Remembering Victory in Europe
In the Spring of 1945, a starving Europe welcomed the news of Nazi surrender after more than five years of brutal occupation. Somehow, amidst the desolation, the tulips still burst into bloom foreshadowing better days to come.
Victory in Europe. Millions of people dancing in the streets. Allied soldiers handing out chocolates to children, strangers kissing in the boulevards, royalty and exiled heads of state returning to their parliaments and castles. We’ve heard the stories so many times. We love a narrative of liberation.
As a writer researching WWII in Holland, and reading the personal memoirs of those who lived through Nazi occupation in the 1940’s, I couldn’t help but feel a shiver of reconnaissance when Putin’s army invaded Ukraine on February 24th. I felt the echo of something familiar and dark I’d attributed to the evils of another century. In the west, we tsk tsked about the conflicts in Georgia, Chechnya and Crimea, perhaps not unlike how citizens in the late 1930’s fretted about the unpleasantness in the Sudetenland (formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, then a newly formed Czechoslovakia). “Surely they won’t go any further.”
Civilians in Holland, Belgium and France opened their newspapers to read about Nazi atrocities in Poland and assembled makeshift regiments still believing that their borders would remain untouched. I can’t help but wonder how Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Finland feel about their aggressive neighbour today. History, with its Maginot Lines, suggests high alert.
In 1939 communities across Europe became divided between established political parties and new national socialist parties that echoed the economic policies of the German Nazis. The Depression had left scars and while Germany’s actions in eastern Europe were distasteful, their economic ideas made sense to thousands who suffered the swift blow of inflation. For many, these new parties that only garnered fifteen percent of the municipal vote were nothing to worry about—until the Nazis parachuted into Europe one nation after another, and those fringe politicians seized local power for the next half decade, collaborating with the occupiers. Many Germans thought the Dutch should think of them as benevolent cousins. Today, Ukraine is divided by those with strong cultural and linguistic ties to Russia, Poland, Hungary etc. How many believe Putin to be a benevolent cousin after two and half months of bombing and the murder of more than 25,000 civilians?
Today there are more than 5.7 million refugees flooding out of Ukraine. To compare, by 1934 there were already over five thousand German refugees scattered across Europe, everyone agreed the situation was dire, and yet exit visas were impossible to acquire, ships were turned around, Jewish assets were seized and thousands were imprisoned in their own countries at their own expense, only to be murdered by the occupiers a few years later. Rights were stolen incrementally, and when the worst crimes were committed—by cover of night or in plain sight—entire populations were too traumatized to mobilize in their fellow citizens defense. Watching the news coverage of the Azostal Iron and Steels Works factory in Mariupol reminds me of the ill-fated journeys of the MS St. Louis, the MV Struma and other instances where civilians were trapped with no safe passage in sight.
In the spring of 1940, the Dutch surrendered after only eight days of fighting. They had been at peace for so long, and hoped to maintain neutrality. With no war chest or army that could withstand Hitler’s forces, the Dutch fought as best they could until Rotterdam, a city that had been a strategic outpost for spies twenty years earlier, was brutally fire bombed, and a thousand civilians perished. The Dutch government in exile realized Germany would continue to indiscriminately level their cities and to save the citizens, they surrendered. By summer, the Nazis headed south and marched down the Champs d’Elysées.
How much bombing can Ukraine withstand? Ethnic Ukrainians are spread throughout eastern Europe, but their current borders are only three decades old. During the second world war, Polish freedom fighters made their way to Britain and served as spies and RAF pilots against Nazi tyranny. I wonder how those who promise to support Ukraine will be able to succeed in the diplomatic arena today. Churchill was unable to give the Poles the rewards they deserved for their service and loyalty in WWII. The Allies promised to help the Poles, but in the end, Poland fell under the sphere of influence of the Soviets, and passed from one oppressor to another. Tariq Ali said, “history rarely repeats itself…but it echoes and these echoes of history are still with us and they don’t go away.”
From The Everett Collection—Polish women led to execution by German soldiers c. 1941
At the dawn of WWII, civilians received news from their occupiers in coloured pamphlets dropped from the sky. The resistance was quick to disseminate information via pamphlets, too, risking their lives to spread hope. Leaders fled into exile, broadcasting addresses over the BBC to those brave enough to keep radios. What a world away from today, where Zelensky and Putin each have their own channels of communication and hackers race to sabotage everything from remote-controlled tractors to Russian government websites.
The tulips are up. A war begun in spring ended in spring (at least in Europe; it began earlier in China and ended later in the South Pacific), leaving in its wake an estimated 50,000,000 people dead—six times the carnage of ‘the war to end all wars’ fought on the same soil a generation earlier.
Most pundits fear this war, begun in the spring, will drag into a long war of attrition. The Ukrainians will not surrender. The West will supply weapons but not fighters, echoing the hesitation of Americans to engage in battle overseas until Pearl Harbor. As the Dutch say, what might the high water mark be this time? How many years, how many lives lost, before we see liberation in Europe again? This VE day, in remembering the deliverance of Europe seventy seven years ago, I say a prayer for Ukraine, in the words of their most beloved poet.
“remember me
with gentle whispers
and kind words
in the great family
of the newly free.
”