 And welcome to the first episode of World of Books, a show that will talk about books. My goal is to maybe help you select your next read or bring some new perspectives to what you've already read, help you enhance your research on certain topics or maybe push you into writing your own book. And today we're going to talk about the book Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. And my guest today is Holly McLeod. She is my good friend and fellow avid reader. And Holly runs a free public library in her neighborhood in Lahaina and also volunteers for Maui Friends of the Library bookstore also in Lahaina. Last but not least, Holly is the owner of a design company called Shark Fit Designs, a company that hand designs logos and stickers and sells them to the interested parties and the profits are donated to local groups. So Holly, thank you for joining me today and for taking the time and for reading the book. You're very welcome. So for our readers, I'm going to give a little intro. The author Timothy Snyder is a very well-known historian. He's a professor at Yale University and he speaks five languages and can read 10 languages. He is an absolute expert in Eastern European history and he's published several books. This is just one of them. Bloodlands, which is the history of Europe between Hitler and Stalin was published in 2010. And here we are in 2022 with a war in Ukraine. And I keep thinking about the relevance of this book. I've picked up on a lot of points that are kind of related to what we see on the news. And I wonder how you feel about that, Holly? What did the book tell you and was it relevant in any way to you? Oh, well, I feel like something that's truly historical that's new information, relatively new, it's not something that we learned when we were in school, especially at least not where I went to school. And plus the information wasn't available at the time. So I just feel like knowing what happened and knowing about historical events is always relevant. It's always really important. I feel like we should never not know the truth of what happened in the past, but definitely, especially now with Ukraine and being on the brink of another, possibly huge mass starvation Yeah, we definitely need to take as much as we can and learn from history or just try to see what could possibly be happening now. So you already know, but I am actually from Romania. So regarding your comment about what we might have learned in school, we haven't learned about this much either. And that is because just like the other countries that are the topic of this book that being Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, we were behind the Iron Curtain. So all the information was controlled and was not really passed on to the West, let's say. So it is after 1991 that a lot of the USSR archives, the former USSR archives were open and Timothy Snyder was able to access them and thus use all this information for his book. And for our viewers, I wanna point out just a few things that were absolutely shocking to me. And that is that between the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, between Hitler and Stalin, in the bloodlines that are described as currently Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, 14 million people were murdered, 14 million. And some of them, I mean, this world's genocide basically started as early as 1932 with a deliberate famine in Ukraine. At that time, Ukraine was under Soviet ruling. Stalin was in power and he decided to go through this process of collectivization, meaning that most farmers had to contribute their land and their crops to the common agricultural entity, if you wanna call it that way. So because most of them did not wanna participate, then they were deliberately famished where all their crops, all their animals were taken away and they were left with not even grains to plant for the next season or today. Famine is a very, very hard topic for me to read or even think about. I feel like something that kind of occurred to me, reading the book is like, you hear about gassing, you hear about shootings, you can wrap your head around those, you can visualize it, it's murder, it's horrible. When you hear that millions of people were starved to death, it's like, you almost have to decide that it's not just something that happened to these people, it was a deliberate way to murder them. It was slow and painful and just brutal. And it happened to millions and millions of people in different time periods throughout these 12 years from like you said, 33 to 45 is when the bloodline, like when the 14 million people were killed. It's just, I think people gassing and shooting and stuff seems cleaner, it seems like something we can accept, we've seen it in movies, we've seen it on the news, but forced starvation, this thing, it's not just something that happens, like it was specific and deliberate and brutal. So once the Soviets went through this process of collectivization, they were started. And now the same territories that have suffered so much through Stalin get to be occupied by the Germans. And now there's different reasons for them to be persecuted, executed and famished again because it's a war and there isn't enough food for everybody. And I've written down like year by year accounts. So the deliberate famine in Ukraine in the early 30s killed three million people. Then Stalin's great terror, which was persecuting people that were opposing his system, 700,000 people were killed. In Poland, between 1939 and 1941, which is after they were occupied by the Germans, 200,000 people were killed. And primarily these were the elite. The Germans wanted to eliminate the thought leaders and the intellectuals. Between 1941 and 1945, during the German occupation that now extended even into Russian territory, four million people were killed and a lot of them through starvation. 5.4 million Jews were gassed in occupied territories. And what this book reveals as a matter of fact that the Germans policy was to primarily persecute and gas and starve in their newly occupied territories rather than in the original German territories. Yeah, that was surprising to me too that German Jews were able to leave for the most part. They were such a small percentage of the Jewish people that were killed throughout those years. Yeah, I think about 90% of the Jews that were killed in these 13, 14 years were actually outside of Germany and outside of Western Europe. They're primarily in Eastern Europe and Poland was sort of the country that had the largest Jewish population. So back to my question, how relevant is this in today's world and what we're going through? And I can't stop relating it to politics and our current US politics and world politics. And in the book, the author Timothy Snyder says that the two systems, Hitler's and Stalin's had a few things in common. One was that they both opposed liberalism and democracy and that's fairly obvious. But what really caught my attention is where he says the word party in both systems seemed to be inverted rather than being defined as a group among others competing for power according to a set or accepted rules. It actually, the party became the group that made the rules. And here we are now in a two-party system in US where we see probably the biggest divide ever between the two. But can you relate this to US politics as well? Or what do you think? Yeah, like you just said, we have these two parties that are kind of making up the rules and changing the way we do things based on what their priorities are or their goals are. And yeah, and then there's still what's going on in Ukraine and like, I feel like Putin and Stalin are starting to look really similar. Yes, yes, exactly. That's how I felt. And as I was reading the book, I could see this and this and that and it's like, oh my God, history repeats itself. And have we not learned from the first time around and how can we let anything like this happen again? We can't let it happen. How they did learn from the first time around and they're taking notes. Right. Yes, yeah, they didn't learn the right things, I guess. So did you, I mean, what were the most shocking parts other than the massive number of people that were killed, executed, damaged and so on? Did anything else get your attention? Any special quote? Anything else really? Well, the part I mentioned about how Hitler was so adamant about purifying and getting rid of the Jewish race altogether, but he had to keep conquering other places to do that, because there weren't enough in Germany that it was such, I think I read like a quarter of 1% were Jewish Germans, so he had to keep moving and taking over other places to find people to kill, which is just crazy. And then for Ukraine and just their fertile land, they just always got the short end of the stick. And I think when Germany occupied Ukraine, eventually it was sad and shocking that the Ukrainian people almost accepted it because they had already been through so much and having the Soviet rule wasn't great for them. So they just kind of, they didn't know yet, I guess, how bad it could be or how bad it was going to be. So they just kind of, they just weren't as afraid or maybe they just thought, well, it can't get worse than what we have now. And that was sad. They're very resilient people, I think. Definitely. I mean, you could see it again nowadays, how resilient they are. And the author mentions this utopia that both Stalin and Hitler had. Hitler thought that he would conquer the Soviets in 12 weeks, which was unrealistic. And meanwhile, Hitler also thought that he would colonize Eastern Europe in 12 weeks and that didn't happen. And it kind of rang the bell with me. It was Putin also thought that this, you know, invasion of the Ukraine is gonna go really fast and be very effective. But in fact, I think the Ukrainians kind of got a preview of this back in 2014. And this time they said, we're not gonna let you do it. This is not gonna happen again. And I feel like with social media and with media in general and just the widespread information that we have now, they have so much more support. And like you said, all of this stuff, all of this information was behind the iron curtain until the 90s. And that can't happen anymore. There's not gonna be this decades where we don't know what happened. We're finding out what happens minutes later. So it's a little harder to get away with the same types of atrocities, I think, because you can't hide it. Yes, that's right. Back in the day, information was not flowing as easily as it is now. And it was much easier, I mean, it was easier to censor it. Today though, we're dealing with a different kind of challenge and that is the manipulation of the information and new technology where, you know... Yeah. And just because we know about something doesn't mean we can stop it. Right. With the other part that kind of got me thinking is I always try to look at the information I get from books like this and bring it into current events or locally. And, you know, back to this idea of famine and, you know, how many people died because of famine. You know, it also made me think and here we are in the middle of the Pacific and Ireland with actually limited land that can be used for agriculture. And we're not dealing with famine, obviously, but I think we're dealing with severe challenges when it comes to feeding ourselves from our own land. Yeah, I mean, our shelves are empty right now at the grocery store because we have so many extra people on the island right now. So yeah, I think about it all the time. My daughter did a project at school last year about shortages on islands and we had to go around and take pictures of all the empty shelves. Then it's definitely concerning. We always talk about how we should be farming and gardening and growing our own food. Right, and, you know, it looks like, yeah, there's plenty of places to do it. We do have challenges, you know, topography of the land. We have the challenge of water, not enough water and we're dealing with global warming and that's going to be even less water. So that's, so while I was reading this book which is, I have to let the viewers know it's very well-written. It's very informational. It's hard-touching because it actually turns the numbers into people. There's so many stories of so many people that were affected by these events in the blood lands. I was trying to think of, or some of the stories reminding me of other fiction books because we've been, it seems like it's easier to reach the masses with fiction than with non-fiction. And did this remind you or point you toward the end of the book? Yeah, I think it did. I think it did. I think it did. I think it did. I think it did. Did this remind you or point you towards any fiction books that you think are connected to this topic? There was a story in the book about, I think they were, I don't remember if they were Romanian or Belarusian. I forget. There were sisters that like carved a message for their mom in the side of a church before they were killed. And I thought of them and I thought of just about every other Holocaust book because you can't help but compare the visuals of these girls leaving a message for their mom knowing they're never going to see her again and she'll probably never see this message. And just, I mean, I've read a lot of the same books that you have, probably the Nightingale sisters, Surviving World War II in France. There's the book. Yeah, no. Great one. The Nightingale actually, you know, before reading this book by Timothy Snyder, I think I read it a couple of years ago. Anyhow, one of the images that really stuck with me is when the main character, you know, she's trying to, is craving for a meal with flavor. Obviously they had no food. And she is saying, oh, how much I wish I had an onion. And, you know, she didn't say I wish I had, you know, a chicken. I wish I had chocolate. Chocolate. How much I wish I had an onion. And, you know, it always comes to mind to me when we have to prepare for some sort of natural disaster. It's like, probably be good to have an onion in this, you know, even if it's perishable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, so it seems to me there are more books about the Holocaust than there are about all these stories of famine and starvation. Yeah. And, but I recently read one that I strongly recommend to you and our viewers. I don't know if you read it. It's City of Thieves by David Benioff. And it's basically the story takes place in what was then called Beningrad when the Germans were trying to take over the city. And what it's, I mean, again, it's terrible. There's terrible events, but somehow the author manages to create a wonderful story. And it ends on a, not joyful, but more optimistic note. So if you come across it again, it's called City of Thieves. And it's by David Benioff. And it's, it's a good book to read. But for our viewers, I also want to point out that Timothy Snyder also wrote a book more recently called On Tyranny. So that's probably an interesting one as well. Pretty serious book again. And there's another book that it's recommended that is recommended in the, by Timothy Snyder in his book. Another historian, Hannah Arendt. And the book is Origins of Totalitarianism. So that's something to consider as well. Well, that's, those are the books that I could think of. So before we wrap it up, because we only have a couple of minutes left, do you have any thoughts? Any last thoughts, last ideas? I don't know. I just, I thought it was so fascinating that it wasn't about a regime or a country or a dictator. It was about an area. And I've never read anything like that before that just really like specified or, or, you know, it was about the history of this area in this timeframe. And I thought that was really fascinating. So just for historians out there or for people interested in history, that was a really neat take on it too. Like it was about a place and not, you know, egos or governments or anything, just, just where these people were. That was really neat. And the, I should say that the books, the book has a lot of maps. So it definitely, they help kind of figure out where you're at. Yeah. Thank goodness. Yeah. So absolutely. A good book for people that are interested in the history of the area and anybody that wants to know more about what happened then again, most of the information was not made available. Because, you know, the, all these former communist countries where with the Russian influence, it was just not good PR to say how many people were killed by the Russians. So again, a good book and I, I definitely recommend it as well. Now, for the next show, we're going to stay on theme. And we're going to read a book by a contemporary Russian author. Her name is I might be butchering her name, Yuzel Yakina, and the name of the book is Zuleika and it takes place in the 1930s. And it's the story of a woman from Kazakhstan that ends up in the Gulag in Siberia. I've read the book in Romanian. So it tells you if it got to be translated in Romanian, it's got to be a good one. And, but the book is available in English on Amazon. And it's going to, so viewers get ready, read the book and join us for the next episode of World of Books, where we're going to talk about it. Until then, Ali, thank you very much for joining me. And for taking the time and for reading with me and for our viewers. Read it all. Read as much as you can. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.