Year Zero Read Online Free Page B

awaited it, as we had the Liberation, in a fever of anxiety; it had been foreseen for a long time, and offered no new hopes. In a way, this end was like a sort of death . . .” 6
    Muscovites, on the other hand, swept into the streets as soon as V-E Day was announced in the early morning of the ninth. Masses of people, many of them still in their nightgowns and pajamas, danced and cheered through the night, crying “Victory! Victory!” In a letter to the British historian Martin Gilbert, one of Stalin’s interpreters, named Valentin Berezhkov, recalled: “The pride that victory was finally won over a treacherous and foul enemy, the grief for the fallen (and we did not know then that nearly thirty million were killed on the battlefields), hopes for a lasting peace and continued cooperation with our wartime allies—all this created a special feeling of relief and hope.” 7
    Libération
of May 8 was probably right: this was above all a party for the young. “It was only the young who felt exuberant. Only the young jumped onto the jeeps, which resembled a grandstand at the Longchampraces, running through the Champs-Élysées, flags around their heads and songs on their lips. And that is the way it should be. For the young the danger is over.”
    My grandmother in England, pining for her husband still serving in the British Army in India, could not share her children’s exuberance. Her feelings were no doubt shared by many people who worried about faraway husbands or sons, or had lost far too much to rejoice. The reaction of this daughter of immigrants was also peculiarly English. “I missed you too much to celebrate,” she wrote to my grandfather, “so I improved the shining hour by doing a bit of extra work in the garden.”
    My father cannot even remember the day the war officially ended. He vaguely recalls the sound of Russian guns fired in celebration. Marshall Zhukov mentions this in his memoir: “We left the banquet hall [on May 9] to the accompaniment of a cannonade from all types of weapons . . . the shooting went on in all parts of Berlin and its suburbs.” 8 But my father was used to the sound of guns, and made no special note of it.
    Brian Urquhart, the young British intelligence officer, stuck in northern Germany, fresh from the shock of witnessing Belsen, could not feel total joy either: “It is difficult to reconstruct what I actually felt at the time on such an overwhelming occasion. Nearly six years from despair to victory, many friends gone, fantastic waste and destruction . . . I wondered about all those nameless faces in war photographs, refugees, prisoners, civilians under bombing, Russians in the snow and wreckage of their country, crewmen on sinking freighters—how many of them would their families see again?” 9
    But such thoughts did not dampen the spirits of revelers in New York, Paris, and London. It was a festival of youth, but also of light. Quite literally. “The City Lights Up!” was the May 9 headline of the
New York Herald Tribune
. “The Night Sky of London was Aglow Again” said the London
Daily Herald
on May 8. In Paris the lights of the Opéra were lit for the first time since September 1939, in red, white, and blue. One after the other, the lights went back on illuminating the Arc de Triomphe, the Madeleine, and the Place de la Concorde. And the
Herald Tribune
proudly reported“large floodlighted Stars and Stripes, Union Jack and Tricolor” waving in front of their building on the Rue de Berri.
    New York City had been going steadily darker since the “dimout” on April 1942, and then the “brownout” since October 1943. Only the torch on the Statue of Liberty remained dimly lit. But by 8 P.M. , May 8, according to the
New York Daily News
, “all the jewels in Broadway’s crown were full aglow, and the great chunky masses of humanity seemed