The historian Omer Bartov, reviewing “Bloodlands†in the journal Slavic Review, put it bluntly, saying the book was “permeated by a persistent pro-Polish bias,†and failed to account for “the willing collaboration of thousands of locals who proclaimed the cleansing of their land of Jews as a national duty.â€
Some early reviews of “Black Earth†have lodged similar criticisms. Writing in The National Interest, the historian David A. Bell said that Mr. Snyder highlights efforts by non-Communist Poles to resist the Nazis and help Jews while arguing — with little empirical support, in Mr. Bell’s view — that those East Europeans who helped carry out the Holocaust were disproportionately former Communist collaborators looking to shift blame for their own behavior onto Jews.
The result, Mr. Bell said in an interview, is a “strange imbalance.â€
“There’s a very strong focus again and again on former Communists and on the actions of the former Soviet Union, which were obviously absolutely horrific,†Mr. Bell said. “But what ultimately saved those Jews who survived was the Red Army.â€
When asked about the role of popular anti-Semitism, Mr. Snyder, who is a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, reiterated his belief that animus toward Jews, while widespread in prewar Poland and elsewhere, simply does not explain how the Nazi genocide started, the forms it took or who participated.
“There are arguments in this book that are clearly not my effort to win a popularity contest,†he added dryly.
And he sharply challenged the charge of bias. If anything, he said, scholarship of the Holocaust has been too dominated by German-language sources and by an “ethnic shorthand,†itself traceable to the Nazis, that obscures more than it illuminates.
“Our shorthand for talking about this stuff has been Poles and Jews, Germans and Jews,†Mr. Snyder said. “I think it should be states, institutions, micro-level sociological explanations, economic behavior.â€
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