Family Histories of World War II

Survivors and Descendants

Róisín Healy, Gearóid Barry, Róisín Healy, Gearóid Barry

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350201972
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Expertly contextualized by two leading historians in the field, this unique collection offers 13 accounts of individual experiences of World War II from across Europe. It sees contributors describe their recent ancestors' experiences ranging from a Royal Air Force pilot captured in Yugoslavia and a Spanish communist in the French resistance to two young Jewish girls caught in the siege of Leningrad. Contributors draw upon a variety of sources, such as contemporary diaries and letters, unpublished postwar memoirs, video footage as well as conversations in the family setting. These chapters attest to the enormous impact that war stories of family members had on subsequent generations. The story of a father who survived Nazi captivity became a lesson in resilience for a daughter with personal difficulties, whereas the story of a grandfather who served the Nazis became a burden that divided the family. At its heart, Family Histories of World War II concerns human experiences in supremely difficult times and their meaning for subsequent generations.

1 From generation to generation: World War II narratives in transition

Róisín Healy and Gearóid Barry

Life during World War II was, for many millions of people across the globe, the equivalent of experiencing hell on earth. While, as historian Ian Kershaw points out, the continent of Europe went ‘to hell and back’ between 1914 and 1949, it was in the years between 1939 and 1945 that Europeans really plumbed the ‘bottomless pit of inhumanity’.¹ Extreme hatreds based on ethnonationalism or class, incipient in the continent since World War I, had by 1939 coagulated into the warped utopianisms of Nazism and Stalinism, along with a host of local variants. Social engineering in the name of racial purity or wartime security ordained the direst cruelty towards perceived internal enemies. Even representatives of the Axis powers themselves were occasionally shocked by the depravity of their allies, as in the case of the treatment of the Orthodox Serbs by the Croat Fascist Ustaše regime.² That is not to say, as Norman Davies reminds us, that World War II was a straightforward morality tale: the Allied victory was itself ‘no simple victory’. The Allies had also played a part in further obliterating the civilian-combatant distinction in wartime, as the civilian dead of the ‘strategic bombing’ of German cities, such as the thirty thousand who died in Hamburg in 1943, could have attested.³ World War II as a whole ended only with Japan’s defeat in August 1945, when the world entered a frightening new atomic age with the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first-hand account of Irishman Aidan MacCarthy, then a British prisoner of war (POW) in Japanese captivity, of the destruction of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945 and the suffering of its people which, as a medical doctor, he tried to salve, captures well the manner in which World War II could literally defy human understanding. MacCarthy recorded in his memoir his initial conviction that he was witnessing the Apocalypse at first hand.⁴

Within Europe alone fighting killed about forty million people, both soldiers and civilians, and the war left in its wake about another thirty million uprooted people, including camp survivors.⁵ War-related deaths of civilians and combatants had been unequally distributed. For instance, out of the estimated fourteen million military deaths on the Allied side in World War II, 70 per cent had been sustained by the Soviet Union whereas Britain and France lost fewer soldiers than they had in World War I.⁶ Suffering did not end with the defeat of the Axis powers. Mark Mazower speaks of a ‘brutal peace’ emerging from the war marked by internal civil wars, hunger and a looming Cold War divide in Europe.⁷ Ethnic cleansing, of which the Holocaust was the most flagrant example, began during the war and continued for several years afterwards, violently reordering central and eastern Europe into more homogenous territories. Indeed, World War II was decisive in a number of key respects in remaking Europe and the world geopolitically. In contrast to 1918, in 1945 the Allies were in a position to inflict an absolute defeat on Germany and overthrow its domestic regime. Both the western Allies – Britain, the United States and France – and the Soviet Union imposed, in the parts of Germany they controlled, political regimes in their own image and likeness. Another major consequence of World War II was the expansion of Soviet power into eastern Europe, a dominance that lasted until 1989.

Biography and memoir

The enormous impact of the war in political, social, economic and cultural terms has encouraged a view of the war as a quintessentially collective experience. In Britain, the popular notion of the ‘spirit of the blitz’ testifies to the value placed on solidarity in the face of Nazi aggression, especially the bombings of British cities.⁸ The Holocaust was conceived as an attack on all Jews and remembered as a collective experience. The Final Solution threw Jewish citizens of different nationalities, different language communities and different levels of commitment to Judaism together in camps, killing fields and gas chambers. The horror of these years and the mass emigration of survivors from Europe helped to forge a transnational Jewish identity in places like Israel and North America. Moreover, the aftermath of the war in eastern Europe – the exchange of Nazi rule for Soviet rule – encouraged a popular regional narrative that considered World War II as the start of a fifty-year period of collective oppression.⁹

Yet no two individuals had the same war experience. Even within national, racial or regional communities, experiences differed according to a host of factors such as gender, age, profession, location and, not least, chance. There is a long tradition of documenting the individual experiences of World War II produced by these multiple variations. Some of those who lived through the war took on the role of active witnesses, deliberately recording their own experiences for posterity. Anne Frank is the best-known example, although there were many others whose works were published long after the war, if at all.¹⁰ Peacetime provided a more conducive context in which to recount the often-traumatic experiences of the war. Soon after it ended, a host of memoirs appeared, largely focusing on combat activities and acts of resistance. Many were written by politicians and senior military officers, keen to celebrate their own prowess and, in the case of the losers, dissociate themselves from the Nazi cause.¹¹ The demand for examples of great heroism allowed some lesser-ranking soldiers and civilians active in the resistance to publish their accounts too.¹² The horror of the Nazis’ campaign of mass murder also gave rise to individual memoirs. Holocaust survivors Viktor Frankl and Primo Levi felt particular urgency in committing their experiences to paper immediately after the war.¹³ Biography also became an important means of communicating individual experiences of the war. For many years, only the key political and military figures were deemed worthy of attention.¹⁴ Numerous biographies of Churchill and Hitler were published in different languages within just a few years of the war’s end.¹⁵

These individual histories of the war proved popular with readers. It is not hard to understand why. Historian Lois W. Banner has pointed out that biography encourages ‘transference’, a process by which readers identify with past lives to ask questions of their own.¹⁶ Readers responded particularly well to Band of Brothers, the collective biography of Easy Company, a US Army crack rifle unit that fought its way through France, the Netherlands and Germany in the last year of the war. The familial note struck by this title emphasized that individual and collective experiences of the war were intertwined.¹⁷ Autobiographical writings enjoy even more immediate resonance. It is no coincidence that the Holocaust is taught in schools largely through first-person accounts such as those by Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank.¹⁸

The decades since 1990 have seen a significant increase in accounts of individual experiences of the war, especially those of Jews. By 2020, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of the war, the genre of World War II biography and memoir accounted for over nine thousand entries on Amazon. Much of this boom is to do with the interest sparked in the Holocaust by popular films like Schindler’s List, which was released in 1993.¹⁹ The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Soviet dominance in eastern Europe also play a role. The ending of the official taboo on comparisons between Nazi and Stalinist terror allowed eastern Europeans to speak more openly about their wartime experiences. The mere passage of time has helped too. The impulse to record experiences in anticipation of death in old age has prompted an increasing number of survivors to pen their accounts.²⁰ Some survivors whose wartime experiences were politically awkward, even if they themselves perpetrated no crimes, felt the need to explain their actions and bear witness to their wartime suffering. Although sent to Germany against their will, the half a million French labour deportees were an embarrassing reminder of the collaborationist Vichy regime and only began writing their experiences decades after the initial rush of resisters’ narratives.²¹ The emotional distance from painful experiences has also enabled other new publications. The family of Renia Spiegel, a Jewish woman mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 From generation to generation: World War II narratives in transition
• Part One Lives in uniform: Enduring combat and captivity
• Part Two Lives under siege: Coping with occupation
• Index
• Copyright Page