Reading ‘the kindly ones’ is not an easy task. It is not entertaining. It almost feels like a task. Littel did everything to make us feel the scale of what took place. Traditionally, the technique to make you understand what’s happening on a large scale is dramatizing. Because the human mind is not suited to understand large numbers at all, the technique is to make you understand one case. If you want to raise money for charity it is not wise to explain that ‘millions have hunger’. It works better to take the example of one family that we can relate to. Littel does it the other way round. He takes away as much as possible the drama, and tells about the procedures, the bureaucratic side. He writes in large chapters, with little subparts. It goes on and on. You need to have a strong stomach. The brilliant thing is that he makes things even harder to cope with, by forcing us to look from the side of the ‘bad side’. You are forced to understand the killing from the perspective of a task, with all of its practical problems. It is amazing to dive into this side of the Shoah. One of those being the moral problems that many soldiers had to cope with. But, as Littell describes, if they did not enjoy the killing, they enjoyed the sacrifice of fulfilling a task, of being obedient.
I haven’t been reading more than one tenth of his novel. And I already got more idea of the scale than ever before. I just read a scene about the killing of 150 jews, written as a sort of ‘practical problem’. And than upscale this to the actual numbers. I can’t promise that I will read all off the nearly 1000 pages.