no shops, because no one had anything to sell. In turn, people took what they wanted regardless of who it belonged to (since almost everyone stole and was stolen).
The devastation encountered along the way by those who, for months or years, traveled across Europe trying to rediscover a past that had ceased to exist, allows one to get an idea of what happened from September 2, 1945, after six years of war.
“In the forests there were sofas and feather beds, mattresses and pillows, many times burst or cracked. The feathers were everywhere, even by the trees. There were baby carriages, jars of preserved fruit, even motorcycles (…). We also saw dead horses, some looking horrible and smelling horrible…”. This is the testimony, cited by Lowe, of Andrzej C., a boy who was nine years old when the war ended and who was forced by the Germans, like his mother and his sister, to work on a farm in Bohemia.
His group was made up of about twenty people, many of them Polish, but thousands of similar refugees passed through European roads, not mixing with each other. Many dragged babies and stole what they could from farmers (chickens, cows, potatoes, kitchen utensils), so they were not welcome anywhere.
In the cities, the situation was even worse. By tacit agreement or good luck, the historic centers of Rome, Venice, Prague, Paris, or Oxford were spared in whole or in part from bombing. Instead, hundreds of other cities and towns were turned into smoking ruins.
In France, 460,000 buildings were destroyed and 1.9 million more damaged. In the USSR, 1,700 cities were devastated. Something similar happened, to a greater or lesser extent, in almost all of Europe.
At the center of this destruction was Germany, where the British and American air forces destroyed some 3.6 million homes, or about a fifth of the country's living spaces. Many German cities were like the face of the Moon and suggested that the final judgment was imminent. Between eighteen and twenty million Germans were left homeless by the bombs.
People lived in cellars, ruins, holes in the ground, and anywhere that offered a modicum of shelter. Very few had water or light. In Warsaw only two lampposts were working, for example.
And the physical destruction gave way to the psychological. In Naples, for example, Lowe recounts, citing the testimony of a British officer, “there was a row of ladies sitting at intervals of a meter or so with their backs against the wall. These women were dressed in street clothes and had the appearance of a clean, respectable, working-class housewife. Next to each woman stood a small pile of cans, and it soon became apparent that it was possible to make love to any of them in that public place by adding another can to the pile.
At the end of the war, thousands of women were accused of "horizontal collaboration", that is, of sleeping with Germans. As a result, many were shaved bald, assaulted or sent to prisoner camps.
Even in Norway, many "sons of the enemy" were labeled retarded on the grounds that any woman who had been seduced by a German soldier was probably weak-minded.
In a Europe without men, which condemned many women between the ages of fifteen and thirty in 1938 to be single, there were countless children left homeless and orphaned. In Berlin alone there were some 53,000 missing children in 1945 who wandered aimlessly and sowed terror day and night (in 1946, the city was considered "the crime capital of the world").
In Rome, too, in 1947 there were still some 50,000 homeless children, who slept in doorways and alleys and kept themselves alive through theft, begging, and prostitution. In France, farmers often found them sleeping in haylofts.
In this ghostly environment, life went on with difficulty, although at times the survivors were reminiscent of wild dogs. Throughout Eastern Europe, Jews were being persecuted and murdered. Vendettas also abounded. Sometimes a scapegoat was chosen on which to vent anger, and sometimes entire communities.
Although most post-war books written after 1989 tend to view the post-World War II period with a sugar-coated eye, emphasizing, for example, the Marshall Plan, this is a distorted view.
This program was not conceived until 1947 to begin with. Consequently, many of the recovery stories reflected in so many of the books written about the period do not fit the reality of a continent that, in some areas, regressed to the Dark Ages. .
Europe continued to lick its wounds until almost 1950 and even after. Somehow, it was almost impossible to get out of the fight without enemies, after a carnage where millions of people succumbed in the name of nationality, race, religion, social class or personal prejudice. Almost all of the Europeans affected suffered some kind of injustice or loss, whether to family, friends, homes or businesses, when ethics, if any, were not left behind.
It remains to be said that of the thirty-six million Europeans who died, around nineteen million were civilians, which gives an idea of who were, once again, the big losers of the war.
