Bloodlands.

I've just run across the story of the Eleven Nuns of Nowogrodek.

The Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth arrived in Nowogródek in 1929 at the behest of Bishop Zygmunt Lozinski.[1] The Sisters became an integral part of the life of the town. During the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland, the Sisters invested great effort in preparing for the religious services—for the residents of the town, liturgical prayer became a beacon of hope amid the hopelessness of the occupation.[1]

The Nazi terror in Nowogródek began with the 1942 extermination of the Jews. Of the 20,000 inhabitants of the town before the war, approximately half were Jews. The Germans murdered about 9,500 of the Jews in a series of "actions" and sent the remaining 550 Jews to slave labor camps. This was followed by a surge in Polish arrests, then the slaughter of 60 people, including two priests. This situation was repeated on 18 July 1943, when more than 120 people were arrested and slated for execution.[1]

The Sisters unanimously expressed their desire to offer their lives in sacrifice for the imprisoned.[1] Sister Maria Stella shared the Sisters' decision with their chaplain Father Zienkiewicz and rector, saying, "My God, if sacrifice of life is needed, accept it from us and spare those who have families. We are even praying for this intention."[1] Almost immediately, the plans for the prisoners were changed—they were deported to work camps in Germany, and some of them were even released.[1] When the life of Father Zienkiewicz was threatened, the Sisters renewed their offer, saying, "There is a greater need for a priest on this earth than for us. We pray that God will take us in his place, if sacrifice of life is needed."[1]

Martyrdom

Without warning or provocation, on 31 July 1943, eleven of the sisters were imprisoned, loaded into a van and driven beyond the town limits.[2] The eleven nuns were killed on 1 August 1943 in the woods 5 km (3.1 mi) beyond Nowogródek, and buried in a common grave.[1] After the execution, Sister M. Malgorzata Banas, the community's sole surviving member, located the place of the martyrdom, and remained the guardian of their common grave until her own death in 1966.[1] The Church of the Transfiguration, known as Biała Fara, or "White Church", now contains the relics of the eleven martyrs.[1]

In a barbaric time, murdering nuns is not a great stretch from murdering children, mothers and the elderly because of religion or ethnicity, but still one has to wonder what the people who carried out these atrocities were thinking.

See review of "Bloodlands."

When Hell Came to Earth.

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder is a well-written, thoroughly-documented investigation into the Hell on Earth that was the "Bloodlands," basically Poland, Belarus and the Ukraine during the era of Stalin and Hitler. Snyder's attention to details - the individual deaths and the grotesque mass murder - focuses the reader's attentions onto the quite literal "enormity" - the extreme evil or moral offensiveness - of which totalitarian societies - whether fascist or communist are capable.


The fact that there were two monsters at work in the Bloodlands has come as something of a surprise to moderns who have tended to ignore the fact that the democratic West was allied with a psychopathic mass murderer of the first water. In his review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler: the Search for the Origins of His Evil", commented that after reading the accounts of cannibalism during the Ukrainian Famine, which had been engineered by Stalin, he was "jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler." The fact that it took this book to jolt someone who had written a book about the evils out of Hitler into thinking about the evils of Stalin, speaks volumes about why Snyder's book is a book that should be read by anyone with an interest in history, or, for that matter, by anyone who is interested in the mystery of human nature or of good and evil.

Snyder does at least five things in this book that make it well worth reading.

First, he breaks down the mostly artificial division that has been made between the experience of National Socialism and Communism for the people who were its chief victims. Most books consider one or the other - with the vast majority concerned only with the former, resulting in the naivety that Rosenbaum expressed in his review. As a consequence of the "fallacy of publicity" - i.e, that which gets the most publicity is most true - the victims of Stalinism, the hundreds of thousands of Poles who were shot for being Polish, have been reduced to non-existence.
 
Review continued here.

It slowly dawns on one writer that Stalin may have been worse than Hitler.

Writing a review of "Bloodlands" for Slate, author Ron rosenbaum observes:

How much should the cannibalism count? How should we factor it into the growing historical-moral-political argument over how to compare Hitler's and Stalin's genocides, and the death tolls of communism and fascism in general. I know I had not considered it. I had really not been aware of the extent of the cannibalism that took place during the Stalinist-enforced famine in the Ukraine in 1933 until I read Yale University history professor Timothy Snyder's shocking, unflinching depiction of it in Bloodlands, his groundbreaking new book about Hitler's and Stalin's near-simultaneous genocides.

And:

But I suppose that, without looking deeply into it, I had considered Stalin's state-created famine a kind of "soft genocide" compared with the industrialized mass murder of Hitler's death camps or even with the millions of victims of Stalin's own purges of the late '30s and the gulags they gave birth to.

Snyder's book, while controversial in some respects, forces us to face the facts about the famine, and the cannibalism helps place the Ukraine famine in the forefront of debate, not as some mere agricultural misfortune, but as one of the 20th century's deliberate mass murders.

And:

Students of comparative evil often point out that Stalin caused a higher death toll than Hitler, even without taking the famine deaths into account; those losses were not treated the same way as his other crimes or as Hitler's killing and gassing in death camps. Shooting or gassing is more direct and immediate than starving a whole nation.


But Snyder's account of the Ukraine famine persuasively makes the case that Stalin in effect turned the entire Ukraine into a death camp and, rather than gassing its people, decreed death by famine.

Should this be considered a lesser crime because it's less "hands-on"? Here's where the accounts of cannibalism caused me to rethink this question—and to examine the related question of whether one can distinguish degrees of evil in genocides by their methodology.

And:

find it hard to understand anyone who wants to argue that the murder of 20 million is "preferable" to anything, but our culture still hasn't assimilated the genocidal equivalence between Stalin and Hitler, because, as Applebaum points out, we used the former to defeat the latter.*

Consider the fact that downtown New York is home to a genuinely likable literary bar ironically named "KGB." The KGB, of course, was merely the renamed version of Stalin's NKVD, itself the renamed version of the OGPU, the secret police spearhead of his genocidal policies. And under its own name the KGB was responsible for the continued murder and torture of dissidents and Jews until the Soviet Union fell in 1991 (although of course an ex-KGB man named Putin is basically running the place now).

You could argue that naming a bar "KGB" is just a kind of Cold War kitsch (though millions of victims might take issue with taking it so lightly). But the fact that you can even make the kitsch argument is a kind of proof of the differential way Soviet and Nazi genocides and their institutions are still treated. Would people seek to hold literary readings at a downtown bar ironically named "Gestapo"?

The full evil of Stalin still hasn't sunk in. I know it to be true intellectually, but our culture has not assimilated the magnitude of his crimes. Which is perhaps why the cannibalism jolted me out of any illusion that meaningful distinctions could be made between Stalin and Hitler

That this is an epiphany for Rosenbaum suggests the wool of euphemism that people from his social structure have been wrapped.  Rosenbaum is the author of
"Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil ."  One would think that someone interested in "evil" would have had more than an intellctual understanding that the evils of Communism were at least as bad as those of Nazi Germany.