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happen almost with a sense of joy. And I think: ‘This is liberation. This is the way it should be, different from other days. This is a party.’” 17
    Benoîte Groult is perfectly well aware of the material benefits of having sex with an American. She makes the link between sexual hunger and hunger for food quite explicit. Lying in bed under Kurt’s body, she remarks, is like sleeping with a whole continent: “And you can’t refuse a continent.” Afterwards, they ate: “My appetite was sharpened by four years of occupation and twenty-three years of chastity, well almost. I devoured the eggs hatched two days ago in Washington. Spam canned in Chicago. Corn ripened four thousand miles from here . . . It is quite something, the war!”
    Spam, eggs, Hershey bars could be eaten right away. Stockings could be worn. But Lucky Strikes, Camels, Chesterfields, or Caporal cigarettes could be exchanged on the black market for more food. The GIs were supplied with plenty. This, as much as their broad shoulders, sweet smiles, straight hips, and fine uniforms, was an inestimable attraction. The easyaccess to cigarettes alone made them into rich men in very poor countries. It was easy to conclude, then, that the women who slept with them were really no better than whores.
    This was indeed what many people thought, especially women who barely scraped by, or men who were barred from the dance halls, cinemas, and recreation centers reserved for the liberators and their local girlfriends. The suspicion was heightened by the fact that some of the young women who latched on to Allied servicemen still wore headscarves to hide the evidence of recently shaved heads, the mark of punishment for those who had shortly before taken German lovers.
    No doubt some women were freelance prostitutes, especially in the defeated countries where sexual services were the only way to keep oneself, or one’s children, alive. But even in the case of women who switched with perhaps unseemly haste from German to Allied lovers, the reasons were not always straightforward or venal. A freshly shaved “horizontal collaborator” from a small town in France told a self-appointed committee of purgers who threatened her with further punishment for her “immoral” behavior: “I don’t care if you shave my hair. I am no longer in touch with my husband [a former prisoner of war]. And I won’t let that stand in the way of having fun with the Americans, if I choose to.” 18
    Reading contemporary accounts and comments in the press, one might get the impression that the summer of ’45 was one long orgy indulged in by foreign servicemen and local women, out of greed, or lust, or loneliness. This impression appears to be confirmed by statistics: five times more women were hospitalized in Paris for sexually transmitted diseases (aka VD) in 1945 than in 1939. In Holland more than seven thousand illegitimate babies were born in 1946, three times the number in 1939. High STD rates can be explained by the lack of medical supervision or contraceptives, poor hygiene in poverty-stricken areas, or any number of other reasons. The fact is that many women and men were simply looking for warmth, companionship, love, even marriage. Much as the early months of liberation offered the chance for wild abandon, people also longed for a return to normality. It should not be forgotten that the 277,000legitimate Dutch births in 1946 constituted the highest figure in the recorded history of the nation.
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    BERGEN-BELSEN WAS LIBERATED ON APRIL 12. British forces commanded by Lieutenant Derrick Sington were ordered to get there as quickly as they could. The war was not yet over, but conditions in the camp were so appalling that local people feared that a typhus epidemic—the same epidemic that had killed Anne Frank just weeks before—might spread to them. Since the German