Free Year Zero by Ian Buruma Page A

was by no means confined to religious conservatives or the political right. In France, a large number of men and women in the resistance had joined the Communist Party for romantic or idealistic reasons. Wartime conditions had loosened the rules of conventional morality. But the postwar French communists, under the leadership of Maurice Thorez, put a swift end to this. Dedication to the Party, and a stable family life, were promoted with zeal. “Debauchery” resulting from war and fraternizing with foreign troops was denounced. In Germany, too, where communiststightened their control of the Eastern zones under their Soviet patrons, political repression came with a new moral order. Erich Honecker, leader of the Communist Youth Federation, tried his very best to wean young women from such frivolities as swing music and sex, hoping to gain their support for the communist cause. But he felt frustrated in his efforts. The problem, he said, was clear: “We have to overcome their drive to take pleasure in life [
Drang nach Lebensfreude
].”
    Erich “Honni” Honecker—no stranger to life’s pleasures himself, having had several affairs with much younger women—needn’t have worried unduly. A state of exultation cannot last. The rush of liberation had already begun to fade by the end of 1945. Foreign troops were going home in ever greater numbers, even though large military bases would remain in Germany and Japan, and to a lesser extent in Britain and Italy as well. Moral panic laid the ground for a conservative reaction. Fear of female sexual license, as well as a common desire for bourgeois stability, after years of danger, chaos, and deprivation, would soon restore a more traditional order to life in the liberated as well as the defeated nations. In the 1950s the summer of ’45 would already seem like a distant memory. Sexual liberation had to wait for another twenty years, when the birth control pill arrived along with the second wave of Anglo-Saxon hedonism, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones unleashed something Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman could only have dreamed of.
    Even so, the postwar disorder, however temporary, was not without some positive consequence. Benoîte Groult’s wish to remake her own freedom did not rest on a complete illusion. Women in France were given the right to vote in March 1944 by the provisional government even before France was liberated—a right born from the dearth of men; the assumption was that wives would represent the views of their absent husbands. The same right came to Italian women in 1945, to Japanese a year later, to women in Romania and Yugoslavia in 1946, and to Belgian women in 1948. No matter how much some people might have wished, the world could never quite go back to the way things had been before.

CHAPTER 3
REVENGE
    I n Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1945, near the town of Budweis (), best known for its fine beer, was a concentration camp with a sign nailed to its main gate which read: “An Eye for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth.” The camp was now under Czech control. It was filled with German prisoners, most of them civilians. The Czech commandant, a young man with a savage reputation, made the Germans work twelve hours a day on minimal rations, then woke them in the middle of the night and ordered them to the
Appelplatz
where they were made to sing, crawl, beat each other, dance, or any other torment that amused the Czech guards. 1
    The desire for revenge is as human as the need for sex or food. Few people have expressed this more finely, and more brutally, than the Polish author Tadeusz Borowski. After being arrested in 1943 for publishing his poems in the clandestine press—wartime Warsaw was alive with a vast underground culture, including schools, newspapers, theaters, and poetrymagazines, all of which exposed participants to the risk of concentration camp or a more immediate death—Borowski survived a