Throughout the past several years, I have tried to cultivate the habit of reading at least one book per week. Now, I have not always succeeded in this, but I try. I usually read for at least an hour each night before bed, sometimes more. I try to carry a book (or my kindle) with me wherever I go, so that I can read in spare moments.
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder was different. I didn't read this book straight through; I couldn't. This book has taken me many months to read, and I have read many other books alongside it. I had to take breaks from it and come back. But, come back I did, again and again. The reason I had to take so many breaks was two-fold: 1) the book is incredibly depressing, because the history is incredibly depressing. At least 22 million people were killed by the two regimes. 2) the book was very long and had so much information. I needed to read it in chunks, so that I could appreciate the full weight of what was being said.
Alas, I have now finished. I don't even know where to begin to describe how I feel about the book, for it is so intertwined with I feel about what happened those 70 years ago. It was deplorable and unimaginable. How could men do this to other men? Why was it allowed to continue? Why were certain treaties signed by certain nations at the end? Why, why, why?
This book challenged my faith. I know that the Father is good and sovereign, but those character qualities are harder to see when faced with these facts. I think this challenge is good; I have to trust Him and love Him amid harsh realities, not just pleasant valleys. Life is full of harsh realities, but He is still good, still all-knowing, still standing sovereign over all. There will be an account for what was done. He is just. We can entrust ourselves to Him who judges justly. And, one day we'll be with Him, and there will be no more pain or sorrow or death, for the former things will have passed away. We are living in "the former things" now. Especially after reading this book, I long for my King, for all the sad things to be made untrue.
I encourage you to read this book. It is so valuable to know history. As the saying goes, "You must know history or you are doomed to repeat it." And, as my dad says, "You may still be doomed to repeat it, but at least you'll know what's going on when it happens."
I will leave you with some quotes:
"Since life gives meaning to death, rather than the other way around, the important question is not: what political, intellectual, literary, or psychological closure can be drawn from the fact of mass killing? Closure is a false harmony, a siren song masquerading as a swan song. The important question is: how could (how can) so many human lives be brought to a violent end?"
"Stalin and HItler both claimed throughout their political careers to be victims. They persuaded millions of other people that they, too, were victims... No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood. In the twenty-first century, we see a second wave of aggressive wars with victim claims, in which leaders not only present their peoples as victims but make explicit reference to the mass murders of the twentieth century. The human capacity for subjective victimhood is apparently limitless, and people who believe that they are victims can be motivated to perform acts of great violence."
"To deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible."
"Victims left behind mourners. Killers left behind numbers. To join in a large number after death is to be dissolved into a stream of anonymity. To be enlisted posthumously into competing national memories, bolstered by the numbers of which your life has become a part, is to sacrifice individuality. It is to be abandoned by history, which begins from the assumption that each person is irreducible."
"Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life. We must be able not only to reckon the number of deaths but to reckon with each victim as an individual."
"The Nazi and Soviet regimes turned people into numbers, some of which we can only estimate, some of which we can reconstruct with fair precision. It is for us as scholars to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people. If we cannot do that, then Hitler and Stalin have shaped not only our world, but our humanity."
