Barefoot and Pregnant: Violence, Children, and History

Barefoot and Pregnant: Violence, Children, and History
Excerpt:
We're not cavalier about violence, though, however it may seem; rather, we probably pay closer attention to violence in its various forms than most parents who place a de facto ban on violence in books and movies. The reason for that is simple. Human beings are capable of committing violent acts, both in defense of good and in service of evil. To ignore or deny that facet of human nature is dishonest.    

This morning, Mrs. Darwin directed my attention via facebook to a story about a French priest who is racing against time to try and bring to light the truth about yet more hidden Nazi atrocities. The generation who witnessed the mobile Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, slaughter hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies in the Soviet Union is dying out, and Fr. Patrick Desbois is desperately trying to record their stories before it's too late. 


You really ought to read the article. It's fascinating, in the same horrific way that all the tales of those atrocities are fascinating. I have less trouble understanding the willing submission of the victims in the Soviet Union than I do in Western Europe, because the Jews and Gypsies had been subjected to pogroms in Eastern Europe for centuries. I don't even have trouble swallowing the cooperation of the townspeople, even going so far as to dig the graves and watch in silence for days as those buried alive struggled beneath the fresh earth, because what choice did they have? As I understand it, life in Eastern Europe, particularly those remote villages of the Soviet Union, was unimaginably bleak and cruel, due to both the government and the weather. These were not a people accustomed to anything other than trying to survive. (This is not to say that there weren't heroic acts of self-sacrifice; I'm sure there were, I just understand why they weren't the norm.) What I truly cannot fathom, though, is why no one said anything after the war, or after the oppression of the Stalinist regime had lifted. Were they afraid? Were they trying to forget? Did they think it didn't matter, that the past was the past? Why did no one think that these atrocities needed to be recorded, the victims remembered, and history set straight? ...