For continental Europeans World War II was a vastly different experience than it was for the people of the British Commonwealth or the United States. In the English-speaking world the war was largely a long narrative of military operations happening somewhere else — sometimes going very badly, but always going, and ending in a comfortably self-affirming victory. They were spared the hardships, horrors, moral dilemmas and later recriminations of foreign occupation.
Not so with the peoples of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, France, Yugoslavia, much of the Soviet Union and many, many others. For them, the war involved either a surrender without a fight or a surrender after a humiliatingly rapid military defeat, followed by years of fear, hunger, oppression and often inconceivable brutality. Occupied peoples had to make choices virtually every day — how much to go along or “collaborate,” how much to push back against the occupier, resist. These differences in how the war was lived continue to shape our politics today, from Brexit to the war in Ukraine.
