How do they live with the fear, I wonder to myself, how do they survive? — Historian Timothy Snyder has spent much of his career examining the terror waged against the people of Eastern Europe between 1930 and 1945 in the borderlands between World War II–era Germany and the Soviet Union. His book Bloodlands chronicles the twin genocides perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin in modern-day Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, and western Russia—campaigns of ethnically and politically motivated mass killing and starvation writ large. Snyder implores his readers to view the staggering number of deaths—fourteen million—as fourteen million times one. “Each record of death,” he writes, “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.” Snyder explains that “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.” Snyder ends his book with a plea to academics and fellow historians, to all those who grapple with death on a grand scale. “It is for us as scholars,” he urges, “to seek these numbers and to put them into perspective. It is for us as humanists to turn the numbers back into people.” — 117: 1728-1739
This feels like it used to feel, she finally said. I stopped walking. I don’t understand, I told her. It’s like when you were on the border, she said. All those years I knew things were weighing on you, but you were so sensitive to my questions—I couldn’t ask about it, I couldn’t show concern, I could never reach you. I don’t want that again. I’m too tired for it now. I stood for a while at the side of the street, staring out at the houses of my neighbors. Finally, I sat down on the curb. When did you know? I asked. She paused. Something had gone away from our conversations, she said. I don’t know how to describe it. She searched for a better explanation. There’s a story I remember from Catholic school, she told me. There was this brilliant child, a music prodigy. He could play anything—he would hear birds sing and then turn it into music. At a very young age he was sent away to be trained by monks. When he arrived at the monastery they forbade him from hearing any music but his own, they forbade him from listening to any of the famous composers. They wanted him to write and create his own music, and for many years he did—he created the most phenomenal things. But as he got a bit older he became frustrated. He wanted to study, he wanted to hear other kinds of music. And so one day he snuck away from the monastery. He went to a nearby town and went into a concert hall, where he heard Mozart. When he came back, he didn’t tell anyone, he kept creating new music just like before. A few days after his return, the monks heard him playing and they told him to stop. You’ve broken the rule, they told him. He looked at them with panic and insisted, no I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t. They shook their heads and said, yes you have, you’ve discovered Mozart. No, he said, how could you know that? Because, they said, when you played without knowing, you played music from every composer—and now Mozart is missing. When she finished the story, my mother fell silent. I sat hunched on the curb, the phone pressed against my ear. My friend, I finally told her, he’s been deported. I felt unable to breathe. I fear for him, I said, I fear for his family. All these years, I told her, it’s like I’ve been circling beneath a giant, my gaze fixed upon its foot resting at the ground. But now, I said, it’s like I’m starting to crane my head upward, like I’m finally seeing the thing that crushes. — 177: 2621-2639
The part of you that is capable of violence, she said, maybe you wish to be rid of it, to wash yourself of it, but it’s not that easy. I sat back in my seat and stared up at the ceiling, listening to my mother’s voice. You spent nearly four years on the border, she said. You weren’t just observing a reality, you were participating in it. You can’t exist within a system for that long without being implicated, without absorbing its poison. And let me tell you, it isn’t something that’s just going to slowly go away. It’s part of who you’ve become. So what will you do? All you can do is try to find a place to hold it, a way to not lose some purpose for it all. — 185: 2740-2745