Hidden Stories

Antanas Sileika and I must have been reading Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin at about the same time and for more or less the same reasons. It is a formidable work of history that deals with the deliberate mass murder of civilians in the territory that covers eastern Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics—the “Bloodlands” of Snyder’s title, the borderlands of Sileika’s novel Underground. It is an area where about 14 million people were killed by a variety of methods, including starvation, shooting, beatings, torture and freezing to death on the way to labour camps in Poland or the gulag. Contrary to the remembered image of the Germans’ planned, mechanized genocide of the Jews, most of the killing in the East took place at close quarters: human beings killing other, defenceless, often naked, human beings, without horror or even regret. This is the setting of Sileika’s novel, Underground.

It takes place in Lithuania...