Year Zero by Ian Buruma Page B

somehow comprehensible to us, whether we explained it as the principle of an eye for an eye, sheer exuberance, or conquerors’ rights. The Poles, on the other hand, were merely camp followers. Their seizure of power had a different character. There was something cold and furtive about it, almost sneaky, which made it seem far more sinister than naked force.” 24
    The Krockows were not Nazis. Christian von Krockow, who wrote up his sister Libussa’s memoirs, was a liberal who understood very well that their suffering was “the result of our own German madness.” 25 But there may be a hint of anti-Polish bias or bitterness in Libussa’s statement, evenperhaps a sense of betrayal. This was not an unusual sentiment. A German Protestant minister, Helmut Richter, expressed the same thing. He had always expected the Poles to be good people. After all, hadn’t Germans treated them well in the past? But now he realized “the awful nature of these eastern peoples.” For a long time, they had behaved themselves as long as they felt “a fist hovering over their heads,” but they turned “barbaric when they have the chance to wield power over others.” 26 This is the way colonizers always talk about the natives. The difference with most European colonies in Africa or Asia, however, is that in this case many of the former colonizers had been natives themselves, albeit natives of a privileged class.
    In any case, the Poles did not want Soviet troops to spend a moment longer than necessary in the conquered lands that were now officially part of Poland. And the cruelties that went with massive expulsions and population transfers decided by the Big Powers at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 were not just the result of Polish vengeance. More than two million “Congress Poles” from the east of the Polish Soviet border, now part of Ukraine, were moved to Silesia and other areas that had been more or less swept clean of the Germans. So they took German homes, German jobs, and German assets, a process that was rarely gentle.
    Of course, ethnic cleansing did not begin in 1945. Hitler had expelled Poles and murdered Jews to make room for German immigrants in Silesia and other border areas. But bitterness over disputed homelands went back further than that. As so often with bloody ethnic revenge, a history of civil war preceded it. With the defeat of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the fate of their holdings in Silesia had to be decided. Bits went to Austria, bits to Czechoslovakia, and bits to Poland and Germany. Upper Silesia, however, remained in dispute. There was a strong Upper Silesian independence movement, supported by local Poles and Germans. But the Allies decided in 1919 that a plebiscite should decide whether the territory should go to Poland or Germany. This decision led to serious violence. Armed Polish nationalists assaulted Germans, especially in the industrial area around Kattowitz (Katowice), not far fromAuschwitz (). These attacks provoked even bloodier reprisals by thuggish German adventurers in the ultranationalist, paramilitary Freikorps, a breeding ground for the future Nazi movement that was formed in late 1918 after Germany’s defeat. “Black-Red-Gold! Smash the Poles!” was one of their charming slogans. The majority voted for Germany to govern Upper Silesia, a decision that caused more violence. In the end, part of Upper Silesia went to Poland after all. But memories were still raw in 1945, all the more so because of the treatment of Poles under Nazi occupation.
    The family of Josef Hoenisch had lived in Upper Silesia for many generations. Because he had never joined the Nazi Party, he decided that it would be safe to stay home in 1945. A bad decision. He was arrested by the Polish Militia, which had replaced Soviet troops. Asked by Militia interrogators whether he had been a Nazi, Hoenisch replied that he had not, and was booted in