Virus forces low-key VE Day in Europe
● People asked to mark the moment in private as plans are scaled back
Europe was marking the 75th anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany to Allied forces following six years of war in a low-key fashion due to coronavirus lockdown restrictions across the continent.
Thebigcelebrationsplanned have been either cancelled or scaled back dramatically and people across Europe have been asked to mark the moment in private.
There will be no mass gatherings, no hugging or kissing, but that day of liberation is still being remembered from Belfast to Berlin. For the few surviving World War II veterans, many living in nursing homes under virus lockdowns, it’s a particularly difficult time.
Unlike Britain, Victory Day is a traditional public holiday in France, but it was clearly far more somber this year with the country under strict lockdown to counter the spread of the coronavirus.
Small ceremonies were allowed at local memorials as the government granted an exception to restrictions following requests from mayors and veterans. President Emmanuel Macron led a small ceremony atthearcdetriomphe.helaid a wreath and relit the flame of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, atop a deserted Champselysees Avenue in Paris.
Macron was accompanied by former presidents Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy. Macron used a hand sanitizer after signing the official register.
The president urged people to display flags on their balconies to honor the resistance fighters.
In Poland, VE Day elicits mixed emotions as the country, which suffered massively during the war, was then subjugated by the Soviet Union and remained part of the communist bloc until 1989.
At a wreath-laying commemoration at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, President Andrzej Duda described VE Day as a “bittersweet anniversary.” Six million of Poland’s 35 million people were killed, half of whom were Jewish.
Duda lamented the fact that thousands of Polish troops who had fought alongside Allied forces were not allowed to march in the 1946 Victory Parade in London for fear of straining British relations with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Although VE Day is a very different occasion in Germany, it’s considered a day of liberation too.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other top officials laid wreaths at the memorial to victims of war and violence in Berlin.
“The corona pandemic is forcing us to commemorate alone - apart from those who are important to us and to whom we are grateful,” President Frank-walter Steinmeier said. He recalled that, on 8 May 1945, “the Germans were really alone,” militarily defeated, economically devastated and “morally ruined.”
“We had made an enemy of the whole world,” he said in a nationally televised address, adding that 75 years later “we are not alone.”
Merkel spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin by phone and the two agreed the war is a reminder of the need for “close cooperation between states and people to preserve and encourage peace.”
Russia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, saw tens of millions of casualties during the war. It marks VE Day today.