A very serious aside on war: skip it if you’re feeling light and airy

The writing of an important chapter of World War II history has yet to be completed. The NYT notes this in today’s story on how deeply preoccupied we’ve been with analyzing battles between German and the Allied forces on the Western Front, and how little attention has been given to the battles on the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht suffered as much as 80% of its total war casualties. It is in the course of battles with the Red Army that the Germans experienced their most stunning defeat.

Apart from the military issues, there are other harrowing aspects of war between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Any Pole will tell you that a key preoccupation for Poland has been why Stalin chose to let Warsaw fall to the final destructive onslaught of the Germans during the Warsaw Uprising. Given the inevitable and devastating outcome, many Poles believe that the Uprising wasn’t heroic, it was suicidal – an unnecessary loss of life. Speculation rather than fact fuels the debate as to the reasons behind Stalin’s passive role in the ultimate leveling of the city.

And there are the issues surrounding Red Army tactics: the retaliatory rape of 2 million German women, the pilferage and assault on Polish homes and families that lay in the path of the Russians – all this is shrouded in mystery, noted only in the limited stories told by survivors.

Why this empty slate? Because few historians have had access to Russian military documents from this period. Now, as the doors are opening for academic research, there still aren’t enough scholars, nor is there money to scrutinize the voluminous materials. The writer Eva Hoffman said recently that it is the obligation of the second generation to record and preserve, from its position of both distance and proximity to the events of war, the memory of those events. A burden? Maybe, but a critical one. Starting each day fresh, without the imprint of a history carefully drawn, seems to me at the very least heartless, and at worst, dangerously irresponsible.