Black Earth(146)

Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books edited and published essays where I worked out certain ideas that feature in the middle chapters. Timothy Garton Ash, one of my doctoral supervisors, discussed structure and conclusions with me. Tina Bennett, now of WME and my agent, befriended me as we began graduate school together at Oxford. She was the first reader of this manuscript and its first editor; her discernment and her enthusiasm were hugely appreciated. Tim Duggan, my editor and publisher at Crown, took up the project with tremendous skill, energy, and devotion. Thomas Gebremedhin handled the manuscript superbly, and I appreciate the attention paid to this work by the staff at Crown. I also thank Detlef Felken of C. H. Beck for conversations between Bloodlands and Black Earth, Stuart Williams and J?rg Hensgen of Bodley Head for their reading of the full text, and Pierre Nora of Gallimard for his thoughts about tone and conclusion. My friends and colleagues James Berger, Johann Chapoutot, Fabian Drixler, Rick Duke, Susan Ferber, Janos Kovács, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Eric Lohr, Wendy Lower, Istvan Rév, Berel Rodal, Joanne Rudof, Stuart Rachels, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Anton Weiss-Wendt were generous enough to comment upon full drafts. David Brandenberger and Joshua Goodman each commented on a chapter of this book. Andrea B?ltke and Andy Morris read the text with exemplary professional care. Jonathan Wyss of Beehive Mapping added the indispensable visual element.

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The arguments that appear here are also the fruit of the learning that comes from listening to students. I taught draft chapters to a special seminar at the London School of Economics in 2013–2014, and am grateful to students there as well as to my colleague Arne Westad for wonderful discussions. I learned a good deal from my students in History 987 at Yale University in 2012; a late draft of this manuscript was read by the students of History 683 in 2015. Graduate students at Yale have been my intellectual companions. While I was thinking about this book, Yedida Kanfer finished a doctoral dissertation on religion and society in ?ód?, and while I was writing, Jadwiga Biskupska completed one on the German occupation of Warsaw. David Petruccelli has helped me to think about transnational history and Katherine Younger about church and state. Jermaine Lloyd kept me thinking about race as a category of transnational history. Sara Silverstein, whose dissertation bears on the relationship between rights and the state, provided thoughtful comments. I have also learned from Rachel White, whose subject is French Christians and political resistance. Aner Barzilai and Stefan Eich intervened with useful suggestions.

I am grateful to Naomi Lamoreaux, the superb chair of Yale’s history department, as well as to Ian Shapiro and the MacMillan Center and Jim Levinsohn of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Adam Tooze led two discussions of early chapters at Yale. I have been very fortunate to spend my career at an institution so devoted to the humanities in general and to history in particular, and where Jewish, German, and Slavic history are broadly represented in teaching, research, and library collections. I cannot stress enough the importance of the open stacks of the Sterling Library, the support of librarians at Yale, and the special resource that is the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. New Haven has been my home over the years because my old and true friends Daniel Markovits, Sarah Bilston, Stefanie Markovits, and Ben Polak live there.

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The arguments have also benefited from public presentation. I was fortunate to have been able to discuss this book at a René Girard Lecture at Stanford University, at a Philippe Roman Lecture at the LSE, at a 1939 Club Lecture at UCLA, and at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, at Sheffield University, the University of Edinburgh, St. Andrew’s University, Birkbeck College London, University College London, the University of Oxford, Cambridge University, City College of New York, Princeton University, Georgetown University, Emory University, the Institute for Social Research at Hamburg, the Sorbonne, the Conrad Festival in Cracow, and at an Arendt Prize seminar at Bremen. Leon Wieseltier had an idea that took me to Ukraine at an important moment.

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The arguments here rest upon the broad learning of countless colleagues in history and other disciplines, and in some measure upon my own research. In the early sections on Hitler’s thought I returned to the primary sources, above all Hitler’s own writings and speeches, in order to elucidate certain basic logics as clearly as possible. The intellectual debts that enabled such an attempt are too broad to be recorded, either here or in the Notes, but include my studies with Mary Gluck and Leszek Ko?akowski as well as long encounters with Isaiah Berlin and Andrzej Walicki. The sections of chapters 2 and 3 on interwar Polish policy, and the sections of chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12 that discuss individual rescue, rest heavily on archival materials. The documentary evidence of rescue is largely in Russian, Polish, and Yiddish; I have been at pains these last few years to read as much of this material as possible. Generalizations, of course, are quite difficult. I have done my best to make sure that the claims about rescue are based on what Jews themselves said, with a preference for languages they knew at the time, and for dates as close as possible to the events recalled. As with many aspects of the history of the Holocaust, there remain large untapped reserves of primary materials in these east European languages. Jeffrey Burds, Wójtek Rappak, and Zbyszek Stańczyk generously shared archival documents that are cited here. Tess Davidson, Karolina Jesień, Andrew Koss, Julie Leighton, Olga Litvin, and Adam Zadro?ny all helped me to find sources. The responsibility for this text is mine.