Year Zero by Ian Buruma Page A

have money, and their saviors were expected to have been richly compensated, anyone who admitted to have hidden Jews was vulnerable to plunder.
    Even after they were long dead, Jews were still thought to have something worth taking. In the autumn of 1945, the former death camp ofTreblinka, where more than eight hundred thousand Jews had been murdered, was a muddy mass grave. Local peasants started digging in search of skulls from which they might still be able to extract some gold teeth overlooked by the Nazis. Thousands worked the site with shovels, or sifted through the mounds of ashes, transforming the mass grave into a huge field of deep pits and broken bones.
    The Poles, it must be emphasized again, were not unique. Greed was the common result of barbarous occupation, which affected countless Europeans. The historian Tony Judt observed: “The Nazis’ attitude to life and limb is justifiably notorious; but their treatment of
property
may actually have been their most important practical legacy to the shape of the post-war world.” 20 Property up for grabs is a great incitement for brutality. What is unusual about Poland is the
scale
of plunder. A whole new class had come up from the war which essentially took over the assets of those who had been killed or driven out. A lingering sense of guilt can have perverse consequences.
    A contemporary Polish weekly paper,
Odrodzenie
, put it succinctly in September 1945: “We knew in the country an entire social stratum—the newborn Polish bourgeoisie—which took the place of murdered Jews, often literally, and perhaps because it smelled blood on its hands, it hated Jews more strongly than ever.” 21
    This explains the sometimes bloody vengeance against the main victims of Hitler’s Reich better than anything. Plundering the Jews, in a way, was part of a larger social revolution. And this type of revenge, too, would not have happened without the sometimes tacit, but often active, connivance of powerful opportunists in the Polish bureaucracy and police. It was not the official policy of the communist-dominated Polish government in 1945 to go after the Jews, but encouragement from the middle ranks was often quite enough.
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    THAT POLES WOULD WISH to direct their revenge against Germans is more comprehensible. But that, too, was partly driven by class warfare.For centuries Germans had lived in areas such as Silesia and East Prussia that are now part of Poland. Major cities, like Breslau (Wrocław) or Danzig (), were largely German. German was the language of the urban elites, the doctors, bankers, professors, and businessmen. In 1945 more than four million Germans were still living in former German lands invaded by Soviet troops. Roughly the same number, terrified of what they had been told about Russian behavior, had fled to the west. Plans to expel the rest of the German population were already clear well before May 1945. In 1941, General Sikorski, the Polish prime minister exiled in London, declared that “the German horde, which for centuries had penetrated to the east, should be destroyed and forced to draw back far [to the west].” 22
    This policy had been endorsed by the Allied leaders. Even worse, Stalin advised the Polish communists to “create such conditions for the Germans that they would want to escape themselves.” And Churchill had told the House of Commons in December 1944, “Expulsion is the method, which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.” 23
    As long as the Red Army was in control, the Poles more or less held themselves back. Libussa Fritz-Krockow, scion of a noble Pomeranian landowning family, remembered how they had actually felt protected by the Russians at times, even though those same Russians “were responsible for the vast majority of the rapes and the lootings.” Yet, she observed, “their violence was