Bloodlands; Europe between Hitler and Stalin

"He found himself treading upon "bottomless, unsteady earth" crawling with small flies. The novelist Vasily Grossman, then a Red Army soldier, was walking across the still-settling wasteland where the extermination camp of Treblinka had stood until nine months before. As Timothy Snyder writes, Grossman "found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery; a sack of hair, blonde and black". The loose soil, flung around by peasants digging for Jewish gold, was still "throwing out crushed bones, teeth, clothes, papers"."
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder – review | Books | The Guardian

 

It is incredible that some people might still consider these dictators as legeds of the kind. Both killed millions of their own and other people for the "fun of it". Both deserve their place in the furnace of hell for sure.

 

Gordon;
Grossman makes for some difficult reading; Review: A Writer at War by Vasily Grossman | Books | The Guardian
I myself had to skip over the section in "Life and Fate" where the charactor based on the author's mother is on the ride to the death camps.
"The Writer at War" is probably the most honest account of GPW ever to come out.
JeffinMNUSA
PS. And it just me or do the photos of Vasily Grossman look like the American artist Robert Crumb? http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl...=IxuyTPHeGsLCnAfiqpX9CA&sqi=2&ved=0CDMQ9QEwAw
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19595.Vasily_Grossman
Grossman quotes; http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/19595.Vasily_Grossman

 

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin: review - Telegraph

 

Another take on it;

Bloodletting before and during World War II - Washington Times

 

Pretty common knowledge but Snyder delves much deeper in to the liquidations of the kulaks in Ukraine etc. Who determined the kulaks? A troika (three person group) from each locality composed of a member of the state police, a local party leader and a state procurator who were able to issue the harshest verdicts without trial or the opportunity of appeal. Pretty tough reading, of course children were not immune and too often the main casualties.

A commonly heard Ukrainian poem of 1932-1933 onward.

Solovki, a prison camp on an Arctic Island, stood for the repression of the people, perpetrated by The Politburo and NKVD under Stalin. What a tragedy for the farmers from the wheat producing regions of the Soviet Union to starve in camps and in the cities as their land lay fallow or in ruins from collectivist mis-management. The true meaning of WTF!

 

http://www.ww2f.com/wwii-books-publ...-stalin-timothy-snyder-review.html#post539702

Similar thread for reference. Thanks for merging them, Lou.