Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II Read Online Free PDF

Dresden in 1945, despite the fact that most reputable sources of the past ten or fifteen years, including an official German government commission in 2009, have put the figure at around 20,000.) The issue of such exaggerated numbers will come up again and again in the following chapters.
    However, if some people overstate the extent of postwar vengeance, then sometimes the opposite is also true. Many Jews are quick to point out that vengeance was actually fairly uncommon. ‘We couldn’t take vengeance, or we’d be the same as them,’ claims Berek Obuchowski, who was liberated at Theresienstadt. ‘Out of all those people who survived I doubt there was more than five per cent that took vengeance on the Germans.’ 1 Even at the time Jews made such claims. ‘We do not want revenge,’ declared Dr Zalman Grinberg, in a speech delivered to an assembly of his fellow Jews at Dachau at the end of May 1945. ‘If we took this vengeance it would mean we would fall to the depths and ethics and morals the German nation has been in these past ten years. We are not able to slaughter women and children! We are not able to burn millions of people! We are not able to starve hundreds of thousands!’ 2
    Most historians would agree with such claims – vengeance was only the path of a minority. There were many areas across Europe where soldiers, partisans and ex-prisoners showed remarkable restraint, and the rule of law was more or less intact. In Norway and Denmark, for example, there was very little violence after the war. But even in these countries, which had not suffered nearly as much physical and moral destruction as other areas further south and east, vengeance did take place, especially against women who had slept with German soldiers. The fact that it was a relatively mild form of vengeance does not make it any less present.
    It is also true that Jews were probably far less guilty of vengeance than any other group in postwar Europe. But those who did choose the path of vengeance embraced it wholeheartedly, to the point where they were willing to risk both their own lives and those of innocent people. The fact that Dr Grinberg spoke so forcefully about the subject in his speech at Dachau shows that the desire for revenge was very much alive amongst Jews there. And, as we know, this desire was acted upon at Dachau, both by camp inmates and by American troops.
    The issue of Jewish vengeance is still an extremely sensitive subject. At the time, most Jews were quick to reject the temptation for the reasons spelled out in Dr Grinberg’s speech – they did not want to sink into the same moral cesspool as the Nazis themselves. Today, however, Jews play down the existence of vengeance for slightly different reasons: they are worried about how the world might perceive their actions. People of other faiths cannot possibly understand this anxiety that Jews feel about their image. Having suffered centuries of anti-Semitic slurs and conspiracy theories, of which the Nazi hate campaign between 1933 and 1945 was merely the apogee, Jews are understandably determined to avoid any kind of unnecessary controversy. Studies show that whenever any controversy does arise, such as over the issue of Israel, the traditional anti-Semitism immediately surfaces once again throughout Europe, as is evidenced by the spate of attacks on Jews that occurred after the Israeli war in southern Lebanon in 2006. 3
    It is unsurprising, therefore, that when journalist John Sack published a book about Jewish vengeance in the 1990s it caused an uproar in the Jewish community, particularly in America. Sack interviewed several Jews who became prominent in Poland’s prison camp system after the war, and who admitted to torturing German prisoners. His work, though sensational in style, was backed up by documentary evidence, and all his interviews were taped and made publicly available. Nevertheless his agent refused to represent the book, and his American publishers, having