What's that you're reading? (2)

After a run of novels, I'm reading some non-fiction again. Currently, I'm reading Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes. This book is hard to read, and it's got some pictures in it that you want to look away from.

It's about the Nazi Einsatzgruppen ('special task forces'). These were specially established units -- made up of SS personnel, personnel from various police organisations, and others -- that followed the German army into Poland and Russia and cleared the occupied areas of 'undesirables' -- intellectuals, communists, political activists, and (especially) Jews.

The Einsatzgruppen killed over 1.5 million men, women and children, mainly in mass shootings, between 1941 and 1943.

I've read a lot of books about the Nazi Holocaust, but every time I read about it again it's as if it's the first time. It's as if your memory blanks out the details, as if they're too unbelievable to be retained. So the horrors come to you afresh, and you sometimes do have to look away, or put the book down for a while. There's too much horror and unbelievable inhumanity in these pages.

To read the book, and to look at the pictures, feels somehow intrusive and obscene, as if the act of reading about these actions trivialises them. I haven't put that very well: beyond the horror of the material itself, there's something disturbing about the act of reading about these people's suffering, and in trying to think what it must have been like, and trying to put yourself into the minds of the perpetrators; it feels as if you are looking at something that shouldn't be seen, that you have no right to see. It's as if being an observer somehow makes you ashamed, as if thinking about these things and trying to imagine/understand them is presumptuous, inappropriate. And yet it has to be read -- you can't look away.