Okay, the book is called “Bloodlands,” written by Timothy Snyder. And yes, I know with a title like that it was going to be depressing.
I hadn’t appreciated how interconnected Nazism and Communism were; it’s possible the rise of one would never have happened without the other. While Stalin was starving the Ukrainian peasants, Hitler was pointing out the Communist Menace. While Hitler was organizing the first boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, Stalin was pointing to him as a danger to European civilization. Both of them were right. Then Stalin told German Communists not to cooperate with other left-leaning parties like the Social Democrats, which split the vote (essentially) three ways in Germany, resulting in Hitler becoming Chancellor. Within a few months he had broken the Communist Party in Germany and Germany was a single-party dictatorship. And Hitler kept hammering away at the Jewish-Bolsheviks, who were a danger to the world, and that road led directly to the mass graves of the Ukrainian countryside, not to mention the camps themselves.
God. I don’t know if I’m the right person to write this story. Except that I’m doing it for them, those young people who fought and died in Warsaw and all over the world, losing the battle but winning the war. Those young people who never saw the world they fought for, who didn’t survive to tell their own stories.
ellen mcbee 
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