Gods And Monsters

This review of two books on the Hitler/Stalin mass murders in central and eastern Europe are chilling. Perhaps because it begins with an indictment of the West from one who lived in it and through it, Czeslaw Milosz, does the roll call of mass death, and the insistent call from the mass graves for real justice, it spoke to me this Halloween.

Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Miłosz, and was even regarded as legitimate if it was carried out on behalf of the resistance. In the name of patriotism, young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom “the killing of a man presents no great moral problem.” Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.

For all of these reasons, Miłosz explained, “the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously.” Because they hadn’t undergone such experiences, they couldn’t seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn’t seem to imagine how they had happened either. “Their resultant lack of imagination,” he concluded, “is appalling.”

The reviewer, Ann Applebaum goes on to point out that, for all the studies of the Holocaust, the killing machines of the Nazis and the Russians, we in the west really have no way of grasping the horror of living in that stretch of Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We write far too blithely of the German psyche, of Russian barbarism, of anti-Semitism, and all the rest, without recognizing that all those who had eked out meager livings in that vast plain were marked for death one way or another. Trying to assign a name to it, even creating a legal classification - genocide - does not and cannot capture the brutality of life in eastern Europe from the rise of Hitler and Stalin's first attempts to break the kulaks (1933) and didn't really end until Stalin died in 1953, on the eve of yet another planned mass killing and simultaneous purge of "Heroes" from the ranks of the Red Army.

On this Halloween night, let me repeat myself. There are monsters who walk the earth. They do not have claws or horns or wings; they don't drink blood to survive, or change in to creatures and devour human flesh. Until we have the imagination to realize the most horrible creature imaginable stares out at us each day, not just from our jail cells and TV screens, but in the mirrors of our homes, we shall never come to terms with this horrid, bloody part of our shared history.