BELFAST RB BOOKLET 2020 - Flipbook - Page 81
Ci t y of Belf ast Grand Bl ack Chapt er - Dem onst rat i on Bookl et 2020
YEAR ZERO .. ' THE BEGINNING OF CHANGE ?'
AFTER
THE ENDING OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, IT HAD BEEN THOUGHT POSSIBLE TO EVEN
CONTEMPLATE AT THAT CRITICAL STAGE OF GOING BACK TO 'BUSINESS AS USUAL'. HOWEVER,
1945 WAS DIFFERENT, SO DIFFERENT THAT IT WAS TERMED AS 'YEAR ZERO' .. 'THE BEGINNING
OF CHANGE'. IN ESSENCE, ONE WORLD HAD ENDED AND A NEW, THOUGH UNCERTAIN ONE WAS
NOW BEGINNING IN WHICH MANY GREAT CITIES AROUND THE GLOBE HAD BEEN RAZED TO THE
GROUND WITH VAST POPULATIONS DECIMATED, DISPLACED AND STARVING.
The capacity for destruction from 1939 to
1945 had been so much greater than in the
earlier WWI conflict, that vast lands across
Europe and Asia were in tatters and for a huge
part of humanity which had been the main
target for human decimation and annihilation,
perhaps moreso than the millions of military
casualties, was again seen as part of Hitler's
evil vision of a world of blond haired, blue eyed
people perfection, led by his Nazi party.
Such figures are both truly and
unimaginary, even very hard to grasp: for
as many as sixty-million had died,
including twenty-five million Russians; and
a new word had by then also entered the
dictionary to highlight the mass murder of
over six-million Jews ... GENOCIDE!
During that six-year timeline, multitudes had
fled their homes or been forcibly moved to
work in Germany, Japan or the Soviet Union.
So in 1945, another new word appeared; for
glossary inclusion, even shortened to just
initials .. DP or 'displaced person.'
There were millions of them, with a
proportionate number of voluntary refugees
moving westward in the face of the advancing
Red Army and many others being deported as
undesirable minorities. The newly independent
Czech state expelled nearly three million
ethnic Germans in the years after 1945, and
Poland did the same to a further one and a
half million. Everywhere there were lost or
orphaned children, with over a quarter of a
million in Yugoslavia alone.
The allies did what they could to feed and
house the refugees or to help reunite
families that had been forcibly torn apart,
but the scale of the task and the obstacles
were equally enormous.
The majority of European ports as well as
many others across Asia had already been
destroyed or badly damaged; bridges had
been blown up; railway locomotives and rolling
stock had vanished. Historical cities such as
Warsaw, Kiev, Tokyo and Berlin were by now,
mere piles of rubble and burned ash. In
Germany alone, it was estimated that seventy
per cent of housing stock had gone whilst
throughout the Soviet Union, seventeen
hundred towns and over seventy thousand
villages had been flattened.
Factories and workshops were in ruins, with
fields, forests and vineyards ripped to pieces.
Millions of acres in north China had been
flooded after the Japs destroyed the dykes.
Many Europeans were surviving on less
than one thousand calories per day; with
the result that in the Netherlands
communities even resorted to
eating the local tulip bulbs.
Apart from the United States
only a few rich allies such as
Canada and Australia, were
largely unscathed by the war's
massive destruction, given their
distance from the actual seat of
the fighting. Even great
European powers such as
Britain and France were left with
IN MEMORY OF THE FALLEN - 79 - AND THE FUTURE OF THE LIVING