The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (41 page)

fered from malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, rickets, stunted growth, and deformities of the legs. Dr. Gollan and the USC team, after spending a year in Italy, knew that what they were witnessing was not just the result of a food shortage, but of a collapse of the entire social fabric in Italy. “ The breakdown of public health mea- sures, sanitation and medical service, the lack of trans- portation, cold in wintertime and dehydration in sum- mer, crowded and unsanitary living quarters due to the destruction of homes and the shift of populations, the constant infections and infestations of the people due to polluted water and milk, the ignorance of the pop- ulation concerning matters of sanitation and cleanli- ness,” all of these factors turned daily life in southern Italy during the war and its aftermath into a desperate struggle for survival.
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Like every European country at the war’s end, Italy also had its share of displaced persons. Hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Italians were settled fairly rapidly, but in 1945, UNRRA faced the prospect of caring for 20,000 non-Italian refugees, some trying to get home, others afraid of returning home. From the earliest days of the Anglo-American landings in south- ern Italy, DPs had sought shelter in liberated southern Italy while awaiting the end of the war. They congre- gated in small camps set up by the Allied forces that

were turned over to UNRRA in the fall of 1945. The conditions in these camps were difficult, though not as bad as those UNRRA would later encounter in Ger- many. Most camps had one to two thousand or fewer residents, which made them easier to run.

Who were these people? Many were the typical resi- dents of Europe’s DP camps: Polish Jews, men, wom-

en, and children who did not wish to return home and were trying to make their way out of central Europe, down into Italy, and on to Palestine. But the makeup of any one camp varied over time: in early 1945, there were large numbers of Yugoslavs and Greeks in Italy who were able to return to their countries by mid-1945. By the end of the year, it was more likely that the camp inmates would be Eastern Europeans and Jews. The national origins of the 4,700 people in four camps in the Lecce region are indicative: 56 percent were Poles, 14 percent were Romanian, and the rest came from a dozen different European states.
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Naturally, the conditions in which they lived were dif- ficult. The health problems so prevalent in Italy were magnified inside DP camps, as UNRRA’s early reports revealed. Anne Dacie, who worked with the British Red Cross in the Bari camp, claimed to be the first woman aid worker inside the camp, arriving in January 1945. She went to work to help bathe, disinfect, and clothe the women and girls, mostly people from the Balkans. Their conditions were often so bad that their hair had to be shaved and their clothes burned. Dacie said that “all the refugees needed shoes and clothing, razors, combs, brushes and toothbrushes in order to gain some sense of self respect and well-being”—yet many of these things were in short supply until the UNRRA

program got under way in mid-1945. Dacie and her fel- low Red Cross workers had to scrounge up outfits for the refugees from cast-off army surplus; rubber tires were converted into makeshift sandals for the shoe- less. Prostitution was rife, as was general promiscuity among inmates. Relief workers were too busy to care, this being part of the normal course of war and some- thing everyone was thoroughly used to by 1945. Dacie seemed to think “a little promiscuity, though undesir- able, denoted a gradual return to the feelings of life, and finally of balance”; and at the weekly dances held in the camp, women camp residents dressed up as well as they could. “Others outside the camp might have thought them dowdy, but to us who knew them as they had been, they seemed charming.” This became a con- stant theme in the world of the DP camp: both inmates and camp staff were eager to reestablish even the most elementary kinds of normal social interactions: a nice dress and a dance, after six years of hell, was a kind of liberation.
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HERE GREECE AND Italy depressed UNRRA workers with their vast needs and defeated people, Yugoslavia lifted their spirits. “ The

inhabitants are all clean, proud, self-respecting and

friendly,” wrote acting director of the Yugoslav mission, Alan Hall, upon arriving in the country, “and a welcome change from southern Italy.” The head of the public re- lations office concurred: “the first general impressions of this place are wonderful, especially compared to the general feeling of depression and lack of initiative that one senses among the Italians.” Yugoslavs were full of “energy and enthusiasm,” and the streets were filled with youthful partisan boys and girls, singing and dancing. “Everyone here is amazed at the fine work the Jugoslavs [sic] are doing.”
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With UNRRA and Yugosla- via, it was love at first sight. Such first impressions, in a country that had passed through four years of bitter occupation and civil war, are curious. What did these UNRRA observers see in this ravaged country that im- pressed them so? What did they not see?

From the moment of the German invasion in the spring of 1941, Yugoslav society had splintered. The Yugoslav government, under the monarch King Peter, rallied el- ements of the army and the Serb elite, but the king fled to London in June; a proroyalist resistance movement headed by Colonel (later General) Draža Mihailovi established links to the British government. The Ger- mans, meanwhile, established a collaborationist re- gime in a much-expanded Croatia under the Fascist and Croatian nationalist Ante Paveli , who now saw an

opportunity to wage ethnic war against the long-hated, domineering, and Orthodox Serbs. The Croatian na- tionalist Ustaše movement began in May 1941 a long- term campaign of terror and extermination against the Serbs. Mihailovi ’s Chetnik forces, instead of fight- ing these Fascists and their German patrons, seemed content instead to play a waiting game, withdrawing to the hills of southern Serbia. The British, on whom Mihailovi was dependent for supplies, began by 1943 to lean toward the more effective resistance movement led by Josip Broz, or Tito, a Communist revolutionary who eschewed ethnic warfare and preferred killing Germans. Precisely because of the challenge they pre- sented to Mihailovi ’s control of the anti-Fascist move- ment, Tito’s partisans were targeted by the Chetniks. The partisans fought back, so Yugoslavia, in addition to facing a German occupation, was also engaged in a three-way civil war between the Fascist Ustaše, the royalist- Serb Chetniks, and the Communist partisans. The result was horrifyingly predictable: of the 1.2 mil- lion Yugoslavs who died in the Second World War, most were killed by their fellow countrymen.
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By late 1943, when British aid and support turned de- cisively toward the partisans, it became clear that the future of Yugoslavia lay in Tito’s hands. A devoted Com- munist, a charismatic and vain, handsome, sometimes

preening leader, Tito also showed enormous political acumen in outmaneuvering Mihailovi for British favor, and then in ensuring that—unlike in Greece, where the Communists had been pushed into the hills—his movement would dominate the postwar government. In June 1944, through British brokerage, representa- tives of Tito and King Peter worked out an agreement for a postwar power-sharing government, but there were few illusions that any real sharing would occur. In the fall of 1944, the Soviet Red Army swept through eastern and northern Yugoslavia to liberate Belgrade, leaving Tito in full command of the political stage. The coalition government that took shape in March 1945 was only nominally multiparty; Tito controlled the le- vers of power, the secret police, and a powerful force of battle-tested rebels.

Yugoslavia in 1945 faced an economic and social crisis. Reports gathered chiefly by British military authori- ties revealed the predictable carnage. In Dalmatia, the beautiful coastal region that had been occupied by the Italians after April 1941 and by the Croatian Fascists af- ter September 1943, 600,000 civilian inhabitants faced a severe shortage of food, housing, and clothing; heavy fighting had killed off much of the livestock and spoiled grain supplies. In the Banat region, north of Serbia and bordering Romania and Hungary, the Germans had

ruled with the willing aid of a large minority of ethnic Germans, who had ruthlessly persecuted the Serbs. By the fall of 1944, the tables had turned, and these Volks- deutsche—perhaps 200,000 of them—were now slated for destruction. Most were expelled from their land and many were shipped in convoys to labor camps in the Soviet Union. The result was a denuded territory of empty farms. Bosnia, much of which had suffered under Croatian Fascist rule, faced an epidemic of dis- ease: “hardly a village in eastern Bosnia has not been struck by typhus,” concluded one report, and the lack of soap and clean clothes compounded the problem. In Montenegro, which had been under nominal Italian control but in fact was a partisan stronghold, disease and food shortages were beginning to take their toll. There had been “no medical attention in these areas for nearly four years,” according to one assessment. “Rickets, tuberculosis, typhus, ring-worm, and impe- tigo are prevalent. There is no attempt at sanitation anywhere, and lice, fleas, and rats are ever present.” Only Belgrade had escaped catastrophic damage, in part because the German occupation had enforced a kind of calm there. The population was anxious about Tito’s troops, and wild rumors circulated about mass arrests and purges; but the food supply was adequate, though expensive due to unregulated prices. “ The av- enues are untidy,” wrote one observer, “with unswept

leaves, and the streets are littered with bins of uncol- lected garbage, until quite recently often liberally in- termixed with deceased Germans.”
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The war’s end did not bring peace to Yugoslavia. On V-E Day, as Europe celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany and the arrival of peace, Yugoslavia was still deep in a season of war. Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s closest po- litical friends and allies in the partisan movement, and a man whose two brothers and pregnant sister were murdered by the Chetniks, recalled that “we leaders greeted the unconditional surrender of Germany—Vic- tory Day—in bitter loneliness. It was a joy not meant for us…. We were still waging war on a grand scale.” Chetniks, Ustaše, collaborators—those who had taken up arms against the partisans—were now marked for liquidation. “ The killings were sheer frenzy,” Djilas ad- mitted. Perhaps 20,000–30,000 were tracked down and killed; the violence continued right down to the end of the year. Why so much bitterness? Djilas explained: “side by side with the invader they [Ustaše and Chet- niks] had waged war for many years against the chil- dren of their own people; they had run to new masters; they had burned, tortured, slaughtered;…they took no prisoners.” And so the wartime enemies were hunted down and wiped out. Djilas said that he and his fellow partisan leaders embraced this policy of retribution

“with bitter conviction.”
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Did the UNRRA teams that arrived in the spring of 1945 overlook this violent endgame of a civil war in a coun- try that apparently was not yet ready to stop killing? Perhaps. Or maybe they liked what they saw—not, to be sure, the purges and murders but the zeal of the fiery partisans. There was something in the Yugoslavs that outsiders wished to identify with: their revolution- ary enthusiasm, the virtue of a righteous cause, their membership in a warrior race that had sustained itself and its people on ideas of patriotism, justice, and lib- eration. These categories and typologies, useful in ex- plaining the success of the rugged partisan against the tyrannical German, were core ideals of the Allied cause as it had been rehearsed by Roosevelt and Churchill. Yugoslavs needed little more than a helping hand, it seemed, to aid their fierce experiment in democracy. It was not that UNRRA observers failed to see the vio- lence of the war and its aftermath: rather, they saw in it a political commitment that filled them with a fearful admiration.

The reputation, so carefully promoted by the BBC dur- ing 1944, of the Yugoslavs as proud warriors who had rid their country of the Germans, prepared foreign relief officials to find heroes on every hand. When in

April 1945 the first convoy of Yugoslav refugees boarded trucks at the El Shatt camp near Cairo, en route to the coast and a ship that would take them home to Split, UNRRA’s public relations bureau invested the scene with a certain grandeur: these 1,300 Yugoslav refugees were “returning with proud, happy hearts, determined to help build a new and democratic Jugoslavia.” These were, according to one observer, “not refugees in the ordinary sense of the word; they are people going home to do a job” of rebuilding their land. On the docks, as the refugees embarked, they filed to the ships “with the precision of soldiers.” The American commander of UNRRA’s Middle East office, Dr. H. van Zile Hyde, de- picted this refugee repatriation as a veritable victory march: “As the first Jugoslavs leave us today, we see men, women and children returning to the land they cherish with determination to add their strength to work in their nation, whose name holds forever a high and honored place among the foes of evil and destruc- tion. These people are returning as victors over hard- ship.”
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Such discipline made UNRRA look good, at a time when UNRRA needed successes. “It will be almost impossible for UNRRA to fail in Jugoslavia,” public re- lations director Sydney Morrell wrote. “If any people were ready and able to help themselves it is this one…. These people have a bottomless capacity for persever- ance.”
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