The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

By Orlando Figes

This is an excellent book that digs below the history of Stalin or even Stalin's Russia into the lives of those living under Stalin. It is an incredible book, an absolute must read to anyone searching to understand those terrible years.

"The Whisperers is not about Stalin, although his presence is felt on every page, or directly about the politics of his regime; it is about the way Stalinism entered people's minds and emotions, affecting all their values and relationships." Pg. xxxii

"Increasingly, there was nothing in the private life of the Bolshevik that was not subject to the gaze and censure of the Party leadership. This public culture, where every member was expected to reveal his inner self to the collective, was unique to the Bolsheviks - there was nothing like it in the Nazi or the Fascist movement..." Pg 37

"Collectivization was the great turning-point in Soviet history. It destroyed a way of life that had developed over many centuries - a life based on the family farm, the ancient peasant commune, the independent village and its church and the rural market, all of which were seen by the Bolsheviks as  obstacles to socialist industrialization. Millions of people were uprooted from their homes and dispersed across the SOviet Union: runaways from the collective farms; victims of the famine that resulted from the over-requisitioning of kolkhoz grain; orphaned children, 'kulaks' and their families. This nomadic population became the main labor force of Stalin's industrial revolution, filling the cities and industrial building sites, the labour camps and 'special settlements' of the Gulag." Pg. 81

"In 1935, the SOviet government had lowered the age of criminal responsibility to just twelve - partly with the aim of threatening those in prison with the arrest of their children if they refused t confess to their crimes." Pg 248     

"As Stalin saw it, the family was collectively responsible for the behavior of its individual members." Pg. 248

"The Great Terror undermined the trust that held together families. Wives doubted husbands; husbands doubted wives. The bond between parent and child was usually the first of these family ties to unravel. . . . Children were put under pressure by their schools, by the Pioneers and the Komsomol, to renounce arrested relatives, or suffer the consequences for their education and career." Pg. 300

Section "Wait for Me" about those coming back from the Gulag's and their silence. "It was terrible. To this day, I do not understand. Why was she so frightened to speak? I think she did not want to burden me. She wanted me to be happy, not to make me bitter about life in the SOviet Union. She knew that everything that had been done to our family had been an injustice  but she did not want me to think that." Pg. 454                                                                                       

Book 81

Vampire Academy

I nominate this the worst series title ever! But I am really enjoying the books. The series is intently focused on one main character and her development as a fighter and her growth as a young girl becoming a woman. The world the author creates is unique, consistent and engaging. The story line is unpredictable and clever. Apart from that, it has some amazing fighting, a very important aspect to me, and an interesting and unpredictable (not stereotypical) romantic story line. I thought I would just read book one but here I am on book 4!

Books 77 - 80, 82 - 83

Valkyrie Rising

By Ingrid Paulson

I am proud to say that this author is someone I used to work with and a good friend of one of my co-workers. I really enjoyed the book and found it completely inspirational that she was at one point working for the same company as me and is now an author! This is a great YA read, lots of action and a very strong female lead character. I loved the Nordic setting and the role of Norse mythology. Keep writing Ingird!

Book 76

Cinder

By Marissa Meyer

Loved this book! I can't wait for the sequel to come out. I found a great website to track series and when the next book is coming out: http://www.fictfact.com. I am looking forward to this one!

"Soon, the whole world would be searching for her - Linh Cinder.

A deformed cyborg with a missing foot.

A Lunar with a stolen identity.

A mechanic with no one to run to, nowhere to go.

But they would be looking for a ghost." Page 384

Book 75

I Hunt Killers

By Barry Lyga


Excellent YA book about a boy with a unique background which prepared him for a life of crime or crime solving (he is still trying to sort that one out). The story was well told, compelling and different from a lot of YA fiction out there. I look forward to the next book in the series!

"You won't even know you've crossed the line until it's way back in your rearview mirror." Loc 3983

Book 74

Reached

By Allie Condie

The final book in the Matched series was in many ways a pleasant surprise. I enjoyed the first book, didn't really like the second but thought this was the best of the series. What I really enjoyed about it was the lack of compromise. I felt that Condie didn't ever take the easy way out with the story line. Even though you thought it was going one (predictable) direction, it didn't happen that way. And this process happened again and again, allowing a kind of depth to surface within the story and within the characters. Excellent end to the series!

"You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all." Loc 2824

"I can't seem to treat this life I have as anything but the only thing." Loc 4882

"I draw in ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let come of it out,  you might cease to exist." Loc 5448

Book 73

The Twelve

By Justin Cronin

This was the necessary second book to Passages. I say necessary because this book really was what I was looking for from a story perspective from the first book. Cronin has an incredibly patient way of writing a story. Patient is the nice way of saying it, maddening as a reader is another way to put it - and my experience oscillated between the two. Some of the strong connections I made with characters and story lines back on say page 100 of the first book (keep in mind these are seven hundred page books) did not find resolution until almost the end of this book. And I must say it put me a little bit in awe of Cronin, the discipline that takes is extraordinary. And it made for some very deep connections and satisfying story links, I found myself thinking about this book a lot outside of reading it, puzzling over it and wondering where some of the characters were going and where they had been. This was an amazing book, difficult to describe but a wonderful thing to experience. 

"Sorry, we made vampires; it seemed like a good idea at the time." (I had been waiting for this line through the whole first book!) Pg. 85

"Let me see if I have you right, the chairman intoned . . . You decided to re-engineer an ancient virus that would transform a dozen death row inmates into indestructible monsters who live on blood, and you didn't think to tell anybody about this?" Pg. 85

"Houston, what remained, was not a place for humankind; Greer wondered why anyone had ever thought it habitable to begin with." Pg. 486

"Already she was feeling it, feeling them. The too-familiar prickling along her skin and, deep insider her skull, a watery murmuring, like the caress of waves upon a distant shore." Pg. 509

Remember Alicia! 

Book 72

Legend

By Marie Lu

This was a very interesting book to me. I had my eye on it for awhile but as I kept up with the response to the book it had pretty mixed reviews. And although I am really glad I read it, I completely understand why there were mixed opinions about the book itself. The story is there - intriguing dystopian world, two strong and interesting characters, compelling motivation (justice, revenge, love), but the book never dives deep enough to really allow these aspects to ferment. For starters, the book is way too short. I only say that because this means there was room to dig a little deeper and for whatever reason Lu decided not to do so. Perhaps it is because it was her first book? I am hoping that is the case and that the sequel has had time to grow into something even deeper and more compelling. I feel like this book was just a seed and that there is more for it to grow into. 

Book 71

Agent 6

Tom Rob Smith

This is the third book in the series. The first book was by far my favorite. This one just didn't really engage me. 

Book 70

Journey Into the Whirlwind

By Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg

This is an incredible Gulag memoir, the first I have read written by a woman. She offers a very different picture not of the camps or the suffering, that remains the same, but the women's response to the conditions and the suffering. I am reminded of what Anne Applebaum wrote in Gulag: 

"[Women] formed powerful friendships, and helped one another in ways that male prisoners did not." Pg. 308

"Why was this? Perhaps because waiting for an inevitable disaster is worse than the disaster itself, or because physical pain dulls mental anguish. Or perhaps simply because human beings can get used to anything, even to the most appalling evils, so that the successive wounds inflicted on me by the dreadful system of baiting, inquisition and torture hurt me less than those I suffered when I first came up against it. Be that as it may, 1945 was a frightful year for me. My nerves were at a breaking point, and I had persistent thoughts of suicide." Pg. 16

"It was he who first explained to me the theory which became popular in 1937, that 'when you get down to it, there is no difference between 'subjective' and 'objective.'' Whether you had committed a crime or, out of inadvertence or lack of vigilance, 'added grist' to the criminal's mill, you were equally guilty. Even if you had not the slightest idea of what was going on, it was the same." Pg.33

"'Sit down if you are tired,' he grunted contemptuously. His face was contorted by the same expression - a mixture of hatred, scorn, and mockery - which I was to see hundreds of times on the faces of his fellow apparatchiks and of heads of prisons and camps. 

I learned later that this grimace was part of the interrogators' stock in trade and that they were made to practice it before a looking glass. But seeing it for the first time, I felt sure that it expressed Vevers's own attitude to me personally." Pg 49

"There is nothing more frightening than prison insomnia." Pg. 97

"Later on I was able to establish a general principle: the dirtier the prison, the worse the food, the ruder and more undisciplined the guards, the less danger there was to life. The cleaner the jail, the more we got to eat, the more courteous the jailers, the closer we were to death." Pg 103-4

"As I lay awake on my plank bed, the most unorthodox thoughts passed through my mind - about how thin the line is between high principles and blinkered intolerance, and also how relative are all human systems and ideologies and how absolute the tortures which human beings inflict on one another." Pg. 113

"The sun shone dimly through the frosted glass; there were thirty five collapsible beds, all tidily made, but the main thing was - did my eyes deceive me? No, there were actually books on each one. I trembled with delight. My beloved, inseparable companions whom I had not seen for six months past - six months without leafing through your pages, without smelling the acrid printer's ink!" Pg. 152

"'The indictment stretched, mile on mile,
Pit-shafts mark our weary way.
We greet our sentence with a smile - 
It's penal servitude! What bliss!'

Suddenly these words thrilled me with their aptness. It is only at such times that one realizes the true value of poetry, and one's heart fills with tender gratitude toward the writer. How could Pasternak have known so exactly what one felt, living in his 'melancholy Moscow home'? I remembered other lines: 'The rest were drunk with space, and spring, and penal servitude. . . '

If only he could know how much his poem helped me to endure, and to make sense of prison, of my sentence, of the murderers with frozen codfish eyes." Pg. 176

"There are no words to describe the feelings of a prisoner who for two years has seen no one but warders and suddenly comes face to face with fellow sufferers. So these were my dear friends whom I had thought I should never see! What a joy to be with them, to be able to love and help them!" Pg. 264

"By innocently calling her 'comrade' I had reminded her of the past which she had cast out of her mind because it stood in the way of her present career: hence the outburst with which she answered me. After the incident I started to reflect on the psychological type created by camp conditions, and whenever I met Tamara afterwards I was reminded of Blok's lines:

'How terrible to be a corpse among the living,
Pretending to be alive and full of feeling!
But why pretend? To be accepted by society, 
One needs only to conceal the rattling of one's bones.'

In later years, in the camps, I men many of these spiritually dead people. In prison there were none. Prison, and especially solitary confinement, ennobled and purified human beings, bringing to the surface their finest qualities, however deeply hidden." Pg. 341

"Although one might have thought the men were stronger than we were, they seemed somehow more defenseless and we all felt a maternal pity for them. They stood up to pain so badly - this was every woman's opinion - and they would not know how to mend anything or be able to wash their clothes on the sly as we could with our light things . . . Above all, they were our husbands and brothers, deprived of our care in this terrible place. As someone expressed it, quoting from one of Ehrenburg's early novels, 'The poor dears have no one to sew their buttons on for them.'" Pg. 345

Book 69

The Passage

By Justin Cronin

This was a very intense book. And although I ended up really liking it, I would never call it a vampire book. Its a wonderful piece of dystopian fiction, a wasteland of a world left in the wake of vampire like creatures. Within this wasteland, our planet, the small pockets of survivors and how they have come to survive weave together a story of human capacity. The capacity to overcome in the face of difficulty, the capacity to sink farther into your own personal fears and delusions, the capacity for incredible selfish smallness or courageous selflessness.

"Grief was a place, Sara understood, where a person went alone. It was like a room without doors, and what happened in that room, all the anger and the pain you felt, was meant to stay there, nobody's business but yours." Page 326

"Carter's look wasn't scared or angry but simply resigned, like the world had been taking slow bites of him his whole life." Pg. 46

"How surprising death was, how irrevocable and complete, how much itself." Pg. 171

"What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?

It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more instance in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas and for whatever reason, made them your own." Pg. 174

"And inside him, far down, a great, devouring hunger uncoiled itself. To eat the very world. To take it all inside him and be filled by it, made whole. To make the world eternal, as he was." Pg. 182j

Book 68

House of Meetings

By Martin Amis

Two brothers living in the Russian Gulag system work out their complex relationship, and each of their love for the woman Zoya. The story is told by one brother in the form of a letter to his daughter, as he is nearing his own death.

Through this story, the larger broken story of Russia is told. The senseless imprisonment of millions of citizens and the impact that had on the country. One person at a time.

Amis writes with a stark bravery. These characters are complex, not always easy to be with, although he connects you to them. And through them, connects you to the Gulag experience and what it leaves of men in its wake. As Lev says in the letter he leaves his brother after his death, "They did more than take our youth away. They also took away the men we were going to be." Pg 223 

How does one emerge from an experience like extended unjust imprisonment? What is left of the life and how does one move forward through it? How does it interrupt the man, the brothers, love, the country itself? Is there something cathartic in telling the story? Even if the story is honest, staggering and brutal, like the stories each of the brothers leaves behind?

"And pitiful because it is such a transparent protest against failing powers: saying fuck is the only dirty thing we can still get up to. But I would like to emphasize the therapeutic properties of the four-letter word." Pg. 12

"I have hurt many men and women with these hands." Pg. 12

"The rest of me, even so, is becoming Eastern - re-Russifying all over again. So keep a lookout, hereafter, for other national traits: the freedom from all responsibility and scruple, the energetic championship of views and beliefs that are not only irreconcilable but also mutually exclusive, the weakness for humor of squalor and cynicism, the tendency to speak most passionately when being most insincere, and the thirst for the abstract argument (abstract to the point of pretension) at unlikely moments - say, in the middle of a prison stampede, at the climax of a cholera riot, or in the most sepulchral phase of a terror-famine." Pg. 15

"I had simply discovered that having someone to look after, or look out for, shored up my will to survive. And that was all." Pg. 22

"All around me, now, was the faint but unanimous sound of slurping and rinsing. It might have seemed encouragingly lubricious if you didn't know what it was. But I knew. It was the sound of three hundred men eating in their sleep." Pg. 23

"It would suit me very well if, at this point, I could easternize your Western eyes, your Western heart. 'The Russian soldiers were raping every German woman from eight to eighty,' wrote one witness. 'It was an army of rapists.' And, yes, I marched with the rapist army. I could seek safety in numbers, and lose myself in the peer group; for we do know, Venus (the key study is Police Battalion 101), that middle-aged German schoolteachers, almost without exception, chose to machine-gun women and children all day rather than ask for reassignment and face the consequence. The consequence was not an official punishment  like being sent to the front, or even any mark of official disfavor; the consequence was a few days of peer displeasure before your transfer came through - the harsh words, all that jostling in the lunch queue. So you see, Venus, the peer group can make people do anything, and do it day in and day out. In the rapist army, everybody raped. Even the colonels raped. And I raped too." Pg. 35


"This was the mental form they took: I couldn't see women whole, intact and entire. I couldn't even see their bodies whole. Now Zoya wielded an outrageous allocation of physical gifts . . . So, to encapsulate: Zoya, unlike 'all the others' I saw as indivisible. Being indivisible was her prime constituent. Each action involved the whole of her. When she walked, everything swayed. When she laughed, everything shook. And when she talked, when she argued and opposed, across a tabletop, she leaned into it and performed a sedentary belly dance of rebuttal. And naturally I wondered what else she did like that, with the whole of her body." Pg 39

"Wildly directed violence, drastic degradation: this is all terribly strange." Pg 45

"How to explain this onset of candor?" (upon coming into a train station with the town named Coercion) Pg 73

"In 'hungry '33' one out of seven died in 1943 one out of five, and in 1942 one out of four. By 1948 it had gone back down again, systemwide, and your chances were not much worse than in the rough-and-ready SOviet Union . . . By 1948, flies had stopped dying like people, and people had gone back to dying like flies." Pg 75

"To me,  by now, violence was a neutral instrument. It wasn't even diplomacy by other means. It was currency, like tobacco, like bread." Pg 79

"And I didn't mind the dead. It would be a strange kind of Russian who didn't forgive the dead. The living were what bothered me." Pg. 85

"Cold isn't like that. Cold is cold , obviously, and wants all your heat. It is on you. It grips and frisks you for all your heat." Pg 89

"What was the treat, exactly? It was to get my first glimpse of Lev, and to see the way his frown softened into the flesh of his brow. It wouldn't happen the moment he set eyes on me. He would smile his strained - his stretched - smile, but the frown, the inverted chevron of care, would remain awhile and then fade, like a gauge measuring my power to reassure. And sometimes I feel that I was never closer to the crest than during those exchanges or transfusions - never more alive." Pg. 90

"And what was the norm? The norm was more blood than shit." Pg 91

"That week had a turbulent color for me. You will recall my 'proof,' framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. 'Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us he would have never given us religion.' But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear - if God is a Russian." Pg. 91

"He wasn't pretending that he was a Christian (no great matter either way, in camp). He was pretending that he was a doctor. And he wasn't - not yet. ALways the most difficult position. ANd it wouldn't have been so hard for him if he hadn't been kind, very kind, continuously moved by all he saw. For those early operations he had to feel his way into it, into the human body, with his knife. First, do no harm." Pg 98

"There was never any soap in the USSR." Pg. 112

"You are mistaken, my dear, my precious, if you think that in the hours before battle the heart of every man is full of hate. This is the irony and tragedy of it. The sun rises over the plain where two armies stand opposed. And the heart of every man is full of love - love for his own life, all life, any life. Love, not hate. And you can't actually find the hate, which you need to do, until you take your first step into the whirlwind of iron."  Pg. 122

"She had the bad dream, then the good dream, than the horrible delusion. Now she had reality, and the locked shape beneath me at once gave way to infuriated struggle. But I remembered how you did it." Pg 198

"Yes, I'm re-Russified. But what can you do? The rule is: This thing, like every other, isnot what it seems; and all you know for sure is that it is even worse than it looks." Pg 207

"The rationale for slave labor, by the way, was as follows. I was clinically speechless for a week when I found out what it was. The rationale for slave labor? It helped keep the people terrorized, and, far more importantly, it made money. But it didn't make money, it never made money. It lost money. Everyone knew this except the General Secretary. From which one concludes that there was a conspiracy of silence. 'If only someone would tell Joseph Vissarionvich.' But no one ever dared." Pg. 211

"Or what is atonement for? What does it do? In 2004, the German offense is a very slightly lighter thing than it was. The Russian offense, in 2004 is still the same offense.

Yes, yes. I know, I know. Russia's busy. There's that other feature of national life: permanent desperation. We will never have the luxury of confession and remorse. But what if it isn't a luxury? What if its a necessity, a dirt-poor necessity? The conscience, I suspect, is a vital organ. When it goes, you go.

If it was up to me, I'd demand a formal apology, in writing, for the tenth century; and for all the others in between. But no trembling relicts, made of smoke and flame, are going to rear up and wring their hands. No Russian God is going to weep and sing.

Say sorry, someone. Someone tell me they're sorry. Go on. Cry me the Volga, cry me the Yenisei, cry me the Moscow River." Pgs 211 - 212

"In my other hand I held a plastic bag. It didn't take very long to fill it - with femurs, clavicles, shards of skull. I was walking on a killing field. A grave churned up by bulldozers and excavators. Further around the slope I encountered a kind of sentry hut; it looked like a single-occupancy toilet, but it was in fact a shrine. Inside: icons, an apple, a wooden cross nailed to the wall. No, this is not a country of nuance . . . The Jews have Yad Vashem and an air force. We have a prefab and a cankered apple. And a Russian cross." Pg.218

"Ever since I was born, you were righter. My righter of wrongs. You towered like a god - you straddled the ocean, you filled the sky. And I still feel that. Having you for a brother was like having a hundred brothers. And so it will always be. Lev"  Pg 235

Books Amis recommends on the Gulag:

- Black Earth: Russia After the Fall - Andrew Meier
- Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia - Orlando Fige
- Stalin: The court of the Red Tsar - Sebag Montefiore
- Ester and Ruzya: How my Grandmothers Survived Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace - Masha Gessen
- Surviving Freedom: After the Gulag - Janusz Bardach
- Man is Wolf to Man - Bardach
- 

Book 67

The Victims Return

Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin

By Stephen F. Cohen

"How the number of victims grew so large is horrifying to consider but not hard to explain." Pg 3

"Headed by two of Stalin's political creatures - a tiny, bi-sexual, drug-addicted fanatic, Nikolai Yezhov, and then by a kind of personification of evil, Lavrenti Beria- the NKVD arrested, interrogated, shot, transported, and guarded the victims." Pg 3

"But it was the conspiratorial theory behind the terror, formulated by Stalin and promoted into a national mania, which systematically multiplied the number of victims. According to Stalinist ideology, the country was full of covert enemies posing as loyal citizens - assassins, saboteurs, and traitors - who were conspiring to destroy the Soviet system and betray the nation to foreign powers." Pg 4

"interviewing victims for this book about the few million people who somehow survived Stalin's torture prisons and labor camps  I was constantly reminded not to forget the many more millions who did not return. Nor should my readers." Pg 6

"For ....., the announcement of Stalin's death 'was the first time I felt happy' because 'he died and I still had not.'" Pg 26

"Who had survived and why? Many attributed it to 'pure chance' or a 'miracle,' but there were also specific reasons. Some people endured because of strong bodies and unrelenting wills, the good fortune of less arduous work, or early release into exile. Others did so by becoming informers, providing sexual favors, or collaborating in different ways with camp authorities. Returnees I knew usually did not want to discuss the issue or did so without recriminations, but several accused other survivors of perfidious behavior. Unfairly, I thought, accusations were often directed at women." Pg 27

"The fate of children who had been 'careless in choosing their parents,' another bitter remark attributed to Gumilyov, was especially tragic. As a result of the terror, orphaned children and their 'destroyed childhoods' - a few even killed themselves - became a 'commonplace story.' Early in Stalin's mass repressions, he issued a particularly cynical declaration: 'The son is not responsible for the father.' In reality, the NKVD had orders 'to take' most of the children as well. Older ones, like those I knew and mentioned earlier, were usually sent to the Gulag, but so were many young ones. According to one source, 4 to 5 million children passed through special NKVD-run or Gulag facilities over the years, though not all of them orphaned by the terror." Pg 28- 29

" Krushchev's historic assault on Stalin's still cult-like reputation at a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, before more than 1500 delegates, was the turning point. The new leader did not tell the full truth about the terror, or even mention the Gulag, but by accusing the dead tyrant of 'mass repression' over many years, Krushchev tacitly exonerated millions of falsely condemned victims. Viewed in retrospect, his courageous, frequently explicit revelations before a still largely Stalinist assembly of the Communist Party elite made possible, albeit twenty years later, Mikhail Gorbachev's more far-reaching anti-Stalinism. Certainly that is the belief of the many Russians who even today blame Khrushchev for having mortally undermined the Soviet system." Pg. 37

"Those returning directly from the camps, without a term in the harsh but relatively recuperative conditions of exile, had the appearance of 'shattered people.' One described himself as merely 'bones in my body and skin stretched over them.' Seeing themselves for the first time in a train mirror, their 'faces eaten away by the cold of Siberia and foul air of overcrowded camp barracks,' was often a shock." Pg 39

"But while Sozhenitsyn espoused the possiblity of personal and moral redeption in the Gulag experience, Shalamov insited there was only dehumanization and death." Pg 65

"To conceal the mass executions, Stalinist 'justice' contrived a false sentence, 'ten years without the right of correspondence.' In reality, it meant the victim had been shot." Pg 68

"One social group did have reason to be fearful. Millions of people had been implicated in some way in Stalin's nearly twenty-five-year terror, from party and state apparatchiki who implemented his orders and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of NKVD personnel who arrested, tortured, executed, and guarded victims to countless petty informers and eager slanderers spawned by the blood-ridden plague. Millions of other citizens had been implicated indirectly, inheriting the positions, possessions  and even wives and children of the vanished. Two generations had built lives and careers on the terror's consequences, which killed but also 'corrupted the living.'" Pg.80

"But by 1956, as the return from the Gulag grew into a mass exodus, a profound antagonism was unfolding between two Soviet communities - the victims of terror and their victimizers." Pg 80

"One returnee dropped dead upon coming face-to-face with the man who had tortured him, while another saw 'fear of death' in the eyes of his NKVD interrogator." Pg 84

"By some reckonings, the mass terror had been possible only due to mass guilt. An estimated five percent of the nation had been secret informers and at least one million people had been Gulag camp employees, including economic managers and bookkeepers." Pg 101

"Readers instinctively saw their own recent experiences in depictions of the Hitler cult, Gestapo, Nazi concentration camps, and widespread German complicity. When the powerful American film Judgement at Nuremberg was shown in Moscow in 1963, reactions were even more pointed. In light of that analogy, graphic accounts of Stalin's terror, and mounting calls for justice, 'fears of being made to answer for their crimes' understandably spread through Soviet officialdom." Pg 108

"In November, in a televised speech to the nation, Gorbachev personally rehabilitated the names of both Bukharin and Krushchev." Pg 143

Books referenced in this work: 
Eugenia Ginzburg - Journey Into the Whirlwind and Within the Whirlwind
Lev Kopelev (Red army officer and loyal Stalinist at the time - accounts of his journey from Stalinist to democratic humanist) - The Education of a True Believer and Ease My Sorrows
Pavel Negretov - All Roads Lead to Vorkuta

Gulag returnees in Western and Russian fiction:
Vasily Grossman - Everything Flows, Life and Fate
Vasily Aksyonov - The Burn
Andrei Bitov - Pushkin House
Martin Amis - House of Meetings

Reality TV show in Russia called Wait for Me about the reuniting of family members torn apart by the Gulags.
http://www.economist.com/node/9982824

Yevfrosiniya Kersnovskaya drew illustrations of almost every episode in her voluminous memoirs

26.5 million dead in the war against Germany

Author's documentary about Anna Larina:
http://filmakers.com/index.php?a=filmDetail&filmID=1025

Book 66

Ashes and Shadows

By Ilsa J. Black


Black writes an action packed story with fearless depth and creativity. The book(s) contain a lot of smell descriptions, which given the dystopic world that this ends up taking place in, is entirely appropriate and only deepens the readers sense of presence in the story. All of the tactile ways the characters are being bombarded with this new reality just enhance the tension and the mystery of what has happened and what do we do now.

The story moves into a deeper exploration of not just "what would I do in that situation," an important part of the engaging quality of the book, but then goes into how do groups of people respond to this situation. And this is where Black's fearlessness comes in to play. Really looking at what happens when all structure of government, rules, discipline are absent from a society. In that gap, what happens? To some degree, one of the answers is that small groups led by crazy power hungry people before the zap lead with insanity after it. But she doesn't let that be the whole story. 

I desperately wanted to read book three at the end!

"A deep red bled across her vision. Disoriented, her lungs on fire, she churned water in a wild, frothing panic, and then she was lunging for a distant glimmer, what she thought might be the surface, kicking desperately even as the water fisted her heavy boots, greedily fingered her clothes, and tried to pull her back." Loc 1336

"Mina sailed across her vision." Loc 1349

"The stench was like summer, hot and torrid: a stink of tarry asphalt and roadkill bloated with decay." Loc 1373

"Mina spotted her first. Her tail thumped, and then she was heaving to a stand. her left leg was splinted, but she pranced over to Alex, who dropped to her knees and wrapped the dog up in a hug. 'Good girl,' she said. 'You are such a good girl.'" Loc 1466

"'When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies.'" Loc 4061

"But she was scared. She was starting to forget Ellie and Tom." Loc 4700

From Shadows:
"Vietnam was wedged in his brain, good and tight, like a stringy piece of meat caught between his teeth that wouldn't be dislodged for love or money. So why should everybody else forget if he couldn't?" Loc 84

"The thing was - no one had ever accused him of being too smart." Loc820

"He's crazy. Peter's throat convulsed, and then he was rolling his head to one side and vomiting the water he'd just drunk along with a thick gob of sour phlegm and mucus. he gulped air as the room spun. He's nuts, he's insane." Loc 1663

Books 64 - 65

Stalin

The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive new Documents from Russia's Secret Archives

By Edvard Radzinsky

I have had several people ask me why I would invest so much reading time to a large tome on Stalin. My answer is simple, I am trying to wrap myself around the gulags and Russia during the time period of the gulags. As I read memoirs, novels and even history books about them without getting into the mind of Stalin I realized I could never fully understand them. And I don't mean to imply that I would ever understand them. As a friend of mind passed on to me a quote from Pirmo Levi when he was asked if he would ever be able to understand the Holocaust, "‘No I don’t understand it and nor should you understand it, but it’s a sacred duty not to understand.’"

The author grew up in Stalins Russia, his father was a playwright during that time period. He begins the book at the beginning of Stalins life, when he was known by his mother as little Soso, into seminary as a young man, then into his years working for Lenin under the nickname Koba, and finally onto supreme ruler of Russia as Stalin.

There is a danger when writing about a man who created such destruction in his wake. There is the temptation to explain why they were the way they were - find some psychological angle or injured psyche - but this can in turn sound like justifications of their actions. Understanding evil is one step from justifying it. Radzinsky refrains from such explanation. He is disciplined about telling the facts as he sees them without trying to understand or make the reader understand Stalin. Which is also frustrating because it is human to want to understand "Why?"

It is tempting to debate who was more evil - Hitler or Stalin. Its an impossible debate, the only winner being the general ability of humans to be destructive, using creativity to find the best way to kill millions. There are stories in the past to support this, stories in this book, stories yet to come in human history. 

"Tkachev's original contribution to Russian revolutionary thought was the idea that a popular uprising is not necessary for the success of a revolution. Revolution can be successfully carried out by a narrow conspiratorial group of revolutionary leaders. They must seize power first and then transform a country accustomed to slavish submission. They would speed the Russian people, full steam ahead, along the route to socialism into the bright future. But the expectation was that for the sake of that bright future the majority of the population must be exterminated.." Pg 34

"One of the pillars of revolutionary socialism was Makhail Bakunin, the father of Russian anarchism. . . . The Catechism prescribed that the revolutionary should break with the laws of the civilized world: 'Our task is terrible, universal destruction.' He must be merciless, expect no mercy for himself, and be ready to die." Pg 35

"His conversations with the deputies can have left Koba in no doubt about 
 Malinovsky's role. And the miserable role assigned to himself. For the second time in his life Koba suffered a terrible spiritual upheaval. The first time he had lost his belief in in God. Now he lost his belief in the god Lenin. And in his comrades." Pg. 87

"It all looked so easy: everything is monopolized in the interests of the victorious people, a single State Bank is established, a Leviathan to dominate the whole country. Everybody would take a turn governing everybody else. Literally the whole population would be involved in government: cooks would learn how to administer the state. And people would gradually reach the point at which nobody governed anybody else. The hateful state, which had enslaved mankind for centuries, would die away.

This was the dream which would lead them to create the most monstrous state of all." Pg 122

"Koba embarked on a revolutionary solution of the problem with a round of executions, just to inspire respect for his decisions. He shot everybody involved in black marketeering or counterrevolutionary activity. Or anybody who might become involved. Pg. 143

"The White armies were fatally weakened by an age-old Russian ill: thievery. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Russian writer and historian Karamazin was asked for a succinct description of his country. He summed it up in a single word (in Russian): 'They steal.'"
Pg. 165

"The Boss, I believe, genuinely grieved for Sergo, just as before he had grieved from Kirov. This was a horrifying trait in his character - he could sincerely grieve for those whom he murdered." Pg 366

"On August 25, 1938 when the Terror was ebbing, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet discussed the possibility of early release for prisoners who had distinguished themselves in the camps. But the Boss said, 'Can't we find some other way of showing appreciation of their work? From the point of view of the economy it is a bad idea. The best people would be freed, and those left would be the worst.' In 1939, he decreed through the Presidium that 'a convicted person must serve the full sentence.' The 'best' were left to die slowly." Pg 414

"The Boss announced the results of the Terror. Half a million new appointments had been made responsible posts in the state and the Party. In the higher ranks of the Party 293 out of 333 regional party leaders were new appointments." Pg. 426

Slaughter of the Polish soldiers Stalin tried to pass off as Hitler's slaughter until recent years - "What remains is a letter from A. Shelepin, then head of the KGB, informing Krushchev that 'in all, 21,857 people were shot on orders from the KGB, including 4,421 in the Katyn Forest, 6,311 in the Ostashkovo camp, and 3,820 in the Starobel camp near Kharkov.'" Pg 499

"The country desperately needed a dose of terror. The counterespionage service zealously intercepted letters from the front, Beria regularly reported their contents, and the Boss saw that the worst had happened: independent thought. A relentless struggle with independent thinking would soon follow." Pg 506

"He also solved the problem of prisoners of war liberated from German camps. They had to pay for disobeying his orders to die on the battlefield. They had dared to survive as prisoners. Ad of course he had in mind the dangerous ideas they would have 'picked up' (a favorite phrase in his propaganda) in multinational camps. 

Their fate, then, was decided in advance. THese unfortunates, who had survived years of nightmare as prisoners, and lived to see their country victorious, were to be sent straight from German to Soviet prison camps." Pg 506

"With his mind always on the Great Dream he knew that there were two emotions which could unite society: fear, and hatred of the Jews. His 'anti-cosmopolitan' campaign had been instructive. The results had surpassed his expectations. The public had joined wholeheartedly in vilifying Jews, deliberately distorting the names of their victims. He remembered particularly the enthusiasm of the workers in that factory at the time of the ZIS affair. As one Russian writer put it: 'Anti-semitism makes your vodka stronger and your bread more appetizing.' Before leading his people to the Apocalypse he would bestow on them a great claim to superiority: the most downtrodden of Russians would rejoice in the fact that he was not a Jew." Pg 551

Book 63

A Red Boyhood

Growing Up Under Stalin

Anatole Konstantin

"The terror did not bypass the NKVD, either. The new chief, Yezhov, began exterminating Iagoda's men, who knew too much; now the old torturers were tortured by new torturers and the old executioners were executed by new executioners. They were so terrorized that, as I read later, sometimes, upon hearing a knock at their office door, they jumped out of the window or put a bullet through their heads." Page 16 

"While I admired America in spite of such propaganda, an aricle in the newspaper made me wonder about some of its leaders. Accoring to this article, the American vice president, Henry Wallace, and the president of the Far Eastern Institute, Owen Lattimore, traveled in Siberia and visited a Gulag concentration camp. Upon returning to the United States, they reported that these Gulag camps were actually rehabilitation centers whose inmates were healthy, well-fed, slept in clean beds with white sheets, and worked with great enthusiasm. One of them, I believe it was Hentry Wallace, said that he had the privilege of shaking the hadn==nd of the greatest industrialist in the wold, the head of the For Eastern Gulag!

I had assumed that most educated people in the world knew from hisotr about the Potemkin villages, but these two obviously did not. Potemkin was chief minister to Catherine the Great. To prevent her from seeing how people really lived, he buildt properous-looking houses along the highway that he know she would travel but these houses were only facades, with nothign behind the front walls." Pages 151-152

"As far as we were concerned, from a practical point of view, the only difference between the Communists and the Nazis was that the Nazi's killed innocent people because of their ethnic affiliation, while the Communists killed innocent people because of political class affiliations, real or imaginary." Page 179

Book 62

Ashes to Dust

Yrsa Sigurdardottir

An Icelandic crime thriller with an excellent story line. Sigurdardottir writes an engaging, well told crime story. The setting and history is fascinating as well. If you like crime fiction, you should read this book!

Book 61

A Discovery of Witches

By Deborah Harkness
Book club book #2This story is about a woman who tries to deny the fact that she is a witch and unexpected consequences result as she is forced to reckon with her own power and the blossoming relationship with, you guessed it, a vampire. Harkness tells a compelling story of discovery as the main characters search to discover why their species are dying out and why their relationship seems to be at the heart of that quest. It took me awhile to warm up to this book because it reminded me of The Historian and yet it didn't have the tight and beautifully woven story that that book had. The suspension of disbelief required in the beginning of the first book was maddening. The many inconsistencies throughout the book were frustrating (some continued even into the second book, although the writing and the story became much more cohesive in the second book). Some of these inconsistencies or loose ends were quite blatant, I was surprised at the editing stage they weren't tied up a bit cleaner.My biggest critique of the first book is that the author told you things without showing them to you. So you really had to believe the storyteller and be willing to follow her despite the fact that what she was telling you was not always evidenced in the story itself. On page 228 I made the note that the author tells you they are in love but you really don't see a lot of evidence of it and she tells you vampires and witches hate each other but all the interactions you see are cordial. I read the book despite these distractions, and also bought the second book. So I definitely think it is a book worth reading. And its always neat to see writers become better as they write more. "Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe." Page 195"Humans can convince themselves up is down and black is white. It's their special gift." Page 142Book 59 and 60

The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys

Courage, Tragedy and Justice in World War II

By Gregory A. Freeman

This is an important, challenging story about the crew of a downed bomber behind German lines. They went down just after a particularly devastating bombing campaign which left their town in shambles, and left most families with at least one member injured or dead. Their response to the young men came from this loss; but regardless of the circumstances it was extreme and brutal. Ending in the deaths of most of them.

But the story doesn't end with this brutal act. These murders were investigated in the system of justice which would later become the Nuremberg trials, the perpetrators were uncovered and those who were found guilty were brought to justice.

"The debate over the bombing strategies would continue past the end of the war, even as the numbers of the dead were still being tallied. . . .The crews flying those missions, most of them young men straight out of high school, were not responsible for debating the merits of their orders, and they rarely questioned them. They flew where they were told to fly and dropped their bombs on the targets they were assigned, trusting that their work was part of the larger effort to shorten the war and defeat an unquestionably evil enemy." pg 40

"The threads of the Russelsheim murders continued spreading for years. Everyone involved with the murders and the trials would find that that terrible day would stay with them forever, an event that changed their lives and how they saw their fellow man."

Book 58

German Boy

A Child at War
By Wolfgang W.E. Samuel

I bought this book while visiting the Air & Space Museum in Washington DC. I bought it from the author. It is his story of survival as a child of 10 - 15 at the end of WWII in Germany. It is an amazing story of childhood, piecing together life amid a brutal war and the devastating aftermath of war which left German's people in starvation, poverty, displaced from their homes, and with little work available to them. 

His story starts in the town right outside of the prison where downed pilots and their crew went, which was the setting of the last book I read. 

"I thought about what I had read in the newspaper, about what happened to German women when they were captured by Russian soldiers. Awful things. I didn't know what rape was, but it had to be terrible the way they wrote about it in the newspaper and spoke of it on the radio. I didn't want my mother to be raped. She was all I had to hold on to, besides Ingrid, my sister. I felt a dull ache rise within me, as if a cold hand were squeezing my insides. Maybe I was hungry. That had to be it. It was my empty stomach that gave me that odd feeling. I couldn't remember when I had last eaten. Maybe it wasn't hunger I felt. Maybe I was afraid of dying." Pg. 3

Book 57

The Final Mission of Bottoms Up:

A World War II Pilot's Story

By Dennis Okerstrom

Flying their B24J Liberator on a bombing mission over Germany the Bottom's Up (the plane's name) went down. The young crew found themselves in enemy territory. This book tells their story with an interesting twist. Lamar, who is the one the story is about, received a strange email from Croatia asking about his plane that went down in WWII. Over time they come to realize the archeology crew in Croatia has found the remnants of Bottom's Up. Its an excellent story!

Point to note: the crew went to Stalag Luft I, one of the largest POW camps in Germany and relevant to the next book I read.

Book 56

In The Garden of Beasts

By Erik Larson

Larson takes a specific story of one US diplomat and his family as a means of exposing many details of the Nazi rise to power. Through this narrative many answers to the question "how could this happen" are are explored at the ground level. Driving home the point, you can not underestimate the power of fear. And the strong, deep desire for everything to be ok, for the horrible things you see in front of you to not be long-term but instead a temporary problem. These driving forces led to inexplicable silence on the part of those living in Germany and even abroad. The story also sheds light on the anti-semitism and subsequent apathy playing itself out inside the US. 

The brutal and cut throat world of politics the Nazis played laid a foundation for the later atrocities played out against the Jews. Once the stage was set for complete conformity to the regime at the risk of death, there was no sound of reason within the party left to question their authority or their final decisions. 

"In this new world, the calling card was the crucial currency. The character of an individual's card reflected the character of the individual, his perception of himself, or how he wanted the world to perceive him. The Nazi leadership invariably had the largest cards with the most imposing titles, usually printed in some bold Teutonic font." page 71

"Fromm added, 'There is nobody among the officials of the National Socialist party who would not cheerfully cut the throat of every other official in order to further his own advancement.'" Page 266

Book 55

A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army

By Vasily Grossman

This is an incredible book based on Vasily Grossman's notebooks while embedded with the Russian army in WWII. As the introduction states, "Grossman's uncomfortable honesty was dangerous. If the NKVD secret police had read these notebooks he would have disappeared into the Gulag." Location 197

In the battle of Stalingrad, he was the "longest serving journalist in the embattled city." His style was engaging, "he never wrote anything down during the interview" which "helped Grossman to win people's confidence." Location 209

His article 'The Hell Called Treblinka' is one of his most im[portant essays and an important piece of Holocaust literature. It was quoted at the Nuremberg tribunals. 

I loved his courage, dedication and willingness to speak from the soldiers perspective with an unflinching honesty. This was in particularly admirable and difficult in the times of great propaganda and re-editing to slant things in favor of the Russian perspective. This was easier to do when Russia was winning but a very difficult line to walk when the war was not going in their favor. 

"Dozens of aerial boats are gliding in the sky, slowly and smoothly, in triangular ranks. They are moving towards us. Dozens, hundreds of people climb over the sides of trucks, jump out of cabins, run towards the forest. Everyone is infected with panic, the running crowd is growing bigger every minute. And then everyone hears the shrill voice of a woman: 'Cowards, cowards, they are just cranes flying over!' Confusion." Page 48

"This poverty, this urban poverty is somehow worse than the village sort. It's deeper and blacker, an all-embracing poverty, deprived even of air and light." Page 50

"Problems for the artillery: battle in a village. Everything has got mixed up. One house is ours, another one is theirs." Page 68

"Throughout the war, the chief obsession of may members of the Red Army was to obtain alcohol or anything which even looked like alcohol." Notes from editors  Page 73

"War is an art. WIthin it elements of calculation, cool knowledge and experience are combined with inspiration, change and something completely irrational (battle for Zaliman, Pesochin). These elements are compatible with one another, but sometimes they come into conflict. It's like a musical improvisation which is unthinkable without a brilliant technique." Page 97

"The blue, ash-grey main road. Villages have become the kingdom of women. They drive tractors, guard warehouses and stables, queue for vodka. . . They are coping with an enormous amount of work and send bread, aircraft, weapons and ammunition to the front. They feed us and arm us now." Page 119

"Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It is dead. People are in basements. Everything is burned out. The hot walls of the buildings are like the bodies of people who have died in the terrible heat and haven't gone cold yet. " Page 125

"That was a terrible dust, the dust of retreat. It ate up the men's faith, it extinguished the warmth of people's hearts, it stood in a murky cloud in front of the eyes of gun crews." Page 130

"Soviet pitilessness more than matched that of the Germans, when it came to forcing their own men into the attack. Stalin's Order No. 227 - 'Not One Step Back' - included the instruction to each army command to organise 'three to five well-armed detachments (up to two hundred men each)' to form a second line to 'combat cowardice' by shooting down any soldier who tried to run away." Page 140

Editor's comment: "The defense of Stalingrad was stiffened by the most terrifying discipline. Some 13,500 soldiers were executed during the five-month battle. Most of these were during the earlier days when many men broke." Page 141

(men were condemned to death if they self-inflicted wounds to get off the battlefield)

"The courage of the young women medical orderlies was respected by everyone. . . . 'We have gone into the attack with our platoon, and crawled side by side with them. We have fed soldiers, given them water, bandaged them under fire. We turned out to be more resilient than the soldiers, we even used to urge them on. Sometimes, trembling at night, we would think: 'oh, if i were at home right now.'" Page 184

Editor's comment: "After the intensity and importance of the battle of Stalingrad, Grossman found it was hard to accept that life moved on it its usual way, that goodbyes could be hurried and casual after such momentous events." Page 203

"The winder sun is shining over mass graves, over handmade tombstones at the places where soldiers had been killed on the axis of the main attack. The dead are sleeping on the heights by the ruins of factory workshops, in gullies and balkas. THey aere sleeping now right where they had been fighting when alive. . . . They are so majstic and matter of fact in their heroism." Page 204

"The gun was reminiscent of a ragged, long-suffering man." Page 235

"Every soldier, every officer and every general of the Red Army who had seen the Ukraine in blood and fire, who had heard the true story of what had been happening in the Ukraine during the two years of German rule, understands to the bottom of their souls that there are only two sacred words left to us. One of them is 'love' the other one is 'revenge.'" Page 248

"There are no Jews in the Ukraine. Nowhere - Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, Yagotin - in none of the cities, hundreds of towns, or thousands of villages will you see the black, tear-filled eyes of little girls; you will not hear the pained voice of an old woman; you will not see the dark face of a hungry baby. All is silence. Everything is still. A whole people has been brutally murdered." Page 250

Editor's comments: "It soon became clear to Grossman that his reports on what was to be known later as the holocaust were unwelcome to the Soviet authorities. The Stalinist line refused to accept any special categories of suffering. All victims of Nazism on Soviet soil had to be defined as 'citizens of the SOviet Union' without qualification. Official reports on atrocities, even those describing corpses wearing the yellow star, avoided any mention of the word Jew. In late 1943, Grossman joined Ilya Ehrenburg on a commission to gather details fo German crimes for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, an organization which later attracted the suspicion of the Stalinist authorities. Ehrenburg and Grossman planned that all the material collected should be published in a 'Black Book' but this would be suppressed after the war, partly because of the Stalinist position on Soviet suffering - 'Do Not Divide the Dead' - and partly because the involvement of Ukrainians in the anti-SEmitic persecution was embarrassing for the authorities. The subject of collaboration during the Great Patriotic War was almost entirely suppressed unti after the fall of communism." Page 251

"There's no one left in Kazary to complain, no one to tell, no one to cry. Silence and calm hover over the dead bodies buried under the collapsed fireplaces now overgrown by weeds. This quiet is much more frightening than tears and curses. 
Old men and women are dead, as well as craftsmen and professional people: tailors, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, house painters, ironmongers, bookbinders, workers, freight handlers, carpenters, stove-makers, jokers, cabinetmakers, water carriers, millers, bakers, and cooks; also dead are physicians, prothesists, surgeons, gynecologists, scientists - bacteriologists, biochemists, directors of university clinics - teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry. Dead are professors, lecturers and doctors of science engineers and architects. Dead are agronomists, field workers, accountants, clerks, shop assistants, supply agents, secretaries, night watchmen, dead are teachers, dead are babushkas who could knit stockings and make tasty buns, cook bouillon and make strudel with apples and nuts, dead are women who had been faithful to their husbands and frivolous women are dead, too, beautiful girls, and learned students and cheerful schoolgirls, dead are ugly and silly girls, women with hunches, dead are singers, dead are blind and deaf mutes, dead are violinists and pianists, dead are two-year-olds and three-year-olds, dead are eighty-year-old men and women with cataracts on hazy eyes, with cold and transparent fingers and hair that rustled quietly like white paper, dead are newly born babies who had sucked their mothers' breast greedily until their last minute.
This was different from the death of people in war, with weapons in their hands, the deaths of people who had left behind their houses, families, fields, songs, traditions and stories. This was the murder of a great and ancient professional experience, passed from one generation to another in thousands of families of craftsmen and members of the intelligentsia. This was the murder of everyday traditions that grandfathers had passed to their grandchildren, this was the murder of memories, of a mournful song, folk poetry, of life, happy and bitter, this was the destruction of hearths and cemetries, this the death of the nation which ha been living side by side with Ukrainians over hundreds of years. . . " Page 252

Editor's notes: "For him, the greatest shock was to discover the major role which local Ukrainians had played in the horror." Page 254

The two letters he wrote his mother

"There was one kind of complaint and lament that I didn't hear in Poland, only one kind of tears that I didn't see: those of Jews. THere are no Jews in POland. They have all been suffocated, killed, from elders to newly-born babies. Their dead bodies have been burned in furnaces." Page 279

"It is infinitely hard even to read this. The reader must believe me, it is as hard to write it. Someone might ask: 'Why write about this, why remember all that?' It is the writer's duty to tell this terrible truth, and it is the civilian duty of the reader to learn it." Page 301

"And one feels as if one's heart could stop right now, seized with such sorrow, such grief, that a human being cannot possibly stand it." Page 306

Editor's notes: "Not surprisingly, Grossman himself fount it very hard to stand. He collapsed from nervous exhaustion, stress and nausea on his return to Moscow." 

"Vasily Grossman's belief in a 'ruthless truth of war' was cruelly scorned by the Soviet authorities, especially when they attempted to suppress information about the Holocaust." Location 5473
Book 54