By Ian Buruma, 2013 

I picked this up off the sale table at McNally Robinson in Winnipeg in June. In a survey of the history of the world in the year the Second World War ended, Buruma discusses cataclysmic events in the framework of such broad themes as exultation, hunger, revenge, going home, punishing the wrongdoers, re-establishing the rule of law and government, and building a new world.

From the distance of our time and place, it is easy to see all of these changes as simple and straightforward. This book presents the reality of the chaos and confusion of that year. People who had changed loyalties several times in an effort to get ahead or to survive or to achieve some nationalistic or political end suddenly found that what had been the winning side had lost.

Since childhood I have been reading books about the Second World War, the Holocaust, concentration camps, and Soviet communism. There were many things in this book that I already knew and many that were new to me or presented in a new way.

I knew about the huge losses of Soviet population, the deaths largely a result of the German invasion but also of bad decisions based on ideology.  Leningrad: Tragedy of a City Under Siege, 1941-1944 by Anna Reid, a book I will always keep near me, is a gripping story that personalizes the vast suffering of the Soviet people.

I knew about the horrible choices—all of them untenable—available to Ukrainians and others in central and eastern Europe even before reading Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder. I knew about the mass rapes by Soviet soldiers, encouraged by Stalin’s expressed conviction that it was a woman’s comradely duty to provide men with a bit of fun. This knowledge was profoundly personalized for me in reading the anonymous memoir  A Woman in Berlin. The rampaging raping army was not just having fun, they were enraged by how rich Germany was even in ruins compared to the workers’ paradise. I knew about the collaboration of many French citizens with the Petain regime, cooperation which may have seemed  like the only means to survival but which was also an expression of profound conservatism and anti-Semitism.

I knew about the awful conditions in the DP camps in Europe. I knew that Jews who returned to claim their property and people who had hidden Jews were often treated abominably, to the point of being murdered. I already was familiar with some of the most harrowing events described in this book, such as the repatriation of the Cossacks to face death or the Gulag, and the massacre of Croats, Serbs and others when they were returned to Tito’s Yugoslavia. These forceful, brutal and murderous population transfers, including the movement of millions of Germans back to Germany, were agreed to by Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt in a cavalier carving up of the map of Europe. These great men who had won the War forgot the map was inhabited by human beings.  The transferred Germans didn’t know it at the time, but they were the lucky ones out of all the peoples moved.

In spite of five trips to Asia, I knew very little about things there in 1945. Somehow I did not know that the slogan “Asia for Asians” had made many think the Japanese would help in the struggle to throw off European and American colonialism. I knew about the terrible losses of life and the horrible working conditions in the building of the Thailand-Burma Railway, even before reading Eric Lomax’s wonderful book The Railway Man. In spite of four trips to Manila and a vague idea about the suffering of Filipinos under Japanese occupation, I did not know about the sacking of the city in the Japanese retreat and the deaths of 100,000 civilians.  I was aware of the brutality of French efforts to re-establish hegemony in Indochina but had no idea of how the British had supported them in this. I did not know that the Soviets had occupied Manchuria just after declaring war on Japan and then carted anything useful back to the Soviet Union—and then the Maoists marched in. The terrible sufferings of Indonesians as the Dutch tried to hang on to their empire was also something I only vaguely knew about. I certainly knew about the Korean War and the existence of two Koreas, especially after reading Nothing to Envy: Everyday Life in North Korea, which I picked up in the airport in Hong Kong in 2013, but somehow had not realized that Korea had been occupied by Japan since 1910. Certainly I knew the Japanese saw all other Asians as inferior, just as the Nazis believed the Slavs to be sub-humans.

Buruma makes the point that, “Those who do well in tyrannies are often the least savory and most easily corrupted people”.  As the war came to an end, people in both the occupied countries and Germany and to a lesser extent Japan purported to have been part of the resistance all along. In fact there were such severe penalties for resisting that relatively few resisters survived, and those who did played a symbolic more than actual role in the victories over Germany and Japan. In writing about the French resistance but in words that also apply to other places, he says the resisters “. . . had done this for all manner of reasons: religious faith, political ideology, boredom, rage, a thirst for adventure, or just a sense of decency. But in their choices they were less representative of most people than were the opportunists and sycophants”. From our comfortable vantage point we all like to think we would have resisted. I think I would have killed myself, but perhaps the will to live and the desire to overcome tyranny would have been stronger than fear.

Soldiers, whether on the winning or losing side, returned to women who had of necessity made lives for themselves without their husbands and who had perhaps never seen the men they used to love in civilian dress. People wanted to go home but many had no home to go to, or had suffered so much and changed so much that once familiar places and loved ones felt foreign. Millions suffered from what we now call PTSD, but there were no counsellors to help them, only an urgent imperative to suck it up and get on with life. Everybody had suffered, and mostly did not want to hear about anyone else’s suffering.  In the words of Buruma, “Extreme experiences created chasms of incomprehension between people”. There was a widespread sense that returning POWs should have died in battle or never allowed themselves to be taken prisoner.

When peace was declared there were still millions of armed soldiers and caches of arms all over the world. All of these arms could not be collected instantaneously by the occupiers, and many of the weapons were used in new insurgencies or for criminal ends. In some places weapons from the War are still being unearthed.  The weapons problem was enormous, but the problem of identifying and punishing the guilty was even larger.

In Japan and Germany and the occupied lands almost everybody who survived had to some extent been complicit in the horror, yet it was impossible to punish all of the guilty and re-establish a functioning society. For example, every teacher in the Third Reich had to at least profess Nazi sympathies, and at the end of the conflict there was not an army of qualified anti-Nazi educators to replace the sympathizers. The challenge was to establish degrees of guilt and degrees of complicity.  The Nuremberg and other trials brought to justice only a fraction of the guiltiest perpetrators.

One of the most amusing parts of the book is the description of efforts by Americans, literal as ever, to establish definitively the guilt or innocence of 23 million adult Germans by having each one take a 131-part questionnaire about their activities before and during the War. “Few Americans even spoke German, let alone read it.” It would take years for even thousands of perfectly bilingual workers to go through 23 million hand-written questionnaires, and there were many more pressing concerns.

Because General MacArthur decided not to put the Emperor on trial, it was a relatively small number of “militarists” who were brought to justice in Japan. The American occupiers set to banning all of the “ feudal” practises, such as emperor worship, the depiction of Mount Fuji,  and the low status of women, that they saw as the root causes of Japanese militarism.

Male reviewers sometimes dismiss a book outright by saying it is not of “general,” that is, masculine, interest. Fiction may be given the patronizing brush-off by being described as “women’s fiction.” As a female reader, I am happy to pay Ian Buruma the compliment that he writes like a woman. By this I mean everything he writes comes from both the heart and the head. In Year Zero he brings together a huge amount of information in an engaging and thoughtful way.  It’s the kind of book that could not have appeared right after the War, when things were mostly presented in black and white terms.  Its nuanced approach is more in keeping with our understanding of events on the seventieth anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory in Japan.