ANATOMY OF A GENOCIDE: 1001 INTERVIEWS AUTHOR OMAR BARTOV

This is your 2001 Stories host, John Haggadorn. Something new is coming your way, so set your podcast dials to today's history minute everywhere good podcasts are found. Early every morning we'll offer a fun, upbeat look at why today is special, usually honoring a holiday or observance and telling one quick and often quirky story about this day in history and why today is special. A story that you can enjoy with your morning coffee. We do all of this in just a few short minutes. Our goal to lend you a friendly morning voice, a reason to celebrate your day, maybe an excuse to buy a card for someone or have a special dinner. Why am I doing this? I sort of lost track of time the past few years and I realized that my goal should be to make every day a special day. There's always something to be grateful for or to celebrate, so instead of tying a string around my finger as a reminder, I thought I'd put my podcast energies to work and create today's history minute. You can subscribe now to today's history minute. That's today's without the apostrophe. Today's history minute, wherever good podcasts are found, and if it hasn't reached yours yet, you can go to our website todayshistoryminute.com. Thank you. And we hope you enjoy our new show. In his brand new book, Anatomy of a Genocide, historian Omar Bartoff shows that ethnic cleansing doesn't occur as it's so often portrayed in popular history with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leadership and the unleashing of military might. It begins in peace, slowly, and often unnoticed as a culmination of pen-up slights and grudges and indignities. Two decades of research into what actually happened at a little town called Bhuchach is what's contained in this book Anatomy of a Genocide, published by Simon in Shuster.com just released this month January 2018. Omar Bartoff is the John P. Berkel undistinguished professor of European history at Brown University in his author of several well-respected scholarly works on the Holocaust and Genocide, including Germany's War and the Holocaust, disputed histories, and erased vanishing traces of Jewish Galicia in present-day Ukraine. He's written for the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, and the New York Times book review he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Omar, welcome to 1,000 One Heroes, legends, histories, and mysteries podcast. I'd like you to start by telling us a little bit about your background and what inspired you to write Anatomy of a Genocide. Sure, my background is I was born and raised in Israel. I studied in Israel and Britain, and I've been in the United States now since 1989, so for a long time. I began my initial career. I wrote on crimes of the German Army on the Eastern Front in World War II, on connections between World War I and World War II, between war and genocide, on representations of war and genocide and film and museums and so forth, and about 20 years ago, I started increasing and interested in the question of genocide on the local level. The main question that I had originally was really what is it that happens in genocide when the perpetrators encounter the victims? There was a sort of convention that in order to perpetrate genocide, one needs to dehumanize the victim, to both think of the victim as entirely different, and to create a mechanism that distances the perpetrator from the victim, and it's true that in the Holocaust, about half of the victims were murdered in extermination camps, which were geared to create this kind of detachment between the killers and the killed. But the other half were actually, as it turns out, killed more or less at home. The perpetrators came there and killed them and didn't take them anywhere else, and in the process they encountered them. So I wanted to see what that actually looked like when you think about genocide on the local level, and that led me to try and choose a place that I could study, choosing that place that involved really, the choice was to go to Eastern Europe because that's where most of the Jews lived, and that's where most of the Jews were murdered. And in choosing a town, I was influenced by two factors, one was the town that I knew about because I'd read about it in the works of fiction by Schmoylusef Agnorn, a well-known Hebrew language author received in a Nobel Prize in literature in 1966, and I studied him in high school. And the other was that my mother also came from that same town. And so in 1995, I decided to interview my mother about her father. And once she told me about her childhood, I thought, well, maybe that's the town that I'm going to study. And I spent the next 20 years studying the town, I didn't think it would take me that long, obviously, about 50,000 people had produced a very large amount of documents in many countries and many languages, so it took a long time to research, process, and then write this book. One part of what I wanted to study was to see what happens when the perpetrators come to a small town and decide to kill part of the population. But once you actually start studying a town like that, then you realize exactly what you were saying, that it wasn't just an encounter between the perpetrators and the victims, there were many other people living there. And those people living there had their own stories to tell, had their own agendas, had their own histories. And so once the perpetrators come to the town, they are triggering a whole set of other issues that existed before they came and in some cases remain after they leave at least in people's memories. And so it became a much more complicated study, not only of the relationship between perpetrators and killers, but also between perpetrators and victims, but also between the different groups that were there and what all of them were doing while this was happening. Their story is so tragic, the killers could have been neighbors. In many cases were, in this war torn area, people just trying to survive. It seems like all morality is gone, and it just becomes an act of survival. And you would turn in your neighbor if you thought it meant you could survive another day. It's one of the sad things you went into such depth on this and there's so many personal stories and personal tragedies, it's just amazing. Yes, thank you. In part, it's obviously a story of survival because when you live under such circumstances of daily genocide, then your first thought is to survive and most people, not all, but many people will do everything they can to save their own skin or their families. But it's also complicated by the fact that we tend to think of genocide, massacre, as cases in which you have three categories of people. You have the perpetrators, you have the victims, you have the bystanders, and the bystanders are usually the largest number of people, and they look on, so to speak. But if you take a town like Butchurch and many hundreds of other towns in that area, similarly, you realize that no one was simply looking on. No one was simply a bystander. Everyone has to take some position. Some people will shelter those who are being hunted down and some people will denounce them. Some people will shelter them and then denounce them. Some people involved in killing will also help some people. Some people will do it, will help for altruistic reasons, others will do it because you promised the money or real estate or some or sex or something that they can profit from while risking themselves. And so it becomes a much more ambivalent story of not Not simply of the bad guys doing the killing and the innocent being killed, but of the whole range of ethical positions, of people shifting from one position to another, of everyone being involved in this social upheaval and extremely bloody event over a relatively short period of time. For the sake of our listeners, could you describe where Bhuchach is located in Europe and also set the stage for us as to how it started to grow as a community with different ethnic divisions and change over a period of centuries? Yes, so Bhuchach is located in what is today Western Ukraine. If you look at the map and you see the long range of the Kapetian mountains, it is on the eastern side of the Kapetian mountains, it is north of Romania and east of Poland, which is now Western Ukraine. The biggest city in that area is now as Viv or Viu, and it used to be called Lemburg, and that is the capital of that region. Now the town itself has existed since the late, as far as we know, since the late 13th century, it was first in a state that then became a town. And from the 1500s on, it has really three populations. One are the poles, and the poles rule that area, it becomes part of the Polish kingdom at that time in the 16th century. There are people called later Ukrainians, they were not known by that name of the time, they were peasants, and they become serfs, but they later become Ukrainians, and they're Jews. And those people live side by side, the town is mostly populated by Jews and poles, and in the countryside, most of the peasants are Ukrainians with the third number of poles as well. And when distinguishes between them largely by religion, so the pose of Roman Catholic, the Ukrainian, the Greek Catholic in that area, and the Jews are Jews. And they're also recognizable by the different occupations with the Ukrainians being mostly peasants, the poles being either peasants or townspeople, and the Jews being mostly in trades, in leasing estates, producing as artisans, distilling alcohol, and so forth. Now, this balance between these three populations lasts for a long time. It's not harmonious in any sense that we would think of, this is not a multicultural society, and people know that they are different from each other, but it's not necessarily violent. And from 1700 on, after the 16th century, which is the century of war and a great deal of killing, but from the 1700s on, it's a relatively peaceful area. In 1772, this area is annexed by the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire, and it remains under Austrian rule until the end of World War I, so for a long period of time. So what happens in the latter part of the 19th century is the beginning of nationalism. And what nationalism does in this area, as in many others, it starts identifying groups as entirely separate from each other. And it creates an argument, a discourse, a discourse between groups over who belongs to that place and who doesn't. In that story, the Ukrainians claim that they are the indigenous population of that area that belongs to them and that the Poles has colonized them and are ruling over them with the help of their Jewish lackeys as they present them. The Poles claim that they came and brought culture and civilization to an area that was barbarous and savage, and therefore they are the rightful rulers of that area. And the Jews, although they don't claim to have any claims on the land itself, they do say that they are those who brought commerce and other commercial activity to city life and to commercial life in that area. Now, until World War I, this is still more of a conversation, there is no violence, but the discourse becomes increasingly violent without any violence being perpetrated. That changes in the war and we think of World War I, really, most of us as what happened on the Western Front, all quiet on the Western Front and all these trenches for four years. But the war on the Eastern Front was extremely violent. And much of it occurs in such areas as the Buta, which is occupied twice by the Russian Army. There are many massacres there, there are vast programs, there are populations that are being uprooted and moved from one place to another. And the war does not end in 1918 there, as it does in the West, because once the Austrian Empire is defeated or collapses, really, the pose in the Ukrainians starts fighting of that area with each other. And while by 1921 this becomes part of a new independent Poland, the Ukrainian population, which is the majority of that area, never comes to terms with that, and the mass autonomy or independence. And so during the 1920s and 30s, there is ongoing conflict between the Ukrainian majority of that area and the Polish rule. There are increasing numbers of terrorist activities, there is an underground, the Ukrainian underground, which becomes increasingly influenced by fascism. And the Polish regime also by the mid 1930s becomes increasingly anti-Semitic. So by the time World War II begins, there is already a history of great violence and antagonism between the three groups and mutual accusations between one group and another. Finally, between 1939 and 1941, this area is occupied by the Red Army, by the Soviet regime. That's part of the agreement between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the model of Rydentrop Pact, which divided Poland between the two countries. And the Soviet rule for two years, and do what the Soviets do, they first of all ruin the economy. And secondly, they start deporting large numbers of people who they see as their enemies, first pose, then Jews, and then Ukrainians. And they decapitate these groups and take away their elites. And so that too creates a sense of victimhood among all these groups and these groups tend to think of their neighbors as collaborating with the enemy and themselves as being the victims, the main victims, which is not unlike many other groups, of course. So by the time the Germans march in, in early July 1941, there is already a great deal of animosity antagonism and a legacy of violence between these groups. And the Germans know very well how to mobilize these antagonisms to serve their own purposes. And their purpose in that area is really to eradicate the Jewish population. And not very interested in the conflict between the pose of the Ukrainians. They're interested in killing the Jews. And they do that very efficiently and quite quickly. We see genocide going on today in a lot of different forms and a lot of different countries. One of my questions for you is how do we recognize this kind of hate today? How do we condition ourselves as humans to deal with it and make sure we're not taking part in it? And what tools do we have necessary as united countries and united nations to prevent this? Well, this is a very complicated question, of course, because at the end of World War II, when it was discovered, what kind of genocide had occurred throughout Europe, the argument was that this would be prevented and it would never happen again. And all these monuments were built that said never again. And, of course, genocide has happened again and again since 1945. There is a genocide convention which the UN agreed on in 1948 and was even joined eventually 40 years later by the United States. But that convention really depends on states acting. And it's very hard to make states act when it does serve their own perceived national interests. The simplest way of recognizing that a prejudional side of a situation exists, which doesn't mean that it would happen, but is a warning sign, is when one group in a certain country is defined by others as being different, being less than human, deserving less rights, being dangerous to the rest. As you begin speaking about one group, whether it's a religious group, an ethnic group, a racial group, you start defining it as completely different from others, then you're We're ready taking it out. out of the realm of humanity, that you're putting it elsewhere. And that makes it increasingly possible to think of eliminating that group, maybe pushing it out, maybe not allowing it in, and mainly under certain conditions, killing it. And many more than general sides have started as ethnic cleansing, as trying to push a group when didn't want out of your own country. Even the Holocaust arguably begins as ethnic cleansing, and only then becomes organized genocide. But I would say that beyond that, and in connection to what you said before, it is true and has been argued by many that in World War II and before, there were powers that were keen on a great deal of destruction. And Bolshevik Russia was one of them, Nazi Germany was another. And there has been an argument that what happened in Eastern Europe was a clash between these two titanic powers and the millions of people who died as a result of this clash by these two dictatorship. And that's true, but it's only partly true, I would say, because if we want to understand what happened on the ground, we have to see how the people on the ground were interacting with each other. And if we think of all of them, simply as victims of these groups that we don't really understand what happened there, if you look at a place like Bucharge, there were, at the time of the genocide there, there were between 20 and 30 Germans in a nearby town. There were the security police, and none of them were Germans, some of them were Germans from Germany and some were ethnic Germans from Poland or Czechoslovakia. These 20 to 30 people were responsible for the murder of 60,000 in about a year. Now, obviously 20 or 30 men cannot kill 60,000 people spread over a large agricultural area with not very good communication on their own. They need a great deal of help. And what you find is that as I said before, the Germans were mobilizing sentiments that existed within the population in order to carry out their own plans. And this means that you cannot think of all the people living there simply being victims of that system, but also benefiting from it. The Germans who were there had a pretty good time. Much of the time they had three booths, they had very good housing, they could get to back as much as they like. There was a lot of three sex for them. And every once in a while, they would go and kill a few thousand people. But many other people profited from the general side too. Because when people in your neighborhood are killed, taken away in shot, then real estate becomes available. All kinds of tools become available. You might want to take the apartment upstairs because now the people live there were your neighbors, and you didn't have that much against them, gone. And so it is a social process in which everyone participates. There was a whole other bout of violence in that area, and not only in that area, but importantly there, that after most of the Jews are murdered, the Polish, the Ukrainian underground, which as I said, had become already infused with fascism and racism in the 1930s, sets out to ethnically cleanse the area of post. The vast massacres going on there, which the Germans are not interested in at all, it's not part of their politics. But by the end of this process, an area that had had a Polish population for 400 years is meant to pose and becomes purely Ukrainian. And so what I'm saying is that quite a part of my identifying something such as a demonization, you have to know much better what are the mechanisms in that society that can create violence, and you have to work against them through education, through understanding, through a process of recognizing the difference is not necessarily a bad thing. The difference is something that, as you said, adds to a society that was a more prosperous area before the Poles were ethnically cleansed and the Jews were murdered than it is now. To add to that question, I would ask, what are the necessary ingredients needed for genocide? You obviously need, first of all, for genocide, unlike local massacres, one needs general legalization or state that is intent on eliminating, eradicating a certain group as such. This is also the UN resolution that finds it in these terms. So there must be an intention to eliminate a certain group as a group. And then you need the logistics in order to carry it out. And often it would be very helpful to have an ideology that is already in place that defines those people to your own population as people who need to be gotten rid of. But if you do that in an area that is not your own country, and the Germans, by the way, killed very few Jews in Germany. They killed most of the Jews in other countries, not in their own country. Then you need also sympathy among the population in which you are, whether it's your population or another population, and sympathy for removing that group. So you need prejudice, not only ideology, but a wider sense of prejudice against a certain group. And when you have all of this in place, then you will have sufficient collaborators in doing that. The victims will have no place to go to because the environment would not generally help them. And if you have the organizational capacity, then all you need to do is to concentrate those people in certain places and to kill them. And what we find so interestingly, but also disturbingly, in the case that I studied is that yes, about half of the people were loaded on trains and sent to extermination camps where they were gasped. The other half were killed right where they lived. They were killed in synagogues and cemeteries in a nearby forest. And they're still there. They're actually still there in mass graves surrounding these towns and villages. And so that kind of killing is then one on one. And it was, to me, quite extraordinary to see how easy it was to have people carry out those killings. There was no resistance by any of the perpetrators to carrying it out. In fact, there were people volunteered to do that. We're waiting around to be given the right to shoot and not only to drive or to block the roads. How this process has its own dynamic of producing willing killers who later on have no sense of conscience regarding what they did, who returned back to their homes to their jobs. As if nothing had happened, bringing with them a few trophies from this, these areas had helped destroy. How many of the locals there in Bouchard, all these years later, had a sense of guilt about what they did and how many just buried it not wanting to face that and maybe change the story or believed it in a way that they wanted to remember. Yeah, that's also interesting, complicated story. So first of all, when has to understand that many of the people who lived in this town after the war did not live there during the war, because much of the population of Bouchard during the war before the Jews were killed and the Poles were ethnically cleansed with Jews and Poles. People who moved into the town came either from the villagers or from the countryside or were themselves Ukrainians who had been exchanged for Poles and came from Poland into these areas. Many came from the Kapethe Mountains. So many of the people hadn't actually experienced that event, but there were some of them and largely people did not speak about it. One reason they didn't speak about it was that until 1991, this area was under Soviet rule. The Soviets were not interested in talking about the extermination of the Jews. The Soviet line was, and you find it in all Soviet documentation and historiography, then was the 7,000 innocent civilians were killed in that area by the fascists. So they never mentioned Jews. They never mentioned local collaboration. Their narrative was that the bad Germans came and there were maybe a few bad apples in town, but Soviet justice had taken care of them. And the rest of the population had bravely resisted the fascists and forced for Stalin. So this was the, so people didn't have to talk about it. But after 1991, what happens in this area is the really discovery of Ukrainian nationalism. And in the story of Ukrainian nationalism, precisely the people who were working with the Germans, the people who helped the Germans kill the Jews, and then ethically cleanse the Poles, were the national heroes, because they're thought for an independent Ukraine. And so they certainly don't want to talk about their participation in this. So as a narrative, it's not an narrative that anybody would support. What you need to find is individuals. And I did speak with a number or had some interviews that were done for me with some elderly women, particularly in Bucharge, who remembered quite well the Jewish neighbors, who remembered sharing, you know, going to school together, playing together, doing homework together before the war, and remembered the horrible killing that took place there, described it in very stark terms, but they didn't talk about local collaboration, and they usually would say that we posed in Ukrainians alike. I did all we could to save our Jewish neighbors. And that was not the case. There were people who helped. They clearly were, but the majority were not involved in helping. The majority tried to either survive or to profit from the massacres. What were pogroms and what were roundups? Is that the same thing, or two different words to describe, two different events? Well, pogrom is usually, it's a Russian word, and it's usually meant to describe what would be popular attacks on Jews, which occurred from the 1880s on in Tsarist Russia, and then there was some, quite a number, doing World War One, which were carried out mostly by cause-acunites invading this area, such as Bucharge, this area of militia, and sometimes they were incited by their own commanders, and sometimes they were just doing it on their own. But they were not the difference between that, and the roundups is that the roundups are part of a concerted, well-planned effort to murder all the Jews. And pogroms were never about that. Even at the height during 1919, 1917 to 1919, when there's a great deal of anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine, and at least 50,000 Jews are murdered in those events, there is no concerted plan to murder all the Jews. The roundups are simply getting all the Jews together so as to lead them to be killed. So it's a government policy carried out by uniformed policemen, soldiers, and socialists, and one needs to distinguish, I think, between the two. Is NATO today preventing genocide, or what are they doing with regard to genocide? Is it basically matter of turning their heads, or is it a matter of them not being able to interfere with other countries? What exactly is going on? Well, the one time that NATO got involved in preventing what might have become genocide, but had already been ethnic cleansing, was incosible. As you remember, there was NATO attacked Serbia, with aerial attacks on Belgrade, that was without security council resolution. And some people still argue today that because of that, it was not legal, it was intervention by military organization without the involvement of the United Nations. Otherwise, NATO has not been involved. You have to understand the irony of this, is that all the signatories of the genocide convention, including the United States, once you've signed it, it means that you have to do something to prevent genocide. If you identify the genocide is about to happen or is happening, it is incumbent upon the signature of a state to do something about it. And you can take two examples of what happened. One is Rwanda. In Rwanda, it was clearly genocide, right? It was the fastest genocide in history. Eight hundred thousand, six, and quite a number of Hutu were murdered in ten weeks, mostly with machetes and fire. The United States did not want to intervene because it didn't think that it served its national interest. And so it refused to call it a genocide. It says genocide or acts. It's all kinds of things that are not exactly genocide. This was at the Bill Clinton at the time, as you remember. And another time, in Darfur, in Western Sudan, the United States identified and clearly stated that that was genocide, but didn't do anything about it. Turned out that you can actually say it's happening and not do anything about it, and who is going to do anything to you if you're the United States. And so in that sense, it takes much more than a UN resolution. It takes a combination of public opinion that presses its own government and sends by these governments that it is in their own national interest to intervene in stopping or preventing genocide. And that doesn't happen very often. The genocide is that that was stopped. If you take them around the genocide, it was stopped by military intervention by a two-tie army that came from Uganda. That in Cambodia was stopped by Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. It was stopped by military intervention. And these groups that intervened, and of course, the Holocaust ended because the Red Army got to the places where the Germans were killing Jews. But the Red Army did not fight Nazi Germany to stop the genocide of the Jews. And the Vietnamese did not invade Cambodia because they were against the genocide there. They had their own self-procise national interest. Oh, exactly. And the Red Army and communism benefited by weakening those countries, picking up a lot of satellite republics and keeping the communism alive and well, what, through 1991? Yeah, it is true. I mean, I would say, though, you have to consider, you know, I studied the Eastern France for many years. And what we, in the West, often forget that the German army would never have been defeated without the huge sacrifice of the Red Army, which cost between 20, 30 million people, at least 7 million soldiers. In no country would have been willing to pay this kind of price. It was only the Soviet Union and the Germans of Stalin, who obviously was a butcher. But the very much 80% of the losses of the German armed forces were on the Eastern front. I always use this example between June and December 1944, that is once the Allies actually land in Europe, right, on D-Day. So between June and December of that year, the Germans lose approximately 20,000 men per month on the Western front. At that same time, they're losing approximately 200,000 men every month on the Eastern front. So we know what crushes it is. The Red Army now, once they take over this territory, they establish the dictatorships there, and indeed rule there until 1991, 1989, depending on which area we're talking about. You had it not been for Hitler deciding to take on Russia. We would have ended up having to drop atomic bombs on Germany, and that would have ended that war on that front, I believe. Yeah, it's possible, you know, I mean, this is speculation, and the stories are as good as speculation as anybody else. General Montgomery used to say after the war, he taught it Sandhurst, the military college in Britain, and the story about him was that he would start every lecture to cadets by saying the first thing you should know is never invade Russia. And Hitler invaded Russia. Now, I actually think that had Nazi Germany not invaded the Soviet Union, we might have still had a Nazi Germany alive and kicking today, because there was no particular interest in the United States, certainly, to fight a war against Nazi Germany. It was not so easy to get America's to do that. Need a turn hopper for that. Go ahead. I spoke with some people recently who believe that Nazi Germany does exist today, but they're handling financial matters for certain international concerns. Yeah, that's possible. Yeah. We got into that when I did Operation Market Garden. Yes. And I'm sure Montgomery wasn't too eager to talk about that idea in his classes that he was offering that you just mentioned. Yes, that's right. That's great. We've got genocide occurring now as you're well aware in North Africa, especially in Nigerian surrounding countries, done by insurgent groups. And that's a, would you call that a religious nature Muslim. killing Christians. Are there other motives beyond that? It's not for territory or for wealth, it's basically just, I believe, Muslim killing Christians. And in Burma, we've got the Rohingya being wiped out basically by a Burmese junta or acting government. So they've just. Yeah, if we identified as genocide and certainly ethnic cleansing, it's what's happening in Myanmar in Burma, definitely. In Nigeria, I think it's a bit more complicated. I'm certainly not an expert on that. I don't think it's just religion, as I don't think it is in Burma either. Religion on its own is never a sufficient cause for this kind of violence. It can play a role. It can play a role, obviously, also in the Holocaust and in, you know, the kind of violence that I described between housing and credience. But it's never sufficient cause. There has to be much more than that. I do want to say what makes your book so good is that you've taken it from a different angle than other Holocaust writers and researchers who come in from the top. You've taken a town that's undergone all kinds of hell and you've studied it, researched it deeply. And when I read this story, it's almost a day-to-day occurrence that's extremely accurate. That's well glued together by the various testimony and interviews and research that you've done. It's a masterful piece. I would recommend that all of our listeners get this book. I know it's available to Amazon. It's called Anatomy of a Genocide. It's by Omar Bartoff, B-A-R-T-O-V. I'd like you to let people know how they can get your book and get in touch with you. Well, the book is, as you've said, available on Amazon and I think of various other outlets published by Simon and Schuster. I can be easily contacted through Brown University. There's a webpage for me there with the History Department. So, anyone who has any questions, I'd be glad to respond. Well, I think that the last thing you said is actually very important to me. That is that if you look at genocide from the inside out, if you look at what happens on the ground, you get a very different idea of what it is. And if you do that, then it makes you, I would say, more troubled by the environment that you might be living in today. Because we find that people have been neighbors for a very long time and have gone to school together when the workplace together were at one point, through a certain process that takes some years, could at a certain point turn against each other. And once they do that, if the police is gone or is collaborating with the killing, if the law enforcement is not there, then what used to be a community of coexistence and of security becomes a community of massacre and genocide. And I think that in my book, what I try to do is to look at it through the eyes of the people who are there, not to make judgments of them, but to see how they understood what they were living through. And if you read that book in that way with the kind of empathy that I try to have for all the people involved, then you can understand better how thin the crust is that all of us are living on and how important it is to preserve it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks to all of you listeners for your support of our show here at 1,000 One Heroes, Legends, Histories and Mysteries. When you read this book, you'll get a true sense of the hell that so many in Europe have suffered just in the past 100 years, the hell that began with soft bigotry and ended in years of outright murder. A lesson in history that we all need to take seriously. The book, Anatomy of a Genocide by Omar Bartov, published by Simon & Schuster. We'll leave the link in the show notes for you. Meanwhile, this is your host and storyteller, John Haginorn, and this is our story. you , you (upbeat music)