book response: Savage Continent by Lowe (2012)
It's ironic that the European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize this week. "Congratulations for not having any genocides in the last 10 years. Keep up the good work."
All I learned in high school was the United States lent money to rebuild Europe through the Marshall Plan and the Soviet Union brought down an iron curtain around eastern Europe. But that's the view from high altitude. In the more granular view, ethnic cleansing continued, not as much against Jews, though this still happened, but Germans were expelled from countries they had lived in, outside Germany for centuries. Ukranians and Poles, Italians and Yugoslavians. If that weren't enough, even within ethnically homogenous countries, they managed to find other reasons to kill or imprison each other, partisans vs. Nazi collaborators, or partisans vs. communists, or in the case of Greece, virtually civil war, in which the partisans, who were communists and successful against the Nazis in the mountainous areas, were considered dangerous in the eyes of the British, who supported the right wing government in suppressing the very countrymen who harassed the Nazis and even delivered some cities from the Nazis.
The shifting political winds immediately after the war made prosecution of Nazi collaborators barely feasible in light of the millions of Red Army boots on the ground in the middle of Europe. Even though justice hardly came through official channels, it often happened spontaneously and locally by lynch mobs or less violently from angry families.
Everything wrong that was done after the war officially ended has to be viewed in light of the atrocities committed by the Nazis, though. Terrible things were done by the communists and the allies. Wrongs were not always made right. Wrongs were added to wrongs. Pleas for help were ignored. On this side of that war, from this separation of time, it is easy to get angry at the injustices. But Lowe is able to bring his readers into the milieu of the time, when the dehumanization wrought on the world by the Axis, made any attempt at making things right again, no matter how crudely, understandable.
Normally, I like to highlight these books and share a few quotes, but every paragraph in this book is worth sharing and remembering. This book is a keeper.
Comments