Chapter 8: Turn the Lights Back On

The ending still had to travel after the signatures were dry.

After 8 May 1945 the war in the west was over on paper, but the ending still had to travel, mile by mile and island by island, to every place where soldiers held their arms. For many people the true end came days or weeks later, when the last guns fell silent and the first lamps were lit again in their windows.

You may still have in your mind the small glow of candles in the windows of the ruined capital on the first night of peace, while the lamps burned late in the officers' hall. I want to begin with those small lights, because for millions of people the end of the war was not a signature they ever saw. It was the evening when they were allowed, for the first time in years, to open the curtains after dark.

In this chapter we follow the news as it moved outward from the tables of the surrender, like the ripples from a stone dropped into still water, and reached the islands, the ports, the forests and the barracks at the edges of the war.

Small islands near the western coast were freed on 9 May.

Among the first places to feel the ending were a group of small islands lying off the western coast of the continent, close to the shores of a liberated western nation. They had been occupied since the summer of 1940. Their garrison had been cut off since the landings of June 1944. The islanders and the soldiers of the garrison had lived through a hungry winter, kept alive in its last months by parcels of food brought by a ship of the Red Cross.

In the early hours of 9 May, aboard a warship anchored offshore, the commander of the garrison signed the surrender of the islands. That same morning soldiers of the western Allies came ashore. The people in the harbour towns gathered on the quays and along the seafront to welcome them. Flags that had been hidden for five years were brought out of drawers and attics. Church bells rang across the fields, and in the evening, for the first time in five years, the windows of the houses were lit without fear.

You can imagine the scene if you have ever watched a ferry come into a small harbour on a holiday morning. The whole town is there on the quay, the ropes are thrown, and everyone talks at once.

On the same day, 9 May, the garrisons of several fortified ports on the western coast of the continent laid down their arms. They had been besieged since the previous autumn, and the towns around them had been damaged and emptied. Over the next days, other pockets along that coast surrendered one after another. Each surrender was a small ceremony in a farmhouse or an office, followed by long columns of prisoners walking out along the roads.

You will notice that none of these places was large. Yet for the people in them, each surrender was the whole of the peace.

In the north and east the last pockets laid down their arms.

In the far north of the continent, in a mountainous kingdom by the sea, some three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers of the defeated army had remained in occupation until the very end. They had not been defeated in battle there. On 8 May their commander accepted the surrender, and in the following weeks small Allied forces arrived to take charge. The kingdom's own government returned from exile, and on 7 June its king came home by ship to cheering crowds in the harbour of his capital, exactly five years after he had left it.

On a broad peninsula in the east, by the northern sea, a large army group of the defeated forces had been cut off from the rest since the previous autumn. It had held its positions all through the winter. On 9 and 10 May its soldiers, nearly two hundred thousand men, surrendered to the army from the east and began the long walk into captivity. Many of them would not come home for years, and some would not come home at all.

On 9 May, too, the army from the east entered a capital in the heart of the continent. Its people had risen against the occupiers four days earlier and fought in the streets until the end. Some fighting continued in the woods and hills of the southeast until the middle of May, as columns of soldiers tried to escape westward to surrender to the western Allies rather than to the army from the east.

I tell you these dates one after another on purpose, because the ending moved like that, in short pulses, as a long train moves out of a crowded station, stopping and starting until it finally runs smoothly along the open track.

On a northern island the fighting continued until 20 May.

The strangest and saddest of the last battles took place on a flat island in the north, off the coast of a liberated western nation. Sheep grazed there behind the dunes, and a tall lighthouse stood at the northern tip. A battalion stationed there had been formed from soldiers of the army from the east who had been taken prisoner earlier in the war. They had been made to serve the occupiers to escape the hunger of the prison camps. On the night of 5 to 6 April 1945, hoping that liberation was close, they rose against the occupying soldiers on the island. The occupiers brought in reinforcements, and for six weeks the fighting moved across the farms and dunes. It did not stop on 5 May, when the occupying forces in that nation surrendered, nor on 8 May, when the whole war in the west was meant to end. It stopped only on 20 May, when soldiers of the western Allies landed on the island and separated the two sides.

By then, hundreds of the rebel soldiers, hundreds of the occupying soldiers and more than a hundred islanders had died.

Their graves lie in a quiet cemetery on the island today. If you go there, you will find the soldiers from the east buried together, under rows of small stones. Flowers are left there every year.

When the surviving rebels were sent home that summer, many of them were not welcomed as heroes. They were treated with suspicion, because they had once worn the uniform of the enemy. You may find this one of the hardest stories of the whole ending to hold in your mind. It reminds us that a war does not end at the same moment for everyone. Even when it ends, it can leave people without a home on either side.

An islander on the ferry pointed to the mended lighthouse.

A few years ago I crossed to that island on a ferry on a grey morning in October, standing at the rail with my collar turned up against the wind. Beside me stood an old woman named Anke, wrapped in a brown raincoat, with a shopping bag at her feet. She was going home after a visit to her daughter on the mainland. When the island came into sight, low and green under the clouds, she pointed to the lighthouse at its northern end.

She told me that her mother had seen it burning in the spring of 1945, and that for a long time afterward it stood dark, its tower scarred and broken. When it was finally repaired and its lamp was lit again, she said, the people of the island came out of their houses in the evening to watch the beam sweep across the dunes for the first time.

"My mother said it was the night the war really ended for us," Anke told me, and then she picked up her bag, because the ferry was turning toward the harbour.

I have often thought about that sentence since. When you read the dates of the great surrenders, you might also ask yourself when the war really ended in the place where your own family lived. The answer is rarely the date in the history books. It is more often a small thing: a lamp, a letter, the sound of a church bell, or the first night without fear.

Mark the last surrenders on a strip of paper from left to right.

A strip of paper will help you see the shape of those weeks. Take a long strip of paper, perhaps cut from the margin of a newspaper, and draw a straight line along it. At the left end write 8 May, and at the right end write 20 May, leaving twelve equal spaces between them, one for each day.

Now mark the dates you have read in this chapter. Put the small islands and the fortified ports at 9 May, the peninsula by the northern sea at 9 and 10 May, the capital in the heart of the continent at 9 May, the end of the fighting in the southeast in the middle of the month, and the northern island at 20 May. Finally, put a small mark at 23 May, just beyond the end of your line. That was the day when the last government of the defeated country, which had gone on meeting in a naval school in the far north, was dissolved, and its members were taken into custody.

When you look at the finished strip, you will see that the marks crowd together on the left and thin out toward the right. That is the shape of the ending: a rush of surrenders in the first days, and then a long tail of smaller endings, each of them complete for the people who lived through it. I hope you will keep the strip somewhere for a while, and look at it now and then as you read on.

The curtains came down in the windows of the west.

For nearly six years the cities and villages of the war in the west had lived in darkness at night. Street lamps had been switched off and car headlights masked. Windows were covered with heavy curtains or painted panes, so that no light could guide the planes of the enemy. Wardens walked the streets at night and knocked on doors where a crack of light showed. People learned to find their way home by memory, counting the kerbs and the lamp posts that no longer shone.

In some countries the rules had been eased in the autumn of 1944, when the danger from the air grew smaller, and a dimmed half-light was allowed in the streets. In the spring of 1945 the rules were lifted step by step. In the western capitals, lights returned to the shop windows, the theatres and the great clock towers. On the evening of 8 May, in many towns, people turned on every lamp they owned and opened their curtains wide, so that the houses glowed along the streets like the windows of a long night train passing through the countryside.

Children who had been born in the war had never seen a lit street at night. Their parents remembered how the little ones stood at the windows and stared, as if at fireworks, at the plain yellow light of the ordinary street lamps.

If you live in a city today, you may find it hard to imagine how much that light meant. Try, one evening, to sit for an hour with all your lamps off, and then switch them on again. You will feel a small part of it.

Some church towers had no bells left to ring.

Not every village could ring its bells on 8 May. You will recall the bells that had been lowered from their towers and carried away for their metal, in the defeated country and in the lands it occupied. In many villages the towers still stood empty that spring, and the people could only open the church doors and stand inside in silence.

Some of the bells had not yet been melted when the war ended. They still lay in the harbour yards, like a field of upturned cups, and in the years after the war many of them were sorted by the marks painted on them and sent home. You may still find, in some country churches, a bell that made that long journey and came back.

I once stood in a village church while the sexton showed me such a bell, hanging in its old frame, with a chalk number still faintly visible on its rim. He rang it once for me, softly. The sound was deeper than I expected.

When you hear a church bell ring on a quiet evening, you might remember that its silence, too, was part of the war. Its return was part of the peace. In those first weeks after 8 May, services were held in churches of every kind for the dead. In many of them, the priest or pastor read out the names of the men of the parish who had fallen. In some, the names of the enemy dead buried in the local cemetery were read as well.

I think that you and I owe those quiet services a place in the history of the ending. They did not decide anything. Yet they began the long work of mourning, without which no peace can last.

Millions of people were far from home when the guns fell silent.

When the fighting ended, the roads of the continent were full of people who were not where they belonged. By the estimates of the time, somewhere between seven and eleven million people had been carried far from home during the war, most of them now in the lands of the defeated country. Many had been forced labourers in its factories and farms. Others had been prisoners of war, or survivors of the camps, who were weak and ill and needed months of care. Several million soldiers of the defeated armies had become prisoners themselves. Many millions of civilians from the eastern provinces had fled westward ahead of the front, or would soon be expelled from their homes. You should picture all of them at once, if you can: the farm worker waiting for a train to the east, the former prisoner sitting in the sun outside a hospital tent, the soldier of the defeated army behind a wire fence in a field, and the mother pulling a handcart along a road toward the west with her children beside her. Each of them was waiting for the war to end for them in particular, and none of them could say when that would be.

In the weeks after 8 May the Allies began to send people home. Long trains of goods wagons, chalked with the names of distant towns, left the stations every day. Lorries carried others along the roads. By the autumn, most of the displaced people of the west had returned to their own countries. Hundreds of thousands, however, could not or would not go back, because their homes had been destroyed, their families were gone, or the borders had moved.

You should not imagine these journeys as happy ones only. They were often slow, cold and uncertain, and many travellers found, at the end, an empty house or a stranger's name on the door. Yet in many stations, people gathered with flowers and bread, and someone read out the names of the arrivals so that families could find one another. I think of those stations as small chapels, where hope and grief stood side by side on the same platform.

Trains with lighted windows crossed the continent through the summer nights.

Through June and July the trains kept running in every direction. They carried soldiers on leave, released prisoners, refugees, and children sent home from the countryside where they had been evacuated. For the first time in years, their windows were lit at night.

I remember, from my own childhood, an old railwayman named Heinrich, sitting in his garden behind the signal box in the evening, with a cup of coffee on the bench beside him. He told me once that the summer of 1945 was the busiest of his whole life. Trains passed his box every few minutes, day and night, full of people leaning out of the windows to see where they were. "They looked at every station sign," he said, "as if it might be their own."

You might picture him at his levers in the short summer night, setting the signals to green for train after train, and watching the lit windows slide past in the dark, one after another, each full of faces.

In the middle of July one more special train passed along the lines of the east toward the defeated capital, travelling slowly, with guards at every bridge and station. It carried the marshal of the eastern ally to a meeting of the three powers in a palace beside a lake, near the ruins of the capital. On the same days, planes carried the new president and the prime minister of the two western Allies to the same place.

Behind them, in the stations of the continent, the crowds waited for other trains, the ones that carried no leaders at all, only fathers and sons and daughters coming home. In the war in Asia, that summer, the guns had not yet fallen silent, and the families there still drew their curtains every night against the dark.