Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Read Free Page A

threat to the rule of law.
    But this is to view these people from the outside. To the displaced themselves, they were simply people trying to find their way to safety. The lucky ones were gathered up by French, British or American soldiers, and transported to displacement centres in the west. But in a huge number of cases there were simply not enough Allied soldiers to deal with them. Hundreds of thousands were effectively abandoned to look after themselves. ‘There was nobody,’ remembers Andrzej C., who was just nine years old when the war came to an end. He, his mother and his sister had been forced labourers on a farm in Bohemia. In the last weeks of the war they were rounded up and taken to the Sudeten town of Carlsbad (modern Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic), where the last of their German guards finally deserted them. ‘We found ourselves in a vacuum. There were no Russians, no Americans, no British. An absolute vacuum.’ 10 His mother decided to head westwards towards the American lines because she thought it would be safer than handing themselves over to the Soviet troops. They spent several weeks walking into Germany, crossing the American lines repeatedly as the US troops fell back towards their designated zone of occupation. Andrzej remembers this as an anxious time, far more stressful even than being a prisoner of the Germans.
     
That was a really hungry time, because there was nothing. We begged, we stole, we did whatever we could. We dug potatoes from the fields … I used to dream about food. Mashed potatoes with bacon on top – that was the highest of the high. I couldn’t think of anything better. A heap of golden steaming mashed potatoes!
     
    He travelled in a whole stream of refugees, made up of separate groups that did not seem to mix with one another. His group had about twenty people in it, most of them Poles. The local people they passed on the way were far from sympathetic to their plight. When Andrzej was given the task of grazing a horse that one of the men in his group had acquired, a German farmer shouted at him to ‘Bugger off!’ At other times they were refused water, had dogs set on them and, as Poles, were even blamed for starting the war and bringing this whole misfortune upon Germany – an accusation that must have felt doubly ironic, given the huge disparity in their relative predicaments.
    The sights Andrzej encountered during his month-long trek towards safety were branded into his memory. He remembers walking past a German field hospital in a forest, where he saw men with broken arms in wire cages, some who were bandaged from head to foot, others ‘stinking like hell, decaying alive’. There was nobody there to help them, because all the medical staff had run away. He remembers arriving at a Polish prisoner-of-war camp where the inmates refused to come out, despite the fact that the gates were now wide open, because nobody had given them an order to do so. ‘They were soldiers and they thought somebody was going to give them orders to march somewhere. Who – where - they had no idea. They were absolutely lost.’ He saw groups of prisoners in pyjama uniforms, still working the fields under German civilian guards. Later on he entered a valley where thousands upon thousands of German soldiers were sitting quietly, a few bonfires dotted between them, guarded by just a handful of American military police.
    When they finally passed through the American checkpoints at Hof in Bavaria they were directed to a building with a red flag flying over it. This caused a few moments of panic because his mother thought they were being sent to a Soviet camp, until she realized that this was the flag of UNRRA – a red flag with white lettering on it. They had reached safety at last.
    The dangers and difficulties that refugees like Andrzej had to overcome should not be underestimated. These might not have been immediately apparent to a nine-year-old boy, but they were all too obvious to the