FEBRUARY

Paris

Christian is born on 12 February, or that’s the way he feels. This is D-Day — as in dream, de luxe, Dior. This is the first time he is presenting a collection under his own name.

The turning points in his life are marked by fortune-tellers. Take the time when, dressed as a gypsy, he was selling lucky charms at a bazaar in his hometown of Granville. Just when it was time to pack up and go home, the hired palm-reader grasped his hand and foretold that he would make his fortune from women — a prophecy that baffled the 14-year-old boy as well as his parents. But now the reborn Christian Dior says happily: ‘In every country there are thin women and fat women, dark women and fair women, women of discreet taste, and others whose taste is more flamboyant. There are some women with a beautiful décolletage, and others whose aim is to disguise their thighs. Some are too tall. Others are too short. The world is wonderfully full of beautiful women whose shapes and tastes offer an inexhaustible diversity.’

Having opened his bureau des rêveries just a few months previously, he selects his staff with great care. They must be focused on achieving elegance, complementing him and his dream factory with embroidery, gauze, and precision needlework. And he knows he must worship the goddess Publicity if she is to enlist Fate on his behalf.

The three-storey house at 30, Avenue Montaigne, Paris, with its wrought-iron balcony and gleaming revolving door in mahogany and glass, now becomes home to his reborn persona, who lacks a past but has all the future imaginable. There, he and his colleagues labour, with feverish discipline, among folds and flounces of fabric.

Owing to the new law banning brothels throughout France, numerous women are seeking alternative employment. Christian Dior advertises for models in the press and is swamped by applications. Amid this plethora, he finds only one — Marie-Thérèse. The others — Noëlle, Paule, Yolande, Lucile, and Tania — are recruited from the world of haute couture.

They are all extremely svelte, naturellement, so Christian urges them to acquire false bosoms. Now is now, and everything is to be different: curves, corsets, padded hips; a waist so slender that it can be spanned by a man’s hands. The New Look.

Outside, the women wear state-approved gabardine, paint their legs brown to compensate for the lack of stockings, and finish off with a darker vertical line that stands in for a seam. Their hats are large, their skirts knee-length, and their hair long, put up in a roll on their foreheads, and flowing freely down their backs as they pedal through Paris — all alike in the democracy imposed by poverty. Christian calls them Amazons, and shudders at their angular silhouettes, grainy as a wartime photograph.

For the second year in a row, the winter is inhumanly cold, Siberian and cruel, yet he wants to spread spring. He thinks of flowers, women, femmes-fleur, rounded shoulders instead of military-style padded ones, flowing lines, bell-shaped skirts. He draws uninterruptedly, everywhere, sometimes making hundreds of sketches in a single day.

Clothes like architecture. Clothes like the figure eight, like tulips, like the letter A. Clothes that not only love women, but also make them love themselves, give them happiness. He adopts the motto ‘Je maintiendrai’, ‘I will maintain’. Does he realise that from now on all he touches will turn into gold?

The world is stricken by poverty, scrawny and fearful, focused on ration cards and clothing coupons. Christian’s whole being is in revolt, he wants to explode in purple and taffeta, interpret reality in the light of a newly cut diamond. Soon he will bring out his visions in silk, already dyed the right shade at the thread stage, never as woven fabric.

By 13 February, he is a household name worldwide. A show, a press release, 24 hours — that’s all it takes. Women queue to have their measurements taken and noted down in his boutique. Olivia de Havilland, the film star, purchases the model Passe-Partout in navy-blue wool. Rita Hayworth orders the evening dress Soirée for the premiere of Gilda. Even the queen of bohemia, Juliette Gréco, wants to wear Dior in the Quartier Latin. Ordinary women are seduced too. Despite the shortage of cloth, plagiarised versions are swiftly produced for the ordinary shops; at home, skirts are lengthened, and coats altered to have nipped-in waists.

Pale sea pearls, the collected amount of light they reflect.

The sound of sharp scissors snipping threads. Révolution!

London

The British are tired. Tired of the Zionists’ bombs and acts of terrorism; of keeping the Arabs happy; of the fact that £80 million has been squandered in Palestine over the last two years, and that 100,000 British men are obliged to be there, far from their homes and work.

All ‘for the sake of a senseless, squalid war with the Jews in order to give Palestine to the Arabs, or God knows who’, as Winston Churchill puts it.

Britain, which once occupied the region to secure trade routes and colonial power, no longer wants the future of Palestine to be seen as an internal British matter, but instead places the responsibility on the rest of the world. On 18 February, five days after Christian Dior’s dream fireworks, the British announce that they are handing the issue of Palestine’s future over to the UN without making any recommendations whatsoever. They want to distance themselves from the mess, to get as far away as possible from the burden of sorting it out.

Only a few months earlier, the Arab League had considered putting forward the same proposal — to hand the whole problem over to the UN — but now Britain’s stance arouses outraged protests. While Egypt, Syria, the Lebanon, Iraq, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia have different positions, they are, above all, influenced by one man: Haj Amin al-Husseini. He is the leader of the Palestinian Arabs and holds two high positions, being both President of the Supreme Muslim Council and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The British are tired of him as well.

The UN decides to set up a committee comprising representatives of neutral countries. They will solve the problem. In the Arab League’s view, there is no need for any committee; all that needs to be done is to establish an independent Palestinian state taking up the whole region, and everything will be sorted. Australia proposes delegates from 11 countries. The Arab League proposes that there should be a representative from each of its member countries, but the proposal is rejected. As is the Zionists’ demand that the British and the Americans take part in the deliberations. Apart from Australia, the new committee comprises delegates from Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. No one is particularly satisfied.

The Zionists demand that the Committee visit the camps in Europe where the survivors of the genocide are assembling. The Arab countries protest, arguing that it should confine itself to investigating the situation on the ground, within the existing borders of Palestine. But the UN brief states that the Committee may work exactly where it wishes, in Palestine or any other suitable location.

Emil Sandström, a Swedish lawyer, is appointed chairman, and after a first meeting in New York the Committee’s members decide to spend five weeks in Palestine in the coming summer. They have a few months to carry out their task. And then, the conflict must be resolved.

Chicago

Simone de Beauvoir is forever making notes on other women’s appearance. ‘She’s very ugly.’ ‘She’s beautiful, but stupid.’ ‘She’s the only woman I consider intelligent enough to spend time with, but she’s ugly.’ This is how she comments on her female acquaintances in literary Paris. Now she has left her well-marked territory and flown out to the United States for a four-month lecture tour. In the first few days, she is intensely absorbed in the experience of changing reality, becoming an outsider.

‘My presence is a borrowed presence. There is no room for me on these pavements. This world, where I have made a surprising appearance, has not been waiting for me. It was complete without me — it is complete without me. It is a world where I am not, and I grasp it in my own absence.’

A woman friend said she ought to visit Nelson Algren in Chicago. Simone de Beauvoir takes this advice. On 20 February, she meets the writer Algren for the first time. He is 38; she is a year older.

One evening he shows her his world, the district around West Madison Street, which he calls Chicago’s ‘lower depths’. Lodging houses for single men, hostels, sleazy bars. A little band is playing in the first bar; women are stripping, making obscene movements under signs saying dancing is forbidden. They stop, listen; drunken people dance. Simone watches and says, ‘It’s beautiful.’

Nelson is surprised but pleased. ‘You French can see that ugliness and beauty, the grotesque and the tragic, good and evil, exist side by side,’ he says. ‘Americans can’t. For them it’s either one thing or the other.’

The two go on to a bar frequented by black people, then to another. The streets are empty, cold, snowy, abandoned. They kiss in the taxi home.

The next day, de Beauvoir and Algren wander around the poor, dirty Polish quarter where he grew up, and where he has spent much of his adult life. Again, they go from bar to bar, chilled by a bitterly cold wind, and warm themselves up with vodka. They don’t want to separate, but are obliged to; de Beauvoir has a dinner appointment with two Frenchmen whom she hates for preventing her from wandering around with Algren. When she leaves Chicago the next day, she rings him from the station, talking for as long as she can before the train departs.

‘They had to take the telephone away from me by force.’

On the journey to Los Angeles, she decides to return.

Nelson Algren lives in a hovel without a bathroom or fridge, in an alley full of stinking garbage bins and discarded newspapers. Simone de Beauvoir finds the poverty refreshing. The only thing that concerns her is pain. If it already hurts to leave him, how will it be if they meet again?

Simone puts this question to Nelson in a letter. He replies, ‘Too bad for us if another separation is going to be difficult.’ Come back.

Ismailia

Listing what Hasan al-Banna loathes is simple. Sexual licence. Women’s emancipation. Democracy. Music. Dance. Singing. Foreign influences.

From an early age, it became al-Banna’s aim to prescribe what was right and to proscribe what was wrong. As an adolescent in the town of Al-Mahmudiyyah, he and some of his comrades formed a group whose mission was to improve morality through prayer and vigilance. One day, strolling along the banks of the Nile, he saw a carved wooden figure of a naked woman, at the very spot where local mothers fetched water. Some of the shipbuilders employed at the port had been amusing themselves, or had had a go at creating female forms, and young Hasan al-Banna realised there was something forbidden here to be reported, and was quick to do so. He contacted the police, and was subsequently praised in school for setting a good example.

Is this true? Did it actually happen? No matter whether it really did, it is a story that will come to play a decisive role in the development of Islam as a political movement: the often-repeated legend of the young man who was not afraid to tell the truth or correct his elders.

At 20, al-Banna lived in a house in the city of Ismailia. The rooms on the ground floor were rented by Jews, there were Christians on the first floor, and he and some friends rented the rooms at the top: a metaphor for the development of the monotheistic religions, he summarised. After this, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Netherlands

There are no tulips in bloom, the gardens have been emptied — everything has been dug up. But what were people supposed to do? Boiled tulip bulbs are said to taste much like chestnuts, bland and slightly sweet, though more than four will poison you.

One cannot speak of national scars after the war; national paralysis is more accurate. There are hardly any trains, given the lack of locomotives. The Nazis handed them over to Romania. They also dismantled much of the telephone network, so people now have to use temporary lines — at least, if they can afford it. Those who pay most are put through first. The Dutch are not allowed to buy more bulbs either, at least not for private use. Professional growers are the only ones filling the fields, as the country’s entire reserve of flowers is set aside for export to the United States. The gardens remain as they are, flowerless: emptied stores.

And no one even wants to hear the word ‘Germany’, so strong is their hatred after the Occupation. Under a new law, 25,000 Dutch nationals of German ancestry are branded ‘hostile subjects’ and sentenced to deportation — even if they happen to be Jews, liberals, or opponents of the Nazis.

The violence takes a well-trodden path. The Dutch-Germans are given an hour to pack everything they can carry, up to a maximum of 50 kg, then they are dispatched to jails, or to prison camps near the Dutch–German border to await deportation. Their homes and businesses are confiscated by the state. Operation Black Tulip.

And then? Relief? A sense of purity?

Ansbach, southern Germany, the American zone

Europe is full of children whose parents have been shot, gassed, tortured or starved to death, or allowed to die of cold. The children were left behind and survived — because their hair was dyed blond and they were given false Christian birth certificates; because they were placed in monasteries or convents, they crouched down in buckets inside privies, they were kept shut in behind walls, in an attic, or under a floor; or because their parents pushed them further back in the queue while they were waiting to be shot on a Danube quayside.

Some of these thousands of children are gathered together in temporary children’s homes or foster homes, others drift around in loose gangs living on the streets and in the ruins. And then there are those who survived the war together with one of their parents, like Joszéf.

Hordes of children — do they share the dream of a country of their own? Maybe. They have to go somewhere, at any rate.

In a former sanatorium in Strüth, 5 km north of Ansbach, UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, is setting up a children’s home in cooperation with the Jewish Agency, a Zionist organisation. The low, white buildings provide a temporary home for some of the orphans from eastern and central Europe, until such time as they are granted authorisation to travel to Palestine.

Behind the buildings lie fields where they can grow vegetables. There is a main building for UN staff and a side building where a small sick bay can be set up. Here, the skinny youngsters are to receive 3000 calories a day, plus schooling, including lessons in Hebrew and Jewish culture.

The first group of Hungarian children arrive at the Strüth camp with the kibbutz movement Hashomer Hatzair. To begin with, their leaders want nothing to do with UNRRA or the adjoining military base, demanding that they be left to organise themselves. The camp staff have a hard job convincing them that a degree of cooperation may be beneficial to the children’s health, cleanliness, and education. UNRRA promises to liaise with the military base which is loaning the buildings, and to refrain from interfering with the movement’s political orientation. A calm of sorts is established for a few days, until the leaders of the kibbutz movement realise that a further 220 children are expected from Hungary. At this point, protests erupt. The leaders are seriously worried; the expected group is too big, the camp will be overpopulated, epidemics will break out. But the worst thing of all is the threat of a bad moral influence. The new group will teach the disciplined Hashomer Hatzair children to steal, smoke, refuse to obey, and refuse to work.

UNRRA’s staff write anxiously to the head office in New York. They have long discussions with the kibbutz leaders about the importance of sharing responsibility for refugee issues, and about how they cannot turn their backs on a single orphaned child. But nothing helps. It is not until the leaders of Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist movement, discover that the group on its way also belongs to the kibbutz movement — albeit to the rival branch, Habonim Dror, which is not as socialist in its ideology — that they accept the situation.

Joszéf is ten. He was once called György, like his father. But when his mother handed him over to Habonim Dror, he was given a new name as a sign of his new future. Now he leaves Budapest on a journey to Palestine, with the Strüth children’s refugee camp as a staging post.

It is a long way. For the last leg of the journey, from Ainring, Joszéf and the others spend over 12 hours in a lorry. They are cold and hungry when they arrive, but in surprisingly good spirits, according to reports by UNRRA staff.

The well brought-up children from Hashomer Hatzair welcome the children from Habonim Dror with songs. Following them into the white buildings, they show them around the dormitories, the lavatories, and the refectory. They serve food and wash up afterwards. It is not until two o’clock in the morning that the lights go out in the dormitories, and all the orphans, their kibbutz leaders, and the UN staff can get to sleep.

Joszéf’s group arrives shockingly badly dressed from Budapest, their shoes falling apart and their garments ill fitting, with no change of clothes. Only a few children have socks. Some of them have to stay in bed until their clothing has been washed and mended. However, they do appreciate the importance of cleanliness. Their first request on the day after their arrival is to be allowed to wash.

When a third group arrives at the white buildings in Strüth a few days later, the Zionist camp is full. It contains 290 children, some of them just two years old. Around 30 of the children are about ten, like Joszéf. Just over 70 children are aged between 12 and 13, while the majority are between 14 and 16. Most of them are from Hungary, but there are also Polish children, and a few who have grown up in Yugoslavia or Russia.

Nothing is straightforward. The two competing Zionist movements demand that sick children be put into separate sick bays, so they are not contaminated by the wrong political ideology. UNRRA’s staff mediate, and gradually daily life in the camp in the green German countryside becomes calmer.

There he is, then, the boy. Once he was a Hungarian, György, who lived with his mother and father in the metropolis of Budapest. Now, as the Zionist pioneer Joszéf, he’s learning Hebrew and the importance of growing crops and being a good comrade. He has lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also in singing, drama, and drawing. He gets to box in his free time. He meets the American soldiers from the camp in Ansbach who drive up in their jeeps, and on one or two rare occasions they let him take the wheel himself. There is no ignition key; you start the motor by pressing a button. It’s all very interesting. Shmuel, Pinhas, and Dov, plus Dina and Miriam, are his best friends. Everything’s fine.

UNRRA is responsible for assisting and rehabilitating Jewish refugees in the region, irrespective of their political activities. A UN employee summarises the situation in a document headed General Observations and Recommendations: the Jewish Situation in Central and Eastern Europe:

The Jews who remain in Europe are of two major groups. Some, and these are chiefly members of Kibbutsim, are well organised and have an ideal and a goal — Palestine, their nation, their home. Their leadership is good, their discipline excellent, their standards high. The other group still carries in its veins the poison that Hitler has brewed. They refuse to work. They steal. They engage in black market activities. Life for them is a day-to-day existence. Their aim is to get everything they can from the Germans or other enemies, to repay just a little of the humiliation and suffering that they endured for so long. If one talks to individuals, they admit they are hurting themselves but the answer is always, ‘When I get to Palestine — or the United States — or to England, then I shall be different.’

The report notes that it is precisely the self-destructive refugees, poisoned by their experiences, who ‘must be served by the best personnel UNRRA can corral. There must be understanding and sympathy — firmness and tact … [They must have] good food … housing that permits one to share a room with one’s friends — not a drab barrack filled with … raw, wooden beds that recall the tortures of the concentration camp every moment of the day.’ Evil is to be exorcised by good.

Kiev

Mikhail was a sergeant and just 22 years old when he was called to the great General Zhukov. Thanks to his invention, the Red Army was able to calculate the exact number of shots fired by a weapon. As a reward and a token of the General’s appreciation, Mikhail was given — what else? — a watch.

The year was 1941. General Zhukov would lead the Soviet Union to victory over the Fascists, but at the time this meeting took place, Operation Barbarossa had not yet got under way, the pact between Stalin and Hitler was still intact. And it goes without saying that the watch has disappeared. Only the myth remains.

Germany

Never again, never again, never again. These words have echoed for nearly two years, from the first day of the German capitulation in May 1945, until the last name is signed under the peace treaty, on 10 February 1947, in Paris.

On this day, the Second World War is formally at an end.

For two years, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the US have been dealing with victory, prisoners, obligations, and responsibility. They have to show people that the right side won, that democracy is superior to authoritarianism. The aim is to de-Nazify, demilitarise, decentralise, and democratise Germany. Crimes must be punished. Wounds must be healed. Events that are so far preserved only in the memories of individuals must be recognised as criminal acts and brought to justice.

The four victorious powers agree that the Nazis must be brought to account. But do they want to exact vengeance? To receive compensation? To secure peace? All of those things — but also to emphasise certain events and avert their gaze from others, both call a halt and move on.

The story of the war is not yet written. No historians have gone through the archives that were left behind. The account of the Nazi dictatorship provided by the legal proceedings will be the first overarching description. The process of law is to be a history lesson, a means to collect facts, and proof that justice has won the day.

On 20 October 1945, the International Military Tribunal took its seat at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice. What has become known as the Nuremberg trial was the first of a total of 13 trials held there. Twenty-four high-ranking Nazi leaders were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as with murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds, and conspiracy to commit these crimes.

Journalists filled the cramped courtroom with its dark wooden panelling. For much of the time, they were bored. The proceedings were complicated, held in four languages — the interpreting adding to the duration — and the arraigned mass-murderers looked just like any other men. Yet decisive information about the Nazi ideology nevertheless filtered out to the world, to those who had not yet understood, to those who, not having been affected, had not been concerned, and — perhaps — to those who had so far refused to believe.

Never before had crimes committed by a state been brought before a court of law, never before had responsibility been established for a nation’s acts, and never before had crimes ordered by a head of government been articulated and brought to a courtroom.

Under the leadership of the chief prosecutor, Robert H Jackson, the US lawyers sought to prove that the Nazis had both conspired to achieve world domination and engaged in a war of aggression. The lawyers also applied the idea that the defendants were representatives; according to their analysis, Hitler’s regime was based upon Nazism, militarism, and economic imperialism, and representatives of each element of this unholy trinity were now to be charged.

Justice Jackson had great ambitions. The verbatim record of the trial and the final document were to be vital historic documents. For this reason, he did not wish to hear a particularly large number of witnesses. The Nazis’ own documents constituted sufficient proof, and were preferable to the accounts of traumatised, self-contradicting individuals whose memories would crumple without warning when they were under cross-examination. Only a few witnesses appeared.

Twelve of the men, including Hermann Göring, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher, were sentenced to death. Three were sentenced to life imprisonment, four received custodial sentences of up to 20 years, and three were released. One of the defendants, Martin Bormann, had not been caught, while another, Gustav Krupp, being senile and seriously ill, went unpunished. After the first major sentence in the first major trial, a further 12 trials were scheduled in Nuremberg itself, and hundreds more in every country that had been subjected to Nazi occupation.

The purpose of the legal proceedings is to reconstruct the events of the recent past, by scrutinising those documents that escaped destruction, and through cross-examinations full of lies. Yesterday’s vanquished reality is to be reconstituted by means of law.

This whole process is subject to powerful political forces. It is politicians that make sure funds are earmarked for the complex tasks of finding competent legal staff, collecting evidence, coordinating investigations among the four victorious powers, ensuring equal treatment — in short, establishing a common legal basis for lawyers from four nations. And it is political forces that will soon — very soon — call off the trials.

Ideological issues leave their stamp both on the charges brought and on the descriptions of the crimes committed. Like a watermark, visible only in a given light, they set their seal on the lawyers of the nations concerned.

The Soviet Union accuses the guards from the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen of being instruments of capitalist monopoly. Since the Russian lawyers regard all the victims who died as martyrs of Fascism, there is no recognition of the specific fate suffered by the Jews in the camps, just as there is no recognition of the fate of homosexuals or Roma.

France concentrates on the victims from among the French Resistance, and avoids focusing on the many French nationals who collaborated with the Nazis. Both the Soviet Union and France lay great emphasis on their own suffering, their own resistance, and their own sacrifices when they present their cases. Thus are memories created and nations’ self-images reconstructed. Memory gaps are established.

In the courtroom, the description of war, crime, and sacrifice is reduced from what probably happened to what can be proven. What most likely happened is brushed aside. The first narrative about Nazi rule takes shape. Reality is sifted through legal texts, charges, and trials, then through the reporters covering the trials. The narrative diverges, taking different directions; emphases shift. Certain aspects of historical events remain unarticulated, while other aspects are represented in the light of post-war reality.

Buchenwald and Dachau, for instance. As it is US soldiers who liberate them, these two camps become the primary symbols of Nazi cruelty in the eyes of the American public. Other camps — other types of cruelty, other ways of murdering, and other victims — are consigned to obscurity, and disappear.

Bergen-Belsen is the only camp liberated by British troops. The camp commandant, Josef Kramer, is captured there with a number of his lieutenants, and they are brought to trial promptly in the British zone in 1945. The fact that Kommandant Kramer also committed crimes during his time as Lagerführer at Auschwitz is included among the charges, yet the trial is called the Belsen trial, and he himself is dubbed the Beast of Belsen. International press reports on the trial barely mention Auschwitz.

Kramer’s trial takes the form of a military tribunal. The legislation invoked is such that only war crimes and crimes committed against nationals of the Allied countries fall within its remit. Whatever crimes Kommandant Kramer and his subordinates have perpetrated against German nationals or nationals of other Nazi occupied countries, they cannot be charged with them here. The fact that Josef Kramer was in charge of the extermination camp of Auschwitz–Birkenau, and that he was Kommandant Rudolf Höss’ right-hand man during the period when 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered in the spring of 1944, is set aside. No point of the charges refers to the murder of Jews. In Great Britain, Belsen comes to symbolise the evils of Nazism.

Now, two years after the end of the war, British enthusiasm for the war trials is on the wane. The British simply cannot afford the cost. And political priorities are beginning to intervene. In the ideological power struggle that is starting to emerge between the Soviet Union and the US, views of Germany are changing. There is no specific date, no specific point in time when the focus shifts from dealing with the past to dealing with the future. Just this year, 1947 — when everything is in a vibrating state of flux, without stability and without goals, as all possibilities are still open.

Perhaps the time has come, the British reason, to stop dismantling the German nation? Maybe something besides guilt and punishment is needed? Maybe memory, the writing of history, and justice for the victims are no longer matters of pre-eminent importance? Rather than a severely punished Germany, Europe needs a more-or-less functioning Germany, as a shield and bulwark against the spread of Communism.

This is why the British occupation of Germany is given a new objective this year. The country is to become ‘stable and productive’. The focus shifts to reconstruction, and to identifying future potential rather than the failings and crimes of the past. Consequently, the British decide to reduce the number of prosecutions.

The ex–Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, is one of the war trials’ most forceful critics. He wants to draw a distinction between Wehrmacht soldiers and the ideologically driven SS troops. The Wehrmacht was doing its job. Sometimes it was ugly, bloody, and vile, but such is the nature of war. And Churchill contributes to a collection for the defence of General Manstein, a German general now in captivity.

What is not said in court dissipates into silence. The Nazis’ persecution and murder of homosexuals does not even constitute grounds for prosecution, and is not part of the trials. The killing of Roma people is mentioned by some of the leading Nazis, but no Roma witnesses are called upon to testify. Although about 650,000 Polish Jews and an unknown number of Roma were murdered in Bełżec and Sobibór, neither death camp is mentioned even once in the course of the 13 Nuremberg trials. The death camp of Treblinka is referred to in passing on one occasion, when it is described as a concentration camp. The fate of the Jews passes in a black flash, but the racial hatred that forms the core of Nazi ideology is not one of the main issues. Rather, it is Nazi Germany’s aggression, striving for world domination, and crimes against peace that dominate.

Upon the quagmire of oblivion, the world rebuilds itself.

London

On Tuesday 18 February, Great Britain relinquishes responsib-ility for Palestine.

On Thursday 20 February, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, announces that the British will be granting India independence.

On Friday 21 February, the Americans are informed that Great Britain will no long be supporting Greece and Turkey as it did in the past.

The Empire is collapsing. The country that once wielded world dominion is relinquishing it; the country that commanded the seas and the trade routes, held the balance of power, and disseminated its language, sport, arms, education system, currency, and soldiers across the globe is now cutting ties and turning in on itself.

An incomprehensible week.

Budapest

The purge of anti-Communist elements starts on 25 February with the arrest of Béla Kovács, leader of the small farmers’ party, FKGP. He is accused of conspiracy against the Soviet occupation power and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in Siberia.

He is the first, but not the last.