on a more personal note

After reading Sam's post, which I believe Nate also responded to, I was reminded of something that happened in my own life. This is a story that has always stuck with me because of the way it made me feel at the time, which was a mixture of angry and confused.

In the 7th grade, I had to chose an elective course to take in the first semester of 8th grade. Among the options was a class that focused solely on the holocaust. Having been strangely interested in this topic since I was a child, having read books such as Number the Stars and The Devil's Arithmetic in elementary school, I decided that I wanted to take this class. Of course, we had to get our parents to sign off on our choices, and when I showed my father my list, asking him to sign, having never faced any difficulty getting my father to sign anything before (I could have gotten him to sign a test I had failed if I had wanted to), he said that he refused to let me take a class on the holocaust. Horrified, I asked him why not. His response was simple. He said that it was unfair of them to devote a whole class on the holocaust when more Russians and Eastern Europeans died under Stalin than had died under Hitler. My father is a very compassionate and also a very relaxed human being. I rarely hear him be so stern about such matters, and he is obviously of the school that considers Hitler to have been a complete monster. My father, however, is also 100% Latvian/Russian (mostly Latvian). He is the son of two people who escaped near death under Stalin's regime and who had family members and friends who were not quite as fortunate as them. He thinks that those deaths deserve as much attention as the deaths that are so much more often thought of with the holocaust. He believes that Stalin was just as much a monster as Hitler, as do many of the people who experienced Stalin's regime or who have close relatives who had. I write about this to tell you, Sam, and all those who wonder why Hitler is always thought of as the worst villain, which i also to believe to be the case (that most people consider Hitler more evil than Stalin), that there are people who do not, but those are mostly people who have a personal connection with it. Stalin treated the Latvians like dogs, as my father would say, just as Hitler treated the Jews as such. I hope one day that those losses are as recognized as the losses that occurred because of Hitler. The scary thing is, is that the losses of "my people" may not be over. As we saw this past summer with the whole Georgia conflict, Russia may not be done with it's desire to expand and control those nations it once had during the reign of the USSR, and people like my grandparents and father, are very concerned about the fate of their home countries if Russia once again decides to reenter them.