I've been listening to some of the online lectures given by Tim Snyder, the historian who wrote Bloodlands, an account of the mass murders that took place in Eastern Europe, the bit between Germany and the Soviet Union, between 1933 and the end of WW2. One day I'll read the book, but I've been putting it off as being a bit too depressing to take on at the moment. I suppose the lectures function as a kind of substitute for the overwhelming detail of the real thing for me.
One number sprung out from the various statistics the prof expertly analyses. 14,000,000. The number who died (men, women and children) in that territory, in that period. The idea of 6,000,000 Jews as victims of the holocaust is difficult enough to comprehend, impossible really, but this number (which includes most of those six million) moves to a place that the brain just cannot go, except in the most abstract sense.
And this in Europe less than a century ago. In the lifetimes of my parents.
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