Yale professor discusses book on Holocaust

Timothy D. Snyder, Housum Professor of History at Yale University, lectured about his newest book "Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin" at West Virginia University Thursday.

"Bloodlands" is a history of the Holocaust during World War II, which involved the mass genocide of approximately six million Jews.

"Roughly half of all the casualties of the war, including the Pacific theatre, were in Eastern Europe," he said.

Snyder said 14 million people were deliberately murdered by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin in Eastern Europe, and he believes his book will help historians understand the full scope of the Holocaust.

"If what I have said is true, that such a horrible amount of death happened in one spot, why hasn't it been noted as such? I think this says a lot about history and how we practice it," he said.

Snyder said his technique strays from national histories of Nazi Germany and socialist Russia and focuses on the history of the territory, using the perspective of the victims in his book.

"Each national narrative has a way of deciding who were the heroes, the perpetrators and the victims. However, national histories are bad at answering questions like why these things happen," he said.

Although the Holocaust was a tragic event, Snyder said revisiting Holocaust history helps people understand why it occurred.

"It's very easy to care so much about something that you take it out of history and put it behind glass," he said. "However, when you take something out of history it becomes impossible to explain. When it's impossible to explain, it's impossible to understand. My question is how 14 million people were killed. This book takes colloquial answers and tries to get history right."

Snyder said his focus as a historian has always been on the individual. His objective is to humanize the statistics.

"These systems of history turn people into numbers. I try to make sure that these are not just numbers – they are people, different from the person before and after. What we have to do is turn these numbers into people," he said.

Snyder is the author of several books on Eastern European history and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. Snyder said the importance of historical evaluation is in its ability to create debate.

"History is a conversation. It works because we communicate, and the conversation is about individuals," he said.

The lecture was presented by the WVU Department of History, The Slavic and Eastern European Studies Program and the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.