All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [314]
Let us dance happily,
And if we dance happily,
It will be in the heart of Tokyo,
Joy! Joy!
In the midst of Tokyo flowers.
But Japanese arrogance and brutality soon destroyed the goodwill of the Burmese people. Malays likewise recoiled from their new masters’ conduct, exemplified by their ubiquitous habit of urinating in public. The local population was outraged by the Japanese custom of administering a rebuke by a slap in the face. The occupiers grudgingly modified this practice in 1943, decreeing that only senior officers, colonels and above, could physically abuse natives; but scant heed was paid to the restriction. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, vivid chroniclers of the Asian experience, have written: ‘The Japanese seemed hardly more culturally sensitive than the British and were certainly more brutal.’
Hans Frank, Nazi ruler of Poland, wrote in his 1942 diary: ‘Humanity is a word that one dares not use … The power and the certainty of being able to use force without any resistance are the sweetest and most noxious poison that can be introduced into any government.’ This is an important statement, for it captures the exhilaration experienced by many Germans and Japanese on finding themselves, together with their local acolytes, occupying posts which conferred absolute powers of life and death. In ordinary peacetime life, men’s and women’s actions are constrained not only by law, but by social convention; even those who might feel no moral inhibitions about pillaging, injuring or killing others are subject to machinery which prevents them from doing so. But the men who exercised authority under the totalitarian regimes, emphatically including that of the Soviet Union, knew themselves liberated from all constraints and safeguards upon the sanctity of human life, provided only that killings advanced the purposes of the system they served. This huge, terrible freedom thrilled its beneficiaries: the few Nazi office-holders who afterwards gave honest testimony described their exercise of power in lyrical terms.
It was hard for victims, accustomed to lives in ordered communities, to grasp the implications of their absolute impotence. The chasm between a bourgeois society going about its lawful business and the Arbeit Macht Frei entrance arch to Auschwitz was initially too wide for comprehension. Occupation and subjection seemed bad enough; only progressively did it become apparent that there could be higher gradations of suffering. Ruth Maier, a young Austrian Jewish refugee living in Oslo, wrote on 25 April 1941 about her quest for a US visa: ‘I’ve been to the American Consulate about it. I’m sure to get a visa after the war. But not before then … So we need to be patient.’ The hapless girl did not yet understand that her inability to secure a visa was no mere inconvenience, but a matter of life and death – her own: five months afterwards, she was deported and murdered. As late as 1944 Edith Gabor, eighteen-year-old daughter of a Budapest diamond merchant, heard reports of the fate of Europe’s Jewish communities, ‘but we thought: “Oh, this is something that happens to other people, in other countries.”’ She herself was frightened, but not frightened enough. Later that year she was transported to the first of a succession of concentration camps where she narrowly survived unspeakable horrors. All the rest of her family save one brother were gassed.
Many people met death far from any battlefield. The Jews of Europe suffered the most dramatic fate, but millions of other civilians – Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Chinese, Malays, Vietnamese, Indians – were extinguished by wilful murder, chance explosion, disease or starvation. Their deaths were no less terrible because they took place in circumstances of obscurity, in some ruined village rather than at Auschwitz