Europe Day and the release of prisoners of war

The end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945, and the release of prisoners from their camp bring Rabo Karabekian to a valley crowded with people whom the war has displaced, imprisoned, or left behind. His account turns a military milestone into an unsettled scene of mass release: the guards have vanished, yet armed German soldiers remain, and freedom means entering a landscape filled with other people’s losses. Years later, Karabekian makes that morning the subject of Now It’s the Women’s Turn, a painting whose thousands of minute figures preserve the scale and variety of the gathering.

Background and Release

Karabekian had been captured in Luxembourg after serving with an Army camouflage unit. He was unconscious when taken prisoner and later woke in a German military hospital; his wound healed quickly, and he was transferred to a camp as an ordinary prisoner. The European war ended on May 8, 1945, but the prisoners’ release did not coincide with a simple return to safety: their camp had not yet been captured by the Russians.

Karabekian recalls being marched out with hundreds of captured officers from numerous Allied countries. The prisoners were taken into countryside that had not yet been conquered, and their guards disappeared during the night. In the morning the former prisoners found themselves on the rim of a broad green valley, on what is now the border between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The episode thus moves from a guarded camp to an open landscape without resolving the uncertainty of what would happen next.

The Valley’s Gathering

The valley held people from many different circumstances. Karabekian estimates that as many as ten thousand were below the rim: concentration-camp survivors, slave laborers, people released from asylums and prisons, and captured officers and enlisted men from armies that had fought Germany. In a later telling, he adds civilians who had fled from the Russian, American, and British fronts, which had met to the north and south. The people had been brought or driven away from cities; their assembly was not a planned celebration but the consequence of being turned loose in the countryside.

The end of captivity did not mean that the instruments of war had disappeared. Among the crowd were the last remnants of Hitler’s armies, their uniforms in tatters but their weapons still functional. In Karabekian’s recollection, they were docile and waiting to surrender, beside people who had themselves been imprisoned, enslaved, or forced to flee. The scene holds release and danger together: the guards are gone and the war in Europe has ended, but armed men and the human aftermath of the conflict remain in the same valley.

A Memory Recounted

Karabekian tells the story more than once, with changing emphasis. His first account places it within the succession of postwar memories he shares with Circe Berman; later, he calls it one of his old soldier’s anecdotes, recounting the march, the overnight halt, the missing guards, and the crowd at sunrise. The repeated account does not reduce the event to a settled victory narrative. Instead, it returns attention to the unusual mixture of people and conditions assembled at the war’s ending.

When he shows Berman the painting based on the scene, Karabekian locates the remembered morning through a small detail: a Maori corporal in the New Zealand Field Artillery sits on a discarded German ammunition box and tries to read a page blown across the valley. The page comes from a Riga anti-Semitic weekly published during the German occupation and, despite its source, offers ordinary advice on gardening and home canning. On the ammunition box is the date May 8, 1945, the day Berman was one year old. These details bring the public date into a particular imagined moment, without making the gathered people interchangeable.

From Historical Event to Painting

Karabekian’s painting, Now It’s the Women’s Turn, renders the valley at an immense scale: eight feet high and sixty-four feet long. Seen from one end, the canvas is compressed by perspective into what appears to be a triangle only five feet wide. Walking with Berman to its midpoint, Karabekian reveals the full scene: a green valley in spring, a medieval watchtower, farmhouses, and 5,219 people on the rim or below. The figures are so small that the largest is the size of a cigarette and the smallest a flyspeck, yet the picture is realistic enough to resemble a photograph.

The painting expands the remembered crowd into an inventory of distinct wartime lives. Karabekian says that even figures in the distance represent concentration-camp victims, slave laborers, prisoners of war from different countries, German soldiers, local farmers and their families, and people released from asylums. He has made up a war story for each person and painted the individual to whom it happened. In the barn, magnifying glasses allow visitors to examine distant details that the naked eye cannot resolve. What the landscape gathers in history, the painting distributes across particular figures.

Public Afterlife and Significance

The scene becomes part of a museum tour at Karabekian’s home. Visitors pass through the potato barn, where the painting can be viewed from end to end; some walk through it more than once. Karabekian initially stays in the barn to tell visitors the stories behind individual figures, but the effort exhausts him, and he eventually invites them to make up their own war stories as they look. For Berman, on the night he first reveals the work, he is willing to tell as many of those stories as she wants to hear.

The painted valley therefore preserves both what Karabekian witnessed and what his account cannot make singular: a mass of people arriving at the end of war, each with a different history. Its careful count, tiny figures, and magnified particulars resist treating liberation as a clean boundary between conflict and peace. The event is at once the end of Karabekian’s captivity, a scene of collective displacement, and the historical image through which he makes his return to serious painting legible.