Year Zero: A History of 1945 eBook: Ian Buruma: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store

Year Zero: A History of 1945 eBook: Ian Buruma: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store




Digital List Price: $14.84
Kindle Price: $11.87





Product details

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 3323 KB
Print Length: 385 pages
Publisher: Atlantic Books; Main edition (3 October 2013)
Sold by: Amazon Australia Services, Inc.
Language: English

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Robert S. Hanenberg
5.0 out of 5 starsWe are wrong to think that the horrors ended after the surrenders of Germany and Japan.
3 October 2013 - Published on Amazon.com
Verified Purchase
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.
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C. M Mills
5.0 out of 5 starsYear Zero is a riveting account of 1945 throughout the world as the guns of World War II ended but not human suffering
5 January 2014 - Published on Amazon.com
Verified Purchase
Ian Buruma is a professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College. He is a prolific author of several books. Buruma's new effort is "Year Zero" referring to 1945 when World War II finally ended. The war cost over sixty million deaths; saw the Holocaust of Europe's Jews and untold suffering and murder throughout the globe. Buruma's Preface tells the story of his father a Dutch legal student who was forced to spend the war years in Berlin who was forced into brutal labor in Berlin, His father survived the war returning to Holland to continue his studies., The book ends with Buruma, his sister and father returning to Berlin in 1989 on the night the Berlin Wall fell and the Communist empire fell. Between those two signposts we take a war ravaged tour of a world recovering from the horror of war. We learn:
a. About continuing violence against the Jews in Poland, Germany and Soviet Union.
b. We Visit DP camps in Europe and Asia.
c. Buruma shows us the move toward centralized government and utopianism in governmental planning.
d. Buruma traces the evolution of war crime trials focusing on the Nuremberg Trials of major Nazi war criminals.
e. The rise of anti-colonialism is presented. Early signs of this movement are seen in Algeria and in Vietnam in the French orbit of their colonial empire.
f. The British empire begins to disintegrate as the British economy is in shambles and post-war drabness becomes reality.
g. The Chinese Civil War in which Mao's Communists duel with the Nationalists is discussed.
h. The different ways in which Japan and Germany were treated by the Western Allies is viewed.
I. Civil war in Greece is given a chapter as the communist rebels fight the British backed conservative government.
The author evinces a deep understanding of this crucial era presenting that slim time between the end of the war and the beginning of the cold war.
A brief review does not do full service to Year Zero. The book would serve well in the classroom or for study by general readers. It is somewhat dry reading but the information is good. Buruma covers both Europe and Asia in his study. Recommended.