This is really three books in one.
The first part aims to shift the way we see the
Holocaust. When something becomes familiar and taken-for-granted like the
Holocaust, then it is always a good thing when someone tries to make us see it
afresh. This Timothy Snyder does. He wants to produce two shifts (at least).
First, away from Auschwitz – a late and relatively
minor Holocaust scene – and towards the Bloodlands of eastern Europe where mass
murders, mainly by shooting, claimed the lives of over a million Jews in 1941 –
42. Waitman Wade Beorn's Marching into Darkness is the companion book for this part of the narrative. Unhelpfully, the book jacket design misses what Snyder is arguing and gives us the familiar railway tracks. Most Jews did not travel by train to die; they were rounded up where they lived and shot in local fields and forests by ordinary soldiers and locals as often as by specially trained killers.
Second, away from an emphasis on (Nazi or
traditional) anti-semitism, as sufficient explanation on its own, and towards
an understanding of the broader contexts in which people turn on their
neighbours and kill them. In this broader context, Snyder emphasises eastern
Europe as a world of shortages (land, food, clothes …) and a world of
insecurity. The insecurity was dramatically increased by the wilful destruction
of state structures by both Germany and the Soviet Union – in the worst cases,
we find both of them attacking in rapid succession. When you destroy states –
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania – remove their leaders,
their leading classes, their political parties, their armies, and so on, you
turn citizens into stateless individuals, denied a Leviathan to protect them. Fear
alone is enough to turn them against each other; anti-semitism channels the
direction of pre-emptive violence in which those who have no prior or no
profound ideological commitment willingly join.
When the world becomes seriously insecure, the
idea of killing your neighbour takes hold almost as if it is human nature. At the end
of his book, Snyder briefly ( page 336) references the US-UK invasion of Iraq
as an exercise in state destruction which functioned very much like the Nazi
and Soviet invasions of 1941 – 42 in turning people into killers of their neighbours. Snyder singles out one phrase from a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and Stalin's Gulag to illuminate what he is trying to get at: "a man can be human only under human conditions" (page 341)
The second part of Snyder’s book takes us over
familiar ground – some of it familiar because of his earlier book Bloodlands - and takes us through thumbnails of how the
Holocaust proceeded (or was halted) in different countries and how individuals responded
to their generally complex and intolerable situations. This is all readable
(and occasionally perhaps sentimental) but does not add to or shift the way we see
things, except insofar as it seeks to confirm the role of state destruction in
unleashing the Holocaust.
The third part is a short essay which seeks to draw
Lessons from the Holocaust which will allow us to understand the way our world
is now and what threatens it. The main theme here is the potential role of food
and water shortages – brought about by climate change - in turning people against their neighbours,
seeking to expropriate and secure scare resources for themselves. I would have
turned this short essay into something a bit longer; as it stands it feels a
bit schematic, despite brief references to interesting examples (like the Rwanda
genocide of the 1990s).
If you are pressed for time, read the first part of
this book. If like me you think that we can never stop learning from our own
recent history, read it all.
