“For five years, Europe has been the victim of cannibalism, with one country trying to eat the other countries, trying to eat the grain, the meat, the steel, the liberties, the governments, and the men of all the others. The half-consumed corpses of ideologies and of the civilians who believed in them have rotted the soil of Europe, and in this day of the most luxurious war machinery the world has ever seen, the inhabitants of the Continent’s capital cities have been reduced to the primitive problems of survival, of finding something to eat, of hatred, of revenge, of fawning, of being for or against themselves or someone else, and of hiding, like savages with ration cards. The desperate economic competition which will arrive with the peace will scarcely be less bloodthirsty . . .”
Genet (Janet Flanner), Paris Journal, 15 December 1944.