Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder

Germans deported at war’s end was comparable to that of the higher number of Soviet and Polish citizens who were deported during and after the war. The experience of the fleeing, evacuated, and deported Germans was not, however, comparable to that of the ten million Polish, Soviet, Lithuanian, and Latvian citizens, Jews and others, who were subject to deliberate German policies of mass murder. Ethnic cleansing and mass killing, though related in a number of ways, are not the same thing. Even at their worst, the horrors visited on Germans in flight or during deportation were not mass killing policies in the sense of the planned starvations, the Terror, or the Holocaust. 19
    Beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated. Even Polish historians rarely recall the Soviet Poles who were starved in Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, or the Soviet Poles shot in Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s. No one ever notes that Soviet Poles suffered more than any other European national minority in the 1930s. The striking fact that the Soviet NKVD made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland in 1940 than in the rest of the USSR is rarely recalled. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest
occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself.
    The Polish literary critic Maria Janion said of Poland’s accession to the European Union: “to Europe, yes, but with our dead.” It is important to know as much as we can about those dead, including how many of them there were. Despite its tremendous losses, Poland, too, exemplifies the politics of inflated victimhood. Poles are taught that six million Poles and Jews were killed during the war. This number seems to have been generated in December 1946 by a leading Stalinist, Jakub Berman, for the domestic political purpose of creating an apparent balance between the Polish and Jewish dead. The estimate that he “corrected,” 4.8 million, is probably closer to the truth. This is still of course a titanic figure. Poland probably lost about a million non-Jewish civilians to the Germans and about a hundred thousand more to the Soviets. Perhaps another million Poles died as a result of mistreatment and as casualties of war. These numbers are appallingly high. The fate of non-Jewish Poles was unimaginably difficult compared to that of people under German occupation in western Europe. Even so, a Jew in Poland was about fifteen times more likely to be deliberately killed during the war than a non-Jewish Pole. 20
    Fourteen million people were deliberately murdered by two regimes over twelve years. This is a moment that we have scarcely begun to understand, let alone master. By repeating exaggerated numbers, Europeans release into their culture millions of ghosts of people who never lived. Unfortunately, such specters have power. What begins as competitive martyrology can end with martyrological imperialism. The wars for Yugoslavia of the 1990s began, in part, because Serbs believed that far larger numbers of their fellows had been killed in the Second World War than was the case. When history is removed, numbers go upward and memories go inward, to all of our peril.
     
    Can the dead really belong to anyone? Of the more than four million Polish citizens murdered by the Germans, about three