Now we will live! ” This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The wheat had all been taken away, in a heartless campaign of requisitions that began Europe’s era of mass killing. It was 1933, and Joseph Stalin was deliberately starving Soviet Ukraine. The little boy died, as did more than three million other people. “I will meet her, ” said a young Soviet man of his wife, “under the ground.” He was right; he was shot after she was, and they were buried among the seven hundred thousand victims of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. “They asked for my wedding ring, which I….” The Polish officer broke off his diary just before he was executed by the Soviet secret police in 1940. He was one of about two hundred thousand Polish citizens shot by the Soviets or the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly occupied his country. Late in 1941, an eleven-year-old Russian girl in Leningrad finished her own humble diary: “Only Tania is left.” Adolf Hitler had betrayed Stalin, her city was under siege by the Germans, and her family were among the four million Soviet citizens the Germans starved to death. The following summer, a twelve-year-old Jewish girl in Belarus wrote a last letter to her father: “I am saying good-bye to you before I die. I am so afraid of this death because they throw small children into the mass graves alive.” She was among the more than five million Jews gassed or shot by the Germans. Timothy Snyder
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war. - Norman Mailer

  2. It is easy to be conspicuously 'compassionate' if others are being forced to pay the cost. - Murray N. Rothbard

  3. If you can convince people that freedom is injustice, they will then believe that slavery is freedom. - Stefan Molyneux

  4. The world, viewed philosophically, remains a series of slave camps, where citizens — tax livestock — labor under the chains of illusion in the service of their masters. - Stefan Molyneux

  5. Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man. - Fulton J. Sheen

More Quotes By Timothy Snyder
  1. Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but...

  2. No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.

  3. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.

  4. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most...

  5. Most the power of authoritarianism is freely given.

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