I started reading Marguerite Duras’ The War last night. Written in long paragraphs crowded with short clipped sentences (including sentence fragments), the book—presumably based on journals that were written at the time, though she claims in a preface to have “no recollection of having written it”[1]—recounts, or at least begins with, her waiting feverishly for news of Robert L., her husband (Robert Antelme).
In the first 30 pages Duras vividly presents the situation as the war drew to a close, in April of 1945. By then thousands of POWs and deportees were arriving in Paris. The former returned to cheers of enthusiasm from the women who waited for their husbands, sons and even fathers; the latter, those who had survived the concentration camps, shocked these waiting women into silence.
Some were so weak—“He’s a strange color…You couldn’t say he’s thin, it’s something else—there’s so little of him left you wonder if he’s really alive”—that they had to be carried from the transport trucks into the reception centers, where they would be ‘processed.’ At this time lists were being published of the names of the survivors. In the days preceding Hitler’s suicide, as the German forces were being surrounded, beaten back, crushed and even liberated (from their commitment to the Führer), thousands of victims of every sort imaginable were being released from the nightmare and obliged to face a new reality. The whole of Europe was overrun by soldiers and displaced civilians (while the war dragged on in Asia, where the same thing was happening). Among all this destruction, rubble and death, people were trying to go ‘home,’ wherever that might be (and for hundreds of thousands of Jews in particular, home no longer existed). Simultaneously tens of thousands of accounts were being settled—either with oneself and cyanide or nine grams of lead; or with the society of victors.
Duras describes the treatment a group of women who had ‘volunteered’ for the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire) received from the French female officers who didn’t know what to do with them: “Don’t think you’re just going to be let go!” Were these women ‘guilty’ of having helped to sustain the Nazi war machine? Some of them were obviously pregnant, and all of “their hands were blackened by the oil of German machinery.”
The STO was introduced by the Vichy government in February of 1943, and contributed considerably to the swelling of the ranks of the maquis, or resistance fighters, in particular, as thousands of able bodied men (and women) fled to the mountains to avoid conscription into this forced labor service. Others might have actually chosen to work in Germany, though in every case save that of Nazi sympathizers it must have been a painful choice: like that between a rock and a hard place.
In Kiev, on the other side of Europe, and more or less at the same time, Ukrainians also volunteered to go and work in Germany. They were seduced, at first, by the offer not only of employment, but of a meal, of food, which was already scarce. The first volunteers left in passenger cars, and some of them no doubt stood at the open windows and waved to the friends and relatives they were leaving behind. Not long after that the first letters arrived, and it soon became clear what life working in Germany was really like. Thereafter the ‘volunteers’ were obliged to go and work in Germany, where they replaced the Germans who were fighting at the front. And they no longer left Kiev in second-class carriages.
Was it better to stay behind, in France or the Ukraine?
Soon after the Red Army was driven out of Kiev (shipping back to Russia as much of the heavy industrial equipment as they could dismount and load onto trains before their forces were completely surrounded by the Wehrmacht; and laying 10,000 mines in the historic center of the city, which were detonated once the Nazis had established themselves in the best buildings, causing the city center to burn for five days), this notice was posted:
Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.
The SS—one of whose four Sonderkommandos, or Special Action Units—was responsible for organizing this gathering of Ukrainian Jews, had only expected five to six thousand people to show up, but instead about 30,000 arrived, believing that they would be ‘resettled’ (the euphemism the Nazis used to dupe the Jews). Instead, almost every single one of those 30,000 Ukrainian Jews—along with an estimated 100,000 non-Jews—ended up in the ravine called Babi Yar.[2]