Tony Judt

I just started reading the book - Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 which I had been referred to by New York Review of Books. The book is very well written. It has the fluidity of a fictional work and yet the objectivity of a journalistic text. The author, a well-known historian, does acknowledge his own perspective in the description of events since 1945.

I am learning things that I had no idea about and I am so overwhelmed that I am compelled to taking notes. Here are a couple of facts that I think are interesting to note.

1. The book talks about the thirty-year war. The scale and extent of this war and the consequent deprivation of the involved states make it seem no less devastating than the First world war.

2. Stalin is know to have ordered shooting of 23,000 Polish officers in Katyn. He later blamed it on Germans.

3. The civilian losses exceed military losses significantly except for UK and Germany.

4. The war casualties were massive but there was a lot of damage also caused by lack of supply of food. Greece to my knowledge was not a major participant in the war. But it did seem to have suffered a lot of lateral damage. A third of its population for example suffered from trachoma in 1945. Pollution through industrial had shot up the infant mortality. In the British zone of Germany the number was about 25%.

5. Hitler's Nazi pogrom needs to be understood in the backdrop of the Reich. Nazis had expelled 750,000 Polish farmers from West to East in order for the ethnic Germans to return to the volksdeutsche. The soviet union moved more civilians during the war. The trend was reversed after the war, with Stalin having kept his promise he made in 1941 - that he would return Prussia back to Slavs where it belonged.

One reason why the author thinks the movement of people was at much larger scale is the failure of League of Nations. They governments were careful not to rely on changing boundaries (like they did in WWI) but instead depend on moving peoples.