Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany

"It’s also a hugely emotive book. At the end of the World War II, over a quarter of a million Jewish survivors find themselves in Germany—the territory of their perpetrators. Jews are living cheek by jowl, in a place where a few days, weeks, months previously, their relatives and, probably, in many cases, their whole family have been destroyed. How do you get your head around that? The book is about how that plays out in reality and the interactions between Germans and Jews. Also, how Germans and Jews competed with each other for benefits and favours—and a sense of victimhood—in their interactions with the Allies. On the one hand, the Jews had six million dead. On the other, the Germans had been defeated in war. With the redrawing of the borders, they had all these refugees, people who had been living in the Sudetenland making their way back to the new German soil in difficult circumstances. Thousands of women had been raped, particularly by Russian but also by other Allied soldiers. They had suffered in the bombings. They had suffered in many ways. So the Germans also felt a sense of victimhood. “At the end of the war, Jews get more ration allocations than ordinary Germans” I was most struck, reading this book, by her description of how there was a real boost in the birth-rate amongst Jewish women at the end of World War II. It was an act of defiance against Nazi genocide. Women were flaunting their bumps and pushing their prams. Jewish life would continue, despite all the efforts of the Germans to wipe them out. Grossman also describes how, in a sense, the shoe is on the other foot. At the end of the war, Jews get more ration allocations than ordinary Germans. She describes an encounter where a Jewish person is at the opera and spots an SS kapo who is then arrested. He has been walking free and had not had to face the consequences of what he had done during the war until then. It’s a situation that was obviously very challenging. The social history of that period, at the end of World War II is absolutely fascinating. You tend to think of history as having discrete dates—a beginning and end—but this book shows just how messy and untidy the whole thing is, and how the consequences of war linger on. There are plenty of other books about Germany’s sense of victimhood at the end of the war. They’re wrapped up in their deprivation as a result of the bombing, the continued rationing, and the fact their men are still away. Some stayed in prisoner of war camps, in Russian internment, for 11 years at the end of the war. As ordinary citizens, we might sympathise with their feelings of victimhood. But how do you square that with the fact that they have also been complicit, if only in passivity, with the Nazi reign of power? Essentially, in the 1960s, you had these Europe-wide and American student movements. There was the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem and there had been some trials in Frankfurt. Young people who had grown up with their parents’ silence about these issues were suddenly watching Eichmann’s televised trial and thinking, ‘Hang on, what did my parents do?’ And some uncomfortable questions were raised that led to some serious generational conflict. It was the start of the realisation of how much had been shoved under the carpet."