Robert Harris's Fatherland

Just finished Robert Harris's book, Fatherland. It's a great thriller. He re-writes history and postulates a world where Hitler won the war. In it people don't know anything about the millions of Jews who were gassed. After all, the truth of the Holocaust was uncovered by the Allies. The German people were led to believe that the Jewish population had been moved out to the wilds of the conquered East. In a world where Hitler wins the war - it's Stalin's Holodomor that becomes the ugly Holocaust.

But Stalin was on the victor's side and so he got to manipulate the truth. Thus, there are no monuments remembering the famine of 1932,  or the lost children of the kulaks. There's no guilt in the former Soviet Union about the past. No collective sense of responsibility.  Still, truth has a way of finding its way out.  Just takes a long time.

1 comment:

Stacy Nyikos said...

So many human tragedy stories. And they still go on today. When will we learn?

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