Holocaust. The Ignored Reality. In Krytyka No. 9-10 (143-144), 2009, pp. 14-16.

In “Holocaust. The Ignored Reality,” which appeared earlier in the New York Review of Books, Yale Professor Timothy D. Snyder proposes a new understanding of the Holocaust and other genocides in Europe in the first half of the 20th century by focusing his attention on those areas where the greatest loss of life occurred – not Auschwitz, but Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor, the mass executions and the destruction of the ghettos in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania which caused the virtual annihilation of East European Jewry. At the same time, he reminds the reader that along with Nazi genocide there was also the Soviet version, beginning with the “collectivization” famines of the early 1930s and the Great Terror of 1937-1938. In all, between the early 1930s and 1944 there were nearly 12 million victims of Nazi and Soviet mass murder in Eastern Europe, and Ukraine and Belarus were the “heart of darkness” of the “dark continent” that was the Europe under Stalin and Hitler.