Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

I came across this book after reading an article by Timothy Snyder on the history behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his piece, Snyder discusses the long history of invasion experienced by Ukraine and other Eastern European nations existing in the dubious space between belligerent powers. This is an area he explored more broadly in Bloodlands, the title of which refers to a swath of land roughly contiguous with Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine. where the vast majority of civilian death in the European theatre occurred between 1933 and 1945.

Much of this death was part of the Holocaust, but Snyder demonstrates that the Nazis were not the only genocidal force operating in that particular time and place. He provides a detailed rundown of the atrocities that the Soviets committed in these lands as well, from the imposed famine in Ukraine to the Great Terror to the purging of Polish intellectuals. He emphasizes that many of these places were subject to not just one invasion, but two or three, as the Nazis and the Soviets moved from allies to belligerents, and the Nazis from invaders to a broken, retreating army.

Of course, the Holocaust is given much focus, as its deliberate and racist intentions arouse particular loathing, but Snyder makes it clear that the Ukrainians and Poles were at times targeted almost as deliberately by the Soviets, if not with the same absolutist intention to eliminate them.

Snyder’s prose is academic but approachable, engaging and clear without much ornamentation. He had a tendency to repeat certain points, which I suspect is an effective way to ensure the general thesis is clear, though it sometimes grated a bit to hear the same fact several times. Overall, an important study of a particularly brutal stain on human history, one which it is hard to look at but must never be forgotten.

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

I don’t think this one needs much explanation. Anne Frank lived in Amsterdam, where she moved as a child from Frankfurt. When the Nazis sent a summons for her older sister to report to a German “work camp,” she and her family went into hiding in an annex stowed away in the back of her father’s office. She lived there for a little over two years with her family and four others: Otto’s buisiness partner Mr. van Daan, his wife Mrs. van Daan, their son Peter, and a local dentist Mr. Dussel (the names are all pseudonyms; the Van Danns were Van Pels and Dussel’s last name was Pfeffer. But I know them better by the names Anne gave them, so I’ve used them here).

During her time in the Annex and a bit before, Anne kept a diary where she recorded her thoughts and feelings, alongside events both quotidian and newsworthy. Life in the annex, with its myriad indignities, frustrations ,and small joys are recorded in great and evocative detail, interspersed with news gleaned from their helpers or the contraband radio. Every entry is addressed to Kitty, a fictitious figure that Anne invented to make her diary feel more conversational.

There is little to say about the structure, since it’s a diary and not beholden to pacing or format in any real sense. Still, it is an engaging read. Anne was a gifted writer, and very well would have been famous in her own right, had not the tragic and evil events of World War II taken her life before she had a chance to bring her gifts to fruition. She also speaks with much frankness (I’m sorry for the pun; I can’t think of a more approriate word) about her sexual feelings and maturity, which is surprising from a book of its time (apparently these passages were excised on original publication and only added back later).

The one other thought that struck me as I read, which never occured to me when first reading it as a teenager, was what it must have been like for Otto Frank to read and edit his dead daughter’s diary. Her love for him is clea,r but not everything she wrote is flattering ,and she was quite hard on her mother. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to do that. It was truly an act of bravery, and of love.

Anne’s diary should be required reading in school. It remains accessible and humanizes an awful period in history that is so huge, so monstrous in its evil, that it can almost feel impersonal. Six million murdered jews is a loss on a scale too large to easily wrap your head around. But thinking of that one girl, with her jokes and her dreams, murdered for the stupidest and pettiest possible reason, gives a foothold to the tragedy.

Nuit - Edgar Hilsenrath

You try to stay human, but afterwards, what does it get you?*

I first heard about Edgar Hilsenrath after reading his obituary in the paper, so I guess you could say I was late to the party. Still, his work sounded interesting and I thought I’d check it out. Unfortunately, the only book of his available from the Ottawa library was a French translation of Nacht. I don’t typically read French books in translation, as it seems kind of pointless—if I’m not reading a novel in its original form anyway, I might as well read it in a language in which I’ve written multiple books, instead of one in which I still struggle to order things effectively in restaurants. But you take what you can get.

It’s interesting to compare this book to John Hersey’s The Wall, especially since I started and finished Hersey’s book during the period in which I read Hilsenrath’s (French books take me forever). Both stories are about Jews living in ghettos in Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation: The Wall takes place in Warsaw, Nuit in a city in Romania. Both describe the harrowing circumstances in great detail. The chief difference is in their tone. While The Wall doesn’t shy away from the horror of the Warsaw ghetto, its nevertheless retains a level of hope cut with realism. Life is hard, and people do turn on each other, but their remains a certain camaraderie, and even heroism.

No such nobility is to be found in Nuit. Life is simply about survival, and brutality reigns. The book’s “hero,” Ranek, eagerly awaits his own brother’s death so that he can in good conscious snatch the gold teeth from his jaw and trade them for food. The caustic indifference of the characters to their own suffering and that of their neighbors and friends is cut with the darkest of dark humor. Put next to The Wall, Nuit paints a very bleak picture of ghetto life (and while The Wall is based on the true and profoundly heroic tale of the Warsaw uprising, it’s worth noting that Hilsenrath actually lived in a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation; Hersey didn’t.)

But that’s too simplistic a take. There is heroism of a sort in Nuit, and as shabby as it may seem, it’s nonetheless remarkable given the circumstances in which the characters find themselves. This heroism emerges in simple moments of humanity. Every choice a character makes in which self-interest is not the pervading driver is in itself heroic, because the substance of their lives has worn so thin that the slightest yielding could cause them to rip in two. To offer shelter to two orphans may seem like basic human decency; asking them to pay for the privilege in cigarettes sounds downright mercenary. But for Ranek, who does just that, taking them on costs him dearly in the goodwill of his neighbors, and such a currency is the only in which he remains even remotely solvent. When you look at it that way, trading a roof for a few cigarettes seems generous.

I can’t comment much on Hilsenrath’s prose, since I observed it through the double filter of translation and a foreign language, but on a purely practical level it appeared ornate enough to push my facility with French to the limit. I’m picking up Camus next, and just thinking of his prose in comparison feels like a relief. As for his story and characters, there is a richness here, one leavened with a bitter sort of humor without being cheapened by it. A powerful book.

*On essaie de rester humain… et après? Qu’est-ce qu’on y gagné?

The Wall - John Hersey

The Wall tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto during the second world war, from the creation of the wall that formed its perimeter to the final savage thrust of noble—if ultimately hopeless—rebellion in which the Jews finally struck back at their oppressors.

The story itself is inherently dramatic, based as it is on a true and monstrous period of history, but the most defining feature of The Wall is not the plot or the characters, but the way it is told. The entire book, from its editorial introduction to its final pages, purports to be extracts from the copious notes of Noach Levinson, a citizen of the ghetto who becomes its de facto archivist.

The opening pages, written in the style of an introduction by an outside academic, describe how the archive was found, and give us a first glimpse of Levinson through outside eyes. The remainder is structured as an assembly of different notes, with each passage marked with the date of its occurrence, the date of its recording, and the source of the material, though every word with very few exceptions is supposed to be written by Levinson.

It’s an interesting structure, giving the impression of something between an oral history and a non-fiction account, and the frequent use of dates helps situate the reader in the broader story. Occasionally notes from other “entries” are inserted as asides to add context, thereby circumventing one of the challenges of the epistolary novel, with its rigid limitations of chronology and perspective.

There are times where the format can be a bit distracting, and while I admire Hersey’s commitment, I occasionally wanted him to just write the novel in a more traditional way, with multiple POV characters undergoing experiences in real time, rather than having everything filter through Levinson’s notes. However, it’s not fair to judge a book on something it’s not, and I have to say it held my interest, and the second half moved much quicker than the first. Hersey apparently wrote a non-fiction account of Hiroshima, and given the talent for historicity he demonstrated in The Wall, I intend to check it out.