Survivors Past & Present – Nine Lives of Waldemar Lotnik & A Known Soldier (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #13c)

When General William T. Sherman said, “War is hell, you cannot refine it”. He was speaking truth born out of experience. Attempts to regulate war through international agreements look good on paper, but on a field of battle they are rendered meaningless. Wars take on a life of their own, they have their own rules or a lack thereof. The battlefield is a different country, one that kills, wounds, or traumatizes most of its citizens. Those who manage to survive are scarred for life. This was the experience of Waldemar Lotnik. It was also the experience of a friend of mine. Both men experienced just how terrible war can be. This is something they could never forget, even when they want to.

Fighting On – Polish Partisans during World War II

History & Therapy – Memory Wars
I read Waldemar Lotnik’s searing memoir Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands only once, but I knew that one day I would return to it again. I am sure that day will come, though it hasn’t yet. My copy ended up as a gift to a friend who was trying to deal with his own combat experiences after fighting several tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Lotnik, he fought in wars that would not be won. Survival was his greatest victory. That was small consolation for a man who had seen his closest comrades either die on the field of battle, succumb to drug use, homelessness, or imprisonment. On random nights he would wake up screaming. The war was still not over for him, I doubt it ever will be. This was something that both he and Lotnik had in common. Judging by Lotnik’s incredible recall, war is one thing that never dies. It lives on in those who lived to fight another day. Their battle continues long after the war ends. The enemy lurks somewhere deep in the subconscious, waiting silently to resurface with a vengeance.

Gifting my friend Lotnik’s book might be construed as insensitive and tone def. My reasoning was that I felt Nine Lives might encourage him to write or tell his story as a way of working through his own trauma. Lotnik did the same with astonishing results. Nine Lives was co-authored by Julian Preece a professor of German at the University of Swansea in Wales. Together Lotnik and Preece created a synthesis of history and therapy. While reading the book I could not help but wonder how many others are living their final years with memories of the borderlands conflict still swirling inside of them. If these memories are not documented, they will die forever. The survivor’s story has a life expectancy unless it is recorded for the sake of posterity.

Survival Mentality – Polish partisans during World War II

Escape Route – Duplicitous Directions
For decades Lotnik kept memories of the conflict to himself. There were a couple of reasons for this. The first is because his actions were less than savory by the standards of civilized society. He literally shot his way to safety. Lotnik took part in actions that depending upon one’s perspective could be considered survival strategies or war crimes. In a conflict where it was kill or be killed, Lotnik did plenty of killing. He is not a hero or a villain. Like the war within the war in which he fought, Lotnik is an ambiguous figure.

The second reason Lotnik kept quiet is more obvious, the trauma must have been too difficult to discuss. When a man still has much of his life in front of him, it is easier to look forward rather than back. And why would Lotnik want to look back. He barely survived the war. The aftermath was not much better. Poland’s eastern lands became part of the Soviet Union. Poland as it came to exist after the war was under a virtual occupation which would continue for decades to come. Lotnik had an extremely complicated past, one that did not lend itself to trust from the new ruling authorities.

After the Red Army “liberated” the territory where Lotnik fought and hid out during the war, he proceeded to lie his way into the KGB. This had nothing to do with ideology, like everything else with Lotnik during and immediately after the war, his behavior was predicated upon survival. If the authorities had known more about Lotnik, then he would have surely been branded an enemy of the state. His recent past would have supplied the material for arrest, imprisonment, and likely execution. Lotnik’s duplicity pointed in one direction, to the west. This was where he escaped from the clutches of communism and persecution for his wartime past. His memories would be enough of a torment.

Foreign affairs – American soldiers in Iraq War

Foreign Affairs – Silence Is Deadly
Like many combat veterans late in life, Lotnik was finally able to revisit and recover his wartime memories. Notice I did not say recover from them. I doubt anyone who experiences the amount of trauma Lotnik suffered is ever able to completely recover. The friend who I gave my copy of Nine Lives had a similar experience. The wars in which he fought came to define him. He kept volunteering to go back until the military would no longer allow it. Just because an organization says the war is over for you, does not mean that it ends. After being discharged, another war began within himself. He never really returned from the battlefield. It was easier to continue the fight on some forlorn front, than trying to survive in polite society. The “real world” of work, commutes, and interaction with well-meaning people was just as foreign to him as the lands in which he had fought.

What could I do to help? I tried to listen and learn. He would talk about his experiences and sometimes even what happened during combat. Unfortunately, talking about a war and fighting one are two very different things. I was at a loss on how to respond. Knowing that he was good with words and storytelling, I encouraged him to write about his experiences. I gave him my copy of Nine Lives as the ultimate example of how to convey wartime experiences. I never heard whether he read it or not. I doubt he did. Everyone’s experiences with war are different. And yet they are similar. I assume the violence, and the fight for survival in Nine Lives would be familiar to my friend, all too familiar. The book may have been too much for him. It might also have been too little. When it comes to the intensity of combat, there is no substitute for experience. That is one of many things my friend and Waldemar Lotnik have in common. They are part of a very rare breed, soldiers and survivalists who sufferer mostly in silence. Nine Lives is the world in which a large part of them will live forever. That is something we they will never forget, and neither should we.

Click here for: Lightning Strikes Twice – Statistical Curios in Hungarian History (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #14)

Nightmarishly Gripping – Nine Lives of Waldemar Lotnik (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #13b)

There are certain books that will stay with me forever. I knew Waldemar Lotnik’s memoir Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands would be one of them after reading just a few chapters. While the book terrified me, it also sucked me into a world of unimaginable tension and violence. The difference between a good book and a great book is that a good book is enjoyable, a great book is unforgettable. I remember reading Nine Lives and thinking there is no book quite like this. It was not a pleasant experience, but neither was war in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands. In fact, it was awful beyond belief. I would sum up the book in two words, “nightmarishly gripping.” Though I wanted to put the book down, I could not turn away from it.

I knew Lotnik’s story was important on multiple levels. One was that it shined an intense light on a part of the Eastern Front during World War II that is barely known in the west. Wars within wars happen are usually ignored. That was not the case with Nine Lives. The second was that Lotnik was exposing the true nature of war. The book was unforgiving, just like the war it portrayed. I found Lotnik’s story both appalling and addictive. I could not stop reading because I wanted to know how he managed to survive. Though I knew he did, I kept asking myself how. He was courageous and murderous, duplicitous and honorable. Lotnik was a soldier and a human being of extreme complexity.

Final Result – Mass grave of Poles killed in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands conflict (Credit: Grzegorz Naumowicz)

Survival Skills – Winners & Losers  
Nine Lives literally exploded off the page, the way the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands exploded during four ferocious years of war. The Eastern Front was a place where anyone could be killed, at any time. This was not only the case on the ever-shifting frontlines where the Wehrmacht and Red Army clashed, it was just as true behind the lines. Subterfuge, sadism, and survival informed life in the occupied territories. The rampant lawlessness in these areas offered an opportunity for the settling of old scores.

Imagine a venn diagram of the Eastern Front where every ethnic and ideological group that is caught in an overlapping succession of circles ends up a perpetrator or a victim and sometimes both. Either they are killed or wounded, both physically and psychologically. There is also another circle among the concentric rings that scarcely gets noticed. This circle contains survivors. They suffered and still managed to emerge with their lives. Reading Nine Lives made me realize that the usual way victory has been defined on the Eastern Front is too narrow. It does not provide a true assessment of the winners and losers. The winner is always given as the Soviet Union and the loser as Nazi Germany. This is true only up to a certain point because it ignores all the other losers.

These include:
* Poles who lost their eastern lands and the estimated 100,000 who were killed in the borderlands conflict.
* Ukrainians, who despite ending up with what is now the western part of their country paid a heavy price in the process. Ukrainian nationalists were just as likely to be killed by the Red Army as the Poles were by Ukrainian nationalists.
* Jews who lost everything.
* Ethnic Germans who lived in small enclaves across the region. They either fled or suffered unspeakable atrocities, the kind their ethnic kin had committed by the millions while murdering their way across the farther reaches of Eastern Europe. *Soviet prisoners of war who were confined behind barbed wire and left to either starve or succumb to disease. If ever the adage that “in war there are no winners” needed confirmation, the Eastern Front provided it.   

Memory War – Remembrance Monument to Poles killed in the Polish Ethnic Borderlands conflict (Credit: Glaube)

Common Cause – Against The Odds
Hate was the essence of the world in which Lotnik found himself. This was the byproduct of a process that two of the world’s most deadly states cultivated. The Germans, and later the Soviets, would stir up ethnic and ideological enmities when it served their interests. This was just as tactical as blitzkriegs and envelopments. And in some cases, even more deadly. It was a means that brought about the end for millions. Everyone from the youngest to the oldest was caught up in ths cauldron of violence. Like Lotnik, they were all forced to choose sides. Ukrainian nationalists sided with the Germans. Partisans might be Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, or communists.

The Poles were largely on their own. They could make common cause at times with other partisan groups, but not always. This was a war fought in the shadows of the Eastern Front. Amid bogs and marshes, forests, and meadows. Places where one wrong move could mean a slit throat or a bullet in the back of the head. Making the right move could mean food, shelter, and the ability to fight another day. Partisans did everything they could to survive. The odds were stacked against them, but the harsh reality was that the odds were against everyone on the Eastern Front.   

Traces of Memory – Ribbon and marker on tree where Poles killed in the Borderrlands conflict (Credit: Glaube)

Edge of a Knife – Line of Control
Anyone reading the Nine Lives who thinks it is bleak or morbid must understand that this was the reality of that war. And to a large extent, it is the reality of every war. Sure, the Eastern Front was among the most brutal war zones in human history, but what war isn’t brutal. When your life is at stake, the potential loss of it is the most brutal blow imaginable. Extremity in such extreme circumstances is difficult to fathom, if not impossible for those who have not faced death or worse on a field of battle. This is the essence of war. It has no limits.

How can a line be drawn between life and death if the line has been erased? In a world where might made right, it also made millions of murders and murderers. Lotnik was one of the latter, but he did it for self-preservation. The instinct for survival can make people do strange things for themselves and to others. Lotnik was caught up in a war over which he had no control. His line of control extended only as far as the barrel of a gun, the blade of a knife, and his survival skills. Lotnik had Nine Lives and maybe more. That makes his story unforgettable.

Click here for: Survivors Past & Present – Nine Lives of Waldemar Lotnik & A Known Soldier (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #13c)

The War Within The War – Nine Lives on the Eastern Front (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #13a)

The way most people understand war is defined by a lack of experience with it. Since most Americans, – myself included – have no experience with either combat or living in a war zone, then it follows that we can never truly understand the true nature of war. That never stopped anyone from trying. I assume that all the books, news reports, movies, and documentaries about war are a rough approximation at best on the true nature of war. They provide only what readers and viewers can stomach. Anything beyond that is considered too gratuitous and vulgar, not to mention violent. War is something that only those who have first-hand experience with it can comprehend. Armchair warriors study war using logic. The problem is that war is beyond logical comprehension. The experience is something truly unimaginable unless you have lived it. In the absence of experience, those of us who sidestepped war either by chance or choice must rely on the best sources available. Thus, we are resigned to trying to experience war vicariously through literature, film, and museums.

Getting to the Truth – Nine Lives by Waldemar Lotnik

Harsh Reality – This Must Be What War Is Really Like
I have read numerous books about many different wars and only one has ever seriously disturbed me to the point that I said to myself, “this must be what war is really like.” The book was Nine Lives: Ethnic Conflict in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderlands by Waldemar Lotnik (with Julian Preece). It is a searing account of Lotnik’s experiences fighting as a partisan during the Second World War. Poles and Ukrainians clashed in a war within a war on the Eastern Front. They were not only fighting against each other, but they also had the Germans and Soviets to contend with as well. Lotnik was Polish so the enemy was three sided. Ukrainian nationalists were the clear and present danger, followed by the Germans, and finally the Soviets. Their “liberation” by the Red Army in 1944-45 was nothing of the sort for either the Poles or Ukrainians. The Poles would lose their eastern lands to the Soviet Union. This region became overwhelmingly Ukrainian, but not as part of an independent Ukraine. That spawned yet another conflict that continued after the war as Ukrainian nationalists carried out on an insurgency against the Soviets.  The situation was as complex as it was violent.

Lotnik’s story is filled with horrifying tales of extreme brutality. These are not told for effect. Instead, they demonstrate the daily reality of trying to survive in one of the most lethal places on earth. The combat was extremely vicious, the violence pitiless, the battles and skirmishes unending. No one was ever to be completely trusted. Life was cheap and capricious. One of the most disturbing aspects of the book was not that so many people were brutally killed, but that anyone managed to survive. Death could come at any moment and often did. A person could take every precaution possible, arm themselves, and still be on the receiving end of a fatal blow. It is a wonder that Lotnik did not go insane. There were points in the book where it was obvious Lotnik had lost all self-control. Killing became an impulse, just like eating, drinking, and sleeping. In the darkest irony, to stay alive meant killing with extreme prejudice.

Sobering Memory – Mass grave of Poles in western Ukraine (Credit: Vlacheslav Galievskyi)

Survival Strategies – A Game of Chance
While reading Nine Lives, I was also reading myself. This was one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. It was one of the main reasons I felt that it came closest to relating the reality of war. I often put myself in Lotnik’s place. At other times, I put myself in the place of victims. How would I have reacted? Would I have survived? The latter question was part of a fool’s game I often play when trying to imagine what it would be like to fight in a war. I always see myself as a survivor. This is predicated upon a belief that I could control my own destiny. That belief is delusional. War exposes the folly of such a belief. The minute that the bullets and artillery shells start flying, it becomes a game of chance. Control is an illusion.

Luck plays a large role in surviving war. Lotnik was lucky. Many of his fellow partisans were not. Lotnik made some of his own luck, but his survival was informed by luck. Every person yearns for control of their own life, war exposes the limits of that control. There were periods where Lotnik and his fellow partisans fought for days on end. They had no control over when, where, or how the combat would end. Their lives hung in the balance. A lucky few survived. Lotnik was one of them. He was resourceful, cunning, and courageous, but so were many others who were not so lucky. Everyone was either a perpetrator or a victim. Those captured could expect no mercy, while those who survived were rewarded with another life and death struggle the next day. 

War within a warm – Massacred Polish citizens (Credit: Władysława Siemaszków)

Trigger Warning – Looking Down The Barrel
Lotnik was the hunted and the hunter. Survival was situation dependent. As bad as his situation was, it could have been much worse. Jews were the one group in an even more dire situation than Poles throughout the region. They were almost completely exterminated. Lotnik had first-hand knowledge of what the Jews were subjected to. At one point, he was imprisoned at Majdanek concentration camp. Being Polish helped save his life there. This was in stark contrast to the countryside where Polish partisans fought. Imagine a world gone so mad, that a concentration camp becomes safer than the world outside the barbed wire, but only for a while.

The world where Lotnik found himself stranded was savage. He was not alone, but he was in the minority. And in a war zone as racialized as the Eastern Front, minorities were most often marked for murder. This was war at its worst, but I have now come to realize that Nine Lives shows the essence of war. Reading it can be traumatic. The only trigger warning Lotnik knew was the one that sent a bullet down the barrel of a gun. That is an experience many have had on the battlefield, including one of my friends whom I gave a copy of Lotnik’s book too.

Click here for: Nightmarishly Gripping – Nine Lives of Waldemar Lotnik (A Trip Around My Bookshelf #13b) 

Fantasy Non-Fiction – Hitler In His Wolf’s Lair Bunker (Northern Poland & Berlin #41c)

When I was in junior high school, my friends and I would sometimes sit around discussing the headlines we saw on the cover of Weekly World News, a tabloid sold in local supermarkets. There was nothing quite like waiting in the checkout line to purchase a Mars Bar and availing yourself of fantastical tabloid tales. If you ever believed in aliens, then the Weekly World News was for you. Even if you did not believe in aliens, the Weekly World News had something for you. Elvis was still alive. Bigfoot roamed the land while you slept. The Garden of Eden had been located. Outlandish headlines for mostly fictionalized stories were a hallmark of the publication. My all-time favorite stated that Adolf Hitler was hiding out in Carlsbad Caverns. How Hitler got to New Mexico and decided the cave would make a good hiding place was beyond me. Exactly where the Fuhrer might be hiding in a cave that has hundreds of thousands of visitors per year defied the imagination, that is unless you had an overactive imagination. Teenagers always have overactive imaginations. We loved Weekly World News.

A sizable scale – Hitler’s Bunker at the Wolf’s Lair

Perceived & Invisible Enemies – The Fuhrer Fulminates
Little did I know that Weekly World News was onto something with their Hitler tale. While Hitler most certainly was not hiding out in Carlsbad Caverns during the 1980’s – mainly because he had been dead for forty years – he did spend an inordinate amount of time during the last few years of his life living a mostly subterranean existence. Rather than natural caves, he preferred manmade ones. I did not realize just how much time Hitler spent underground until my travel companion and I visited the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze), his headquarters in northern Poland from June 1941 to November 1944. This was Hitler’s home away from home. He spent more time at the Wolf’s Lair than anywhere else during the war. And most of that time was spent in his bunker. This was not because he enjoyed the place, by all accounts he led a gloomy existence. Instead, it was out of military necessity.

Hitler wanted to be as close to the Eastern Front as possible to manage the campaign. The Wehrmacht probably wished he had stayed in Berlin and shown much less interest in strategy since Hitler’s disastrous decisions ensured their defeat. Hitler could not have gotten much closer to the front than the Wolf’s Lair. Prior to the start of Operation Barbarossa, the complex was a mere 50 kilometers from the prewar border with the Soviet Union. This would seem to be a little too close for comfort, but Hitler was well protected. The SS enforced the strictest security. Meanwhile, Hitler spent much of his time confined to his bunker obsessing over the war. The stories are legion of Hitler railing for hours against real and perceived enemies. He would fulminate about the war’s conduct while staff, military leaders and Nazi officials sat through harangues that often went on until the early hours of the morning.

A maddening prospect – Interior of a bunker at the Wolf’s Lair

Graveyard of Nazism – Among The Ruins
Hitler and bunkers are synonymous. This is mainly for two reasons. The first is that he ended his life in the Fuhrerbunker beneath bombed-out Berlin on April 30, 1945. The second is that the German film Downfall brought Hitler’s descent into madness during his final days in the bunker to life. Those who have seen the film, will always have an image of Hitler shaking like a leaf in the concrete encased world where he had imprisoned himself. It is easy to see how his already narrow mind narrowed even further in this suffocatingly claustrophobic world. Hitler’s view of reality became increasingly skewed, sending him spiraling into delusion. This is not news to anyone who is familiar with what went on in the Berlin bunker. What I found surprising while visiting the Wolf’s Lair was that Hitler’s life in the subterranean world started here rather than in Berlin.

Deep in the woods of northern Poland, Hitler’s sinister dreams of German superiority began their demise.  This makes the Wolf’s Lair an unofficial graveyard of Nazism. The ruined bunkers are tombs that come in all shapes and sizes. The Germans did their best to dynamite the bunkers prior to the Red Army’s arrival, but they did not have the time to totally obliterate them. Most of the bunkers are still standing today. They are in various states of ruin, but each of the bunkers was so large that they mostly survived attempts to destroy them. Dilapidated, dank, and reeking of failure, these austere symbols stand silent, but speak volumes about the Third Reich’s collapse. The entire complex existed to perpetuate the greatest military failure in world history. It is hard to imagine just how awful the situation was at the Wolf’s Lair, but we should try.

Graveyard of Nazism – Ruins of a bunker at the Wolf’s Lair

A Contradictory Figure – Pure Evil & Utterly Absurd
Let us imagine for a moment having to spend hours in a damp and humid room while Hitler bared his bad teeth and repulsed a captive audience with his halitosis and uncontrollable flatulence. Standing outside Hitler’s massive bunker at the Wolf’s Lair, it is hard to know what to make of a man who was pure evil and utterly absurd. Something tells me that these two opposite perspectives of Hitler’s conduct at the Wolf’s Lair are mutually compatible. One informing the other. Hitler was undoubtedly a megalomaniac and as such his ego had to be satisfied. Thus, he had the largest bunker.

While Hitler’s persona dominated the proceedings at the Wolf’s Lair, his bunker did not dominate the premises. The entire complex was 2.5 square kilometers, with 80 structures and 4,200 people working there. This was more town than village. The Wolf’s Lair had its own railway line, post office, and cinema. The insufferably vain Herman Goring even had his own tea house. This was basically little Berlin deep in the woods of the wild east. And nothing could be wilder than Hitler sequestered in his ginormous bunker obsessing over Germany’s dwindling prospects of military victory.

Besides what little is left of the building where Hitler was nearly assassinated, his bunker is the most popular site at the Wolf’s Lair. Visitors walk around every side of it, as though they are inspecting it for any sign of the sinister which might remain. I am sure most people are like me and wonder what it must have really been like inside. Judging by everything I have read; it was an experience that even Hitler’s acolytes would never care to repeat. They were stuck in a bunker with a madman whose behavior would put the Weekly World News to shame. Hitler hiding in Carlsbad Caverns is a ridiculous story, but no more absurd than what went on at the Wolf’s Lair.

Coming soon: Dressed To Kill – Plotting To Kill Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair (Northern Poland & Berlin #41d)

Kindred Spirits Between East & West – Travels With Brian (Eastern Europe & Me #20b)

For two kindred spirits who spent so much time together, the European travel preferences of Brian and I could not have been more different. By the time I began traveling in Eastern Europe, it had been over twenty years since he set foot anywhere on the continent. His travels had been mainly to western and southern Europe. For over half of Brian’s life, Eastern Europe was terra incognito due to the Iron Curtain. Brian never made it any farther east than Vienna. His opinion of the Austrian capital was less than stellar. Depending on the conversation, it was either nice or sterile. Not exactly a rousing recommendation. I detected a suspicion of all things Habsburg because it was east of center. For Brian, the Austrians were Germans, and all Germans were to be regarded with skepticism. He generally thought they were fine. He gave them the compliment of being “regular people”. Something to which any self-respecting Brit should aspire.

All that glitters is not gold – Schloss Belvedere in Vienna (Credit: Murdockcrc)

Bombs Away – An Open Wound
Like many of his generation who were born during World War II and grew up in its aftermath, Brian never forgave Germany for the terror that rained down on Britain. I remember watching the World Cup with him and his uneasiness when Germany’s fans began singing “Deutschland Uber Alles.” First there was silence, then he said, “that should not be allowed.” This remark was followed by a longer silence. The room we were in filled with an unspoken tension. His prejudice was understandable considering that his mother had been forced to take him into air raid shelters on several occasions after he was born. He recalled that there were four monuments on his street in Stockport (part of Greater Manchester) marking where German bombs had fallen. Britain may have been on the winning side in the war, but they did come out of it proud and prosperous. Instead, the country was exhausted and impoverished.

Postwar Britain was a tough place, nowhere more so than industrial Stockport. Brian recalled ration books, the public housing where he grew up, and the straitened circumstances of the country during his youth. I am quite sure he held Germany responsible for some of the situation. I realized the depth of his anger one day in 1997. I remember the exact place where we were riding in his car when he spoke with furious intensity after I asked him about Dresden. The city in eastern Germany which the British incinerated in February 1945. He was incensed by anyone who might try to apologize for the firebombing or even worse. “When I was growing up, we called it revenge. Everyone knew that and there was no question about why it was done” I can still recall the burning gaze in his eyes when he made that remark.

In that moment, I understood the visceral anger after World War II toward the Germans, not only by the British, but also Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs and many others who had suffered horribly. This led to ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe being expelled. The wound after fifty years was still open and raw for many. Time does not heal all wounds. It dulls the pain and masks the anger, postponing the outburst to a later date. I recall distinctly how indifferent Brian was when I returned from a trip to Germany and told him about my visit to Dresden. The only time he displayed emotion was when I mentioned seeing a few of the scant ruins left as a memorial. This seemed to satisfy him.

.Towering inferno – Dresden after the firebombing (Credit: Bundesarchiv)

Irreversible Decline – A State of Mind
Brian also showed no sympathy for the destruction of East Prussia in 1945. East Prussia was believed to be the heart of German militarism. He summed it up as “the Red Army sorted out that problem.” This was quite the statement from a man who detested the Soviet Union, which he viewed as a hub of degeneracy and despotism. His opinion of Russia was hardly any better. He did provide one caveat for Russia’s turn toward communism stating that, “No country had tried it before.” In his view, communism was an understandable experiment at the time. The world had no experience with it before the Russian Revolution.

Nevertheless, he had little use for communism, believing the ideology was an abomination. When it came to countries such as China which later tried the experiment for themselves, Brian said they should have known better. He had no use for the apologists and the foolish naivety of the Lincoln Steffens (“I have seen the future and it works”) of the world who deluded themselves in the 1920’s and 1930’s despite copious evidence of Stalinist crimes. He did reserve some sympathy for those intellectual elites such as the French writer Andre Gide who were first seduced by Stalin’s Soviet Union, then had a change of heart and told the devastating truth about it.

Each of the above anecdotes was as close as Brian got to Eastern Europe mentally, physically, and academically. His fields of scholarship were Ancient Greece and Rome, Jacksonian America, and Ancient Chinese history. Very different subjects, but with the commonality of being either on top or on the rise. He did not show any great interest in imperial decline and fall. Decadence and disasters in once great empires might provide a telling anecdote, but they were not among his favorite topics. Perhaps that was a subconscious psychological reaction to the British Empire’s irreversible decline.

Well-traveled – The Times Atlas of the World

End Run – A Matter of Time
Later in life, Eastern Europe was still terra incognito to Brian despite the Iron Curtain’s collapse. He dismissed it as irredeemably backward from the Byzantines to the Bolsheviks. For some reason which I never quite understood, he always tolerated my obsession with the region. His usual withering criticism of any place he found not up to standard was muted. I figure that Brian respected my opinion enough to give a wide berth to my enthusiasm for all things Eastern Europe. When I would call him from abroad, he would mention thumbing through his huge and well-worn Times Atlas of the World, following my travels with his finger. Unfortunately, my travels took me away from him, just as my career had. I would still visit him at least twice a year, but I regret not spending more time with him. Little did I realize that he was slowly approaching the end of his life.

Click here for: Notoriously Crazy – Travels With Brian: The Snoma Finnish Cemetery (Eastern Europe & Me #20c