Year Zero: A History of 1945 (ALA Notable Books for Adults)

At the end of World War II after the death camps were liberated, aid workers noticed a strange thing among the survivors waiting to be relocated. Half-dead, grotesquely emaciated, many became sexually promiscuous. The author of the book, Ian Buruma, quotes a doctor that one could not really blame the young girls who had passed through hell and "are now seized by an irresistible desire for affection and forgetfulness..." Outside the camps VD rates and illegitimate births rose sharply. Buruma says "the fact is that many women and men were simply looking for warmth, companionship, love, even marriage." This book is worth reading if for no other reason than to learn what happened to a case of lipstick mistakenly sent to Bergen-Belsen after the war.More than 60 million people died in World War II, over three percent of the world's population, for no good reason as far as anyone can tell now. Among the least ignoble reasons for the German and Japanese leaders who decided to go to war was to get "living space," because it was thought that without land and colonies their countries would decline. Look at them now, Germany with no eastern territories and Japan with no colonies, two of the richest places on earth. The men in those countries who made World War II caused unspeakable suffering for an idea which was dead wrong.The country which lost the most people was the Soviet Union. Eight million Soviet soldiers died, of whom 3.3 million were deliberately starved to death. Sixteen million Soviet civilians died. Ten million Chinese civilians died (the United States lost 0.4 million soldiers and civilians).This is a book about the people who survived. We are wrong to think that the horrors ended after the surrenders of Germany and Japan. Although the magnitude of the horrors was smaller, the stories are harrowing. In 1945 in the Netherlands 18,000 people died of starvation, which got so bad that the British and Americans took to dropping loaves of bread from the sky. In Japan more than 20,000 people died of dysentery in 1945. In Italy 20,000 fascists and collaborators were killed in the north of Italy, 8,000 thousand in the Piedmont, 4,000 in Lombardy, 3,000 in Emilia and 3,000 in Milan province. In France over 10,000 collaborators were murdered. One American soldier machine-gunned three hundred concentration camp guards.Some the people who were murdered after the war were "collaborators", but as Buruma points out, most of the collaborators were never punished. In fact it would have been impossible to punish all the collaborators, because there would have been no one left to govern the cities or teach the children. Many of the worst offenders went unpunished. Some people were tried and executed, but often the wrong ones and on shaky evidence. Often the people exacting revenge were themselves guilty. One feels after reading this book that a person who lived through World War II could not possibly have known which decisions might save them. The innocent, the righteous, the evil and the sadistic seem to have had equal chances of perishing.The main point of this book is that after the war as well as during it, there were no good ways to proceed. The victors made bad decisions, but often any decision would have been bad, and many of the decisions were the lesser of many evils. As time went on, people constructed myths about the war, but nothing we thought was true turns out to have been so. For instance,* Although the rapes committed by the Soviet troops in Germany and the Japanese in China were on a massive scale, the victims being in the millions, one estimate is that at least 40 Japanese women per day were raped by the allied soldiers in the latter half of 1945.* Although the Germans and Russians were notorious thieves and looters, the American army had its share. After France was liberated some US soldiers deserted from the army, stole army trucks, stocked up on gasoline and sold it to French gangsters (they were caught because they took to living like kings in Paris).* One weeps for the Jews and Poles who died in the concentration camps, but also for the captured Soviet soldiers whom the allies forced to return home to a certain death (anyone who was captured was by definition a traitor) and for the 10 million (TEN MILLION) German speaking citizens of Czechoslovakia, Poland and Romania who, after the war, were forced leave their homes for a devastated Germany, where many had never been before. Many were killed on the way. This is one of those books which teach you that if ever you thought you knew anything definite, you are wrong. The world is too complex. Ian Buruma, half-Dutch, half English, descended from Mennonites and Jews, a scholar of Japanese history and culture, and a flawless prose stylist, is the right man to make this point.

Too many people tend to believe that the horror of WW II stopped with V.E. and V.J. Days. After all, what else is there? The Allies won. The Axis lost. End of story...No. Far from it. In his absolutely brilliant overview of immediate events following the Allies' victory, Ian Buruma pointedly chronicles the tragic events that ensue. It is difficult to narrate to someone who has not yet read this book the feelings of ambivalence that this work stirs in its reader. It is UNarguable that the war crimes committed by the Axis are beyond reprehension. It is absolutely abominable that many of the perpetrators of these atrocities escaped their just punishment or got away with little more than the proverbial "slap on the wrist." These are not the issues Ian Buruma – the son of a Dutch slave laborer seized by the Nazis and brought to Germany after his country was overran by Werhmacht -- brings to the forefront of his narrative in "Year Zero: a history of 1945." Nor is there a question that the civilian populations of Axis countries must bear some responsibility for abhorrent atrocities of that period. They do. For nothing can possibly justify the absolute and catastrophic horror and misery their military and paramilitary entities (i.e. armies, SS, Gestapo, etc.) inflicted upon their victim populations: the tears, the pain, the heartache... death, destruction, sadness... starvation, disease, abandonment...But just how much of the punishment inflicted upon Axis civilian populations in retribution can be justified? Should a line be drawn between what is morally acceptable and what is not? The revenge killings?... The way the righteous French took out their post-occupation anger on some of their own women accused of (literally) sleeping with the enemy?... The mass rapes of East German women?... The fate of Japanese civilians abandoned by the retreating Imperial Army in China and Manchuria?... The fate of Russian émigrés, who escaped the Soviets in 1918-1920, but ended up in the hands of Western Allies in 1945?... The fate of Soviet (Red Army) POWs captured by the Wehrmacht in WW II and ended up in the hands of Western Allies in 1945?...The book is meticulously researched and cogently written. Thoroughly referenced and conscientiously indexed, this text (IMHO) should be a part of any self-respecting college history curriculum. After reading every word of its 337 pages, I have but one regret – Ian Buruma's book is too short. I wish there were more.

By its title, "Year Zero" (a history of 1945), a casual reader may believe that this book was written specifically/only about the aftereffects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's much, much more...without providing "spoilers," it takes us through the first or second most important event in WWII (the 'competition' with D-Day speaks for itself). The reader 'witnesses,' despite the war raging, preparations for/disagreements about what "the peace would look like" when the war ended. It's a fascinating book, and contemporary (it contains an imperialistic Russian bully taking every advantage of The West. Sound familiar??? This book could provide strategies for dealing with Russia in today's world. It's a good, important book about war AND peace,

I read this book in honour of VE Day, rather expecting it to focus at least in part on the last few months of the war in Europe leading up to VE Day. Instead it started from the last few weeks of the war and focused thematically on the main trends from then until the end of the year: the exultation of release from concentration camps, combined with the dire state of the survivors; the cycles of revenge that the end of hostilities gave rise to in the occupied countries; the return, or attempted return, of huge numbers of displaced persons to their homes; attempts to drain the poison of fascism and militarism from Germany and Japan; and the beginnings of the rebuilding of society in all the devastated countries. The first steps towards rebuilding were combined with a limited but very real sense of optimism at the potential for a new start in individual countries and also, at least initially, internationally with the establishment of the United Nations, hence the title of the book. That said, the author concludes prosaically that:"the sense one gets from newspapers around the world on the last day of 1945 is that most people were too anxious to get on with their own lives to care much about the global news anymore. During a worldwide war, everywhere matters. In times of peace, people look to home."and"If there is anything to be gleaned from these glimpses of the global mood on New Year’s Eve, it is that a certain sense of normality was beginning to seep back into the daily lives of people who were lucky enough to be able to lift their heads from the direst misery of the immediate postwar period."My only criticism would probably be that the author tries to cover too much ground, in too many countries, and I might have preferred it if all the material on, say, Japan had been in one section, rather than scattered thematically throughout the chapters - though this may just be my personal preference.

There are a couple of pictures in the book of people enjoying themselves on or around VE-Day: a photograph of a couple of Dutch girls on a Canadian soldier's motorbike, and a couple of British sailors and their girlfriends splashing around in a fountain. Those are the only joyful things in the book. A great many of the events and incidents described in the book are harrowing, distressing, horrific. Until I read this book, I had made the extraordinarily naive assumption that once the war ended, the killings, rapes, the hatred and the bigotry would be more or less at an end. That assumption was very clearly wrong.The author's whole approach is serious, very well-researched and thorough, as it needs to be for this subject, of course. The author has clearly expended an enormous amount of time and effort in the creation of the book.Yet one of the critical reviewers expends considerably less time and effort and somehow manages to sum the book up in four words: "Fairly dry... but informative" and in doing so, damns Buruma and his book with faint praise. Some critical reviewers say the book doesn't have enough descriptions of personal incidents, other critical reviewers say the book has too many descriptions of personal incidents. Another reviewer says the book is: "Depressingly badly written, repetitive, superficial and full of inaccuracies", yet the same can't be bothered to present a single example from the book to back up this scathing attack. And so on.It would be possible to come up with a number of theories for the inadequacies of the critical reviews: maybe the reviewers hadn't read the book, or they had read it and didn't understand it, or they had taken a dislike to the author for some reason.I have no idea which, if any, of those theories is correct. I am simply trying to show that the critical reviews for this book may not provide you with reliable information to help you decide whether you should buy the book or not.That's true for any reviews for any book from any supplier, of course, and it might equally apply to the reviews which are not critical. However, I'm writing all of this because I was particularly struck by the inadequacies of the critical reviews for this specific book.

The last book I read (some time ago) on 1945 was Robert Kee's "The World we Fought for". It's very good. And so is this one, but it's a bit different. You don't get many details of the final campaigns in Europe and the Far East, but you learn a lot about the aftermath, often very traumatic. Indeed the immediate post war months were decidedly awful for many, and few heroes emerge. This makes for quite depressing reading. The feeling of joy at the end of the War was often decidedly dampened.Some pertinent points come across. Having been smashed by their opponents in the War, the Germans and the Japanese had had enough. But the "British and Americans......could never quite rid themselves of nostalgia for their finest hours, leading to a propensity to embark on ill-fated military adventures". Yes indeed; and the Russians too. The events of the last seventy years bear witness to that.There's a lot of interesting information in the book, but one little snippet appealed to me especially. Apparently, in Britain, weather reports were banned in the War. What with "Closed for the Duration" and "don't you know there's a war on?", I imagine people had their fill of gloomy joy without that.This book is possibly a little heavy for some tastes, but I'm glad I read it.

I was born soon after the events detailed in the book but I knew nothing of what happened in the short time after the war finished. It does get mentioned. It is as if the world has a degree of shame for what happened. Not surprising as all the authorities were guilty of turning a blind eye to the massacres that occurred. The book is a valuable exposition on a time we all should know about.

In the world of stereotypes that our place has become these days, this book sheds light like a searchlight on a spot somewhere deep in our civilized self that we'd rather keep buried there for ever. Great book for all people in our free and human-loving West who are strong enough to be honest with themselves about a certain shade of gray of our self.