The Synchronicity of 2666 and the Bloodlands

Had a strange moment of synchronicity yesterday. It started off with my nightly reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. I’m on the last section – “The Part about Archimboldi" – the main character of which is a German on the west front of WWII. The part I read last night involved him learning about a town administrator who was “accidentally sent” 500 Greek Jews and needed to “take care of them,” with predictably brutal results. (2666, for all of its brilliance and amazing reading, is far from an uplifting book.) Then, at 2:30 this morning, suffering from what I learned today was bronchitis bordering on pneumonia, coughed myself awake and spent some insomniac time reading through the latest Harpers. Adam Hochschild reviews a Timothy Snyder book Bloodlands: Europe Between Stalin and Hitler in a chilling examination of “how what is today Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, the three Baltic states, and a narrow strip of Russia became, between the early 1930s and 1945, a killing ground almost without precedent.”
The article goes on to detail how much these people suffered – and not just the Jews. From the article: “...a minimum of 14 million people altogether were deliberately murdered there during that period, the Soviet POWs, almost all of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust, at least 3.3 million inhabitants of Ukraine who died in the famine caused by the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, civilians starved or shot by Nazi occupying troops, and people from a variety of ethnic groups targeted by Hitler or Stalin or both. This appalling total does not even count the many millions of combat deaths in the region, on the bloodiest front of the bloodiest war in history.” Yikes. The situation was indescribably grim, and one of the strengths of 2666 is it brings these cold statistics to life in a way that you can start to empathize with the situation.
Confronting this grim situation is not pleasant. The sheer scope of the slaughter is depressing enough, but Hochschild also presents two other reasons “why Americans, when we talk about those years, almost entirely ignore [this territory].” His conclusion is twofold: that 1) “in the bloodlands... it is sometimes frustratingly hard to draw the line between victim and victimizer. Many people were both;” and 2) “Americans… like to imagine ourselves always making the right moral choice; hence we prefer to hear about times and places where people could do so.” The second point brings me back to 2666, one of the themes of which could be described by Hochschild when he writes “And not only were there few chances for heroism, there was little inherent nobility in being a survivor.” The last section at least is grim writing about tough times, and I was happy to have supporting evidence to drive home just how tough it really was.