Two Best Friends Turned Enemies: The End of World War II and the Birth of the Cold War

August 15, 1945, 12-year-old Leo Marquez is perched on the fire escape of his family’s third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn, New York, crumpling scrap paper into confetti to toss at the crowd below. The whole street moves like a river of noise: car horns blaring, a neighbor playing a trumpet so off-key it’s almost tuneful, a group of sailors kissing every girl they can find, even the old lady who runs the corner bodega is passing out free soda. Leo’s dad, who spent the last two years on a Navy destroyer in the Pacific, lifts him up over his head so he can see over the crowd, yelling so loud his voice cracks: “We did it, kid! The bad guys are gone!” Leo whoops so loud his throat hurts, because for three years, all anyone has talked about is the war: the newsreels of London being bombed, the stories of Jews in concentration camps, the maps his teacher pulls down in class with

A crinkly, ink-smudged extra blows past his face a second later, and he grabs it out of the air before it hits the sidewalk. The headline is so big it takes up half the page: V-J DAY! JAPAN SURRENDERS! WORLD WAR II IS OVER! Leo’s dad snatches it from his hands, whooping so loud the windows rattle, and hoists him higher so he can see the photo below the headline: three men in suits sitting at a long wooden table, grinning like they just won a spelling bee. One is Franklin Roosevelt, the American president Leo has seen on every newsreel for three years, his face lined but smiling, a cigarette holder tilted in his mouth. The second is Winston Churchill, the British prime minister with the big cigar and the furrowed brow, giving a thumbs-up to the camera. The third is Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader Leo only knows from the grainy photos his history teacher showed, the one with the thick mustache and the serious face, who never smiles in any picture. But in this one, he’s smiling too, his hand resting on a stack of papers labeled “POSTWAR GERMANY.”

The crowd below roars louder when they see the photo, and Leo’s dad sets him down on the fire escape so he can wave at the crowd too. But when he looks over at the edge of the sidewalk, he sees Mabel, the old British lady who lives on the first floor, standing with her hands clasped in front of her, staring at the photo without smiling. Mabel’s only son, Thomas, died on Omaha Beach on D-Day, and she’s been bringing Leo’s family lemon cookies every Sunday since he was little. When Leo waves at her, she looks up and gives him a small, wobbly smile, but when she looks back at the newspaper, she shakes her head and mutters something Leo can’t hear over the noise.

“What’s wrong with Mabel?” Leo yells over the crowd, tugging on his dad’s sleeve.

His dad’s smile fades a little, and he squats down so he’s eye level with Leo. “Nothing, kiddo. She’s just tired. Her son died fighting the Nazis, that’s all. It’s a lot to be happy about and sad about at the same time, you know?”

Leo nods, but he doesn’t really understand. All he knows is the bad guys lost: Hitler is dead, Mussolini is dead, the Japanese emperor surrendered, and no one else has to die in the war anymore. But when he looks back at the photo of the three leaders, he notices something weird: Roosevelt and Churchill are leaning toward each other, like they’re sharing a secret, and Stalin is sitting back in his chair, his arms crossed, like he’s not part of the joke.

Just then, Joe, the veteran who lives across the street, limps over. His right leg is still in a cast from when he got shot in the Battle of the Bulge, and he’s carrying a bottle of beer in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other. He fought with the British army, but he was born in Poland, so he speaks both English and Russian, and sometimes he tells Leo stories about the snow in Moscow and the pierogi his grandma used to make. He squats down next to Leo, claps him on the shoulder, and says, “You’re old enough to know the truth, kid. We won the war, yeah. But the two guys who helped us win it? They’re already starting to fight.”

“Fight?” Leo’s eyes go wide. “But they’re on the same team!”

Joe laughs, a rough, gravelly sound, and takes a drag of his cigarette. “Yeah, they were on the same team, same way you and Tommy are on the same dodgeball team when you play against the seventh graders. You two work together to beat the bigger kids, but you two don’t even like each other that much, remember? Tommy likes to hog the ball, and you like to make up your own rules. You put up with each other to beat the bad guys, but once the game’s over? You’re gonna fight over who gets to pick the next game.”

Leo blinks. He and Tommy did fight last week over who got to be captain for the next dodgeball game, and they didn’t talk for two days until Leo’s mom made him go over and apologize. “So… Roosevelt and Stalin are like me and Tommy?”

“Sort of,” Joe says, nodding. “Only these two guys run whole countries, not just a dodgeball team. And they don’t just fight over who gets to be captain. They fight over who gets to run the whole playground.”

Leo looks down at the street, at the sailors dancing with girls, at the kids running around with sparklers, at the old men crying because their sons are finally coming home. He can’t imagine two people who just helped win a war being mad at each other. “Why don’t they like each other?”

Joe takes another drag of his cigarette, and his face gets serious. “Because they want the exact same thing, but they want it in totally different ways. Let me explain it to you like you’re five, okay? Imagine the whole world is a playground, right? After the war, the playground is all broken: the swings are broken, the slide is cracked, the sandbox is full of broken glass. The two strongest kids on the playground are America and the Soviet Union. They both say they want to fix the playground, but they have totally different ideas of what ‘fixed’ looks like.”

Leo leans in, interested. This sounds like a game he can understand.

“The American kid says: ‘I think everyone should get to pick what game they want to play. If you want to play on the swings, you can, if you want to play in the sandbox, you can. If you’re good at fixing swings, you can charge people a quarter to fix their swings, and the money you earn is yours, you don’t have to give it to anyone else. If you’re bad at fixing swings, no one has to pay you. The only rule is you can’t hit other kids, and you can’t steal their stuff.’ That’s what America believes in. They call it capitalism, but you can just call it the ‘do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone’ rule.”

Joe pauses to take a sip of his beer, and Leo nods, because that sounds pretty fair. If he had a lemonade stand, he’d want to keep all the money he earned, right?

“Now the Soviet kid says: ‘No, that