Soviet dead
20 million
German dead
3 million
Subtotal (for the Eastern Front)
23 million
Endlösung
5.1 million
Total
26.6 million, given that 1.5 million Jews have also been counted as Soviet dead (“Soviet citizens murdered by the German-Fascist invaders,” as the extraordinary monument in Kiev so discreetly puts it)
Now for the math. The conflict with the USSR lasted from June 22, 1941, at 03:00, until, officially, May 8, 1945, at 23:01, which adds up to 3 years, 10 months, 16 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute, or, rounding off, to 46.5 months, 202.42 weeks, 1,417 days, 34,004 hours, or 2,040,241 minutes (counting the extra minute). For the program known as the “Final Solution,” we’ll use the same dates; before that, nothing had yet been decided or systematized, so Jewish casualties were for the most part incidental. Now let’s average out one set of figures with the other: for the Germans, this gives us 64,516 dead per month, or 14,821 dead per week, or 2,117 dead per day, or 88 dead per hour, or 1.47 dead per minute, on average for every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year for 3 years, 10 months, 16 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute. For the Jews, including the Soviet ones, we have about 109,677 dead per month, which is 25,195 dead per week, 3,599 dead per day, 150 dead per hour, or 2.5 dead per minute, over the same period. Finally, on the Soviet side, that gives us some 430,108 dead per month, 98,804 dead per week, 14,114 dead per day, 588 dead per hour, or 9.8 dead per minute, for the same period. Thus for the overall total in my field of activities we have an average of 572,043 dead per month, 131,410 dead per week, 18,772 dead per day, 782 dead per hour, and 13.04 dead per minute, every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year of the given period, which is, as you will recall, 3 years, 10 months, 16 days, 20 hours, and 1 minute. Let those who smirked at that admittedly somewhat pedantic extra minute please consider that it is worth an additional 13.04 dead, on average, and imagine, if they can, 13 people from their circle of friends killed in 1 minute. You can also calculate the length of time it takes to generate a fresh corpse: this gives us on average a dead German every 40.8 seconds, a dead Jew every 24 seconds, and a dead Bolshevik (Soviet Jews included) every 6.12 seconds, or on the whole a new dead body on average every 4.6 seconds, for the entirety of said period. You are now in a position to carry out, based on these numbers, concrete exercises of imagination. For example, stopwatch in hand, count off 1 death, 2 deaths, 3 deaths, etc., every 4.6 seconds (or every 6.12 seconds, or every 24 seconds, or every 40.8 seconds, if you have a marked preference), while trying to picture them lying there in front of you, those 1, 2, 3 dead. You’ll find it’s a good meditation exercise. Or take some more recent catastrophe that affected you strongly, and compare the two. For instance, if you are an American, consider your little Vietnam adventure, which so traumatized your fellow citizens. You lost 50,000 troops there in 10 years: that’s the equivalent of a little less than 3 days and 2 hours’ worth of dead on the Eastern Front, or of some 13 days, 21 hours, and 25 minutes’ worth of dead Jews. I obviously am not including the Vietnamese dead; since you never speak of them, in your books or TV programs, they must not count for much to you. Yet you killed 40 of them for every single one of your own dead, a fine effort even compared to our own, and one that certainly speaks for the value of technical progress. I’ll stop there, we could go on forever; I invite you to continue on your own, until the ground opens up beneath your feet. As for me, no need: for a long time already the thought of death has been closer to me than the vein in my neck, as that beautiful phrase in the Koran says. If you ever managed to make me cry, my tears would sear your face.
The conclusion of all this, if you’ll allow me one more quotation, the last one, I promise, is, as Sophocles said so welclass="underline" Not to have been born is best. Schopenhauer has written roughly the same thing: It would be better if there were nothing. Since there is more pain than pleasure on Earth, every satisfaction is only transitory, creating new desires and new distresses, and the agony of the devoured animal is always far greater than the pleasure of the devourer. Yes, I know, that makes two quotations, but it’s the same idea: in truth, we live in the worst of all possible worlds. Now of course the war is over. And we’ve learned our lesson, it won’t happen again. But are you quite sure we’ve learned our lesson? Are you certain it won’t happen again? Are you even certain the war is over? In a manner of speaking, the war is never over, or else it will be over only when the last child born on the last day of the war is safely dead and buried, and even then it will live on, in his or her children and then in theirs, till finally the legacy will be diluted, the memories will fray and the pain will fade away, even though by then everyone will probably have forgotten, and all this will have long gone to gather dust with all the other old stories, those not even fit to frighten children, much less the children of the dead or of those who wish they were, dead I mean.