Of all the difficult passages that I was forced to confront in Timothy Snyder’s extraordinary history, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, this is the one that has stuck with me:
Prisoners
sang at Treblinka, at German orders, but also for themselves. “El Malei Rachamim” (the funeral
prayer) was chanted for the Jews killed each day.
Let’s try
and imagine the scene. A group of Jewish men have been tasked with the
impossible: to handle the bodies of the recently gassed. Bodies that in all
likelihood included their wives, babies, teen-agers, and parents. Their job was
to burn these bodies. Try and see them
at the end of such a day saying this prayer, knowing that the next day, or the
day after, or by the end of the week, others would be repeating it for them.
The mind
can’t go there easily and yet we must. We all need to read this account-backed
up by brilliant analysis and solid research- of how 14 million innocent Ukrainians,
Poles, Jews, Belarusians, and Russians were murdered in 12 years.
You will
notice that I include, rather than separate, the Jews in with the other
victims. This is in-keeping with Snyder’s analysis. Rather than look at each
group of victims in isolation, we need to look at the totality. We need to
understand the geography of where these people lived to fully comprehend how and
why they died. Snyder defines this geography as the “Bloodlands”: Poland,
Belarus, the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These contested areas suffered
three violent occupations in a very short span of time: Stalinist, Nazi, and
Stalinist.
Stalinism
and Nazism, though different in some aspects, were both “isms” whose leaders
believed that the utopian end justified whatever means. It was in the Bloodlands where these ideologies
played themselves out most fully. The areas of starvation, the areas where the
death facilities were located, and the areas where victims were shot over pits were
all located in the Bloodlands.
While some
Jews may be taken aback by the grouping together of the victims, Snyder’s approach
presents a different Holocaust, in many ways, a far worse Holocaust. For years,
Auschwitz was held up as the lowest depths of hell that man had ever sunk.
Snyder points that if you look at the entire history of this area, you realize
that it was not the “height of the technology of death” even though this is
what we have thought to this point. In his Preface, Snyder writes:
“Auschwitz
is the most familiar killing site of the bloodlands. Today, Auschwitz stands
for the Holocaust, and the Holocaust for the evil of a century. Yet the people
registered as laborers at Auschwitz had a chance of surviving, its name is
known. Far more Jews, most of them Polish Jews, were gassed in other German
death factories where almost everyone died, and whose names are less often
recalled: Treblinka, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec. Still more Jews, Polish, Soviet
or Baltic Jews, were shot over ditches and pits. Most of these Jews dies near where they had lived, in
occupied Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Soviet Ukraine, and Soviet Belerus.”
According
to Snyder, Jews in Auschwitz had a change of survival. In Treblinka, they did
not. As a necessary corrective to how we have viewed Auschwitz to date, Snyder
devotes a lot of attention to the Treblinka death camp. His presentation is
easily the hardest reading I have ever done.
I was left
with the impression that there is still so much we don’t know and that there are so many victims that have
not been accounted for. During my reading, I was frequently reminded of a New
York Times article “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking” (March 1, 2013)
where researchers at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum concluded that there were
far more ghettos, camps, extermination sites than originally thought. A
Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in
Occupied France by Caroline Moorehead (2011) leaves a similar impression of
France where schools and playgrounds became prisons and execution sites.
Snyder
writes in his Epilogue: “Fourteen
million people were deliberately murdered by two regimes over twelve years.
This is a moment that we have scarcely began to understand let along master.” As
researchers like Snyder pore over these documents and look at events through
different lenses, as archival material becomes more available, we are likely going
to be confronted with a far more sobering picture of those dozen years.
Historians
like Timothy Snyder are a gift. We owe them for their perseverance to do the
hard work of learning new languages, testing difficult ideas, visiting places
that we would rather forget, gathering stories we don’t want to hear. When
people produce this kind of work, we need to read it as difficult as it is and
despite the nightmares that they inevitably bring. We need to confront this
history. We need to understand what human beings are capable of. We need to “go
there” in our imaginations, to feel those men chanting the “El Malei
Rachamim” to avoid going there in reality. As Snyder writes in his Preface: “Today there
is widespread agreement that the mass killing of the twentieth century is of
the greatest moral significance for the twenty-first.”
You don’t
have to be a historian to read this book, but you need to be brave. It is transformative reading. You will not be the
same person after.
Timothy
Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books: 2010)
