Bloodlands

I'm currently reading the book "Bloodlands" by Tim Snyder. I cannot remember reading a more difficult-to-stomach book. He published it in 2010,  and it is the definitive account of the killing machines of Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II. It chronicles, in painful detail, the attempted extermination of the Jews by Hitler. It chronicles, in painful detail, the horrifying conditions of widespread State-sanctioned starvation in Ukraine and some of the other Western Soviet Union countries during the early part of WWII, that saw people resort to cannibalism (sometimes of their own children!) to stay alive. It chronicles, in painful detail, mass shootings and mass poisonings of all sorts of different groups of people by the evil governments of Germany and the Soviet Union. It sometimes prompts audible reactions of horror from me as I read. To fully comprehend the evil and the bloodshed of non-combat civilians during the period from 1937-1945 is staggering. I love this quote in the book - a reason why remembering and knowing all of this is important:

"It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of victims. It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible. To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history."

And then one more:

"...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life..."