frandroid

What are you reading?

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

Between the two of them, they intentionally killed 14 million civilians that had nothing to do with fighting, mostly through starvation. Most of the killing happened in Ukraine, Belarus and Poland, the latter which they first split and then fought over. Snyder highlights that we sometimes overlook Eastern Europe to focus on Germany since Nazis were the perpetrators of so much killing, but Germany had 1% Jews in 1933 and 0.25% Jews by the time WWII started. So that's not where Jews were killed. They were mostly killed in the bloodlands of Ukraine and Poland. Along with so many others.

This book is about these mass murders. It has the rhythm of a metronome but the heft of a sledgehammer. Boom. Boom. Boom. It's brutal and relentless.

Right now I'm reading through the Holodomor. CW.

Starvation led not to rebellion but to amorality, to crime, to indifference, to madness, to paralysis, and finally to death. Peasants endured months of indescribable suffering, indescribable because of its duration and pain, but also indescribable because people were too weak, too poor, too illiterate to chronicle what was happening to them. But the survivors did remember. As one of them recalled, no matter what the peasants did, "they went on dying, dying, dying." The death was slow, humiliation, ubiquitous, and generic. To die of starvation with some sort of dignity was beyond the reach of everyone. Petro Veldii showed rare strength when he dragged himself through his village on the day he expected to die. The other villagers asked him where he was going: to the cemetery to lay himself down. He did not want strangers coming and dragging his body away to a pit. So he had dug his own grave, but by the time he reached the cemetery another body had filled it. He dug himself another one, lay down, and waited.

A very few outsiders witnessed and were able to record what happened in these most terrible months. The journalist Gareth Jones had paid his own way to Moscow, and violating a ban on travel to Ukraine, took a train to Kharkiv on 7 March 1933. He disembarked at random at a small station and tramped through the countryside with a backpack full of food. He found "famine on a colossal scale." Everywhere he went he heard the same two phrases: "Everyone is swollen from starvation" and "We are waiting to die." He slept on dirt floors with starving children, and learned the truth. Once, after he had shared his food, a little girl exclaimed: "Now that I have eaten such wonderful things I can die happy."

I want to take this book in small doses but there's a long list of holds for it. Blood must flow.

No fucking wonder Ukrainians are standing up and fighting back like hell.