Laura Eilers

“Someone has farted; no one knows just who, but this isn’t like a normal adult place where everybody coolly pretends a fart didn’t happen; here everybody has to make their little comment.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

“Trouble didn’t just come in threes: it gathered passengers as it went, and crashed nastily into bystanders.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Forge of Heaven

“American and British forces reached none of the bloodlands and saw none of the major killing sites. It is not just that American and British forces saw none of the places where the Soviets killed, leaving the crimes of Stalinism to be documented after the end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives. It is that they never saw the places where the Germans killed, meaning that understanding of Hitler’s crimes has taken just as long. The photographs and films of German concentration camps were the closest that most westerners ever came to perceiving the mass killing. Horrible though these images were, they were only hints at the history of the bloodlands. They are not the whole story; sadly, they are not even an introduction.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin