Историческая проза — цитаты из книг — стр. 5

Отец тогда не знал, как выглядит атака из засады, и уж тем более не представлял, зачем для этого брать с собой грабли в количестве четырёх штук.

Another specialty of Unit 731 was to infect large numbers of rats with deadly bacteria and drop them over Chinese cities together with thousands of fleas in porcelain bombs suspended from little parachutes.

Not only did Ishii, and his able staff of Unit 731, including a microbiologist named Kitano Masaji, experiment with bubonic plague, cholera, and other diseases, but thousands of prisoners were used for anything that took the doctors’ fancy. The human guinea pigs, mostly Chinese, but also Russians and even a few American…

The Hungarian writer Sándor Márai was in Budapest when the Hungarian “antifascists” appointed by the Soviet Red Army came to power in 1945. This was not yet a communist regime. Stalin decided that a gradual takeover would be better; he didn’t wish to startle the Western Allies too soon. Elections were held in November in…

De Gaulle mended France in the same way Japan was “mended,” or Italy, or Belgium, or even Germany: by keeping damage to the prewar elites to a minimum. He could not afford to polarize his nation further. The expertise of businessmen, financiers, lawyers, professors, doctors, and bureaucrats was needed. They had the right…

And de Gaulle made a deal with the French communists. If they wanted permission for their leader Maurice Thorez, who had deserted the French army in 1939 and fled to Moscow, to come home without being tried for his treachery, they had to agree to disband their armed fighters. Many weapons were still carefully hidden in…

For the state to regain the monopoly of force, the first thing de Gaulle had to do was disarm the resistance. Since the maquisards, the underground fighters in the French resistance, had gained their weapons at great risk during the war, while de Gaulle had lived in the safety of the British capital, this was a delicate…

Chinese civilians dreaded the arrival of Nationalists in their villages and towns, for the troops tended to behave more like brigands than soldiers, looting property, robbing food, raping women, and shanghaiing peasants into the army. Puppet troops and warlord armies were not much better. The Communists, who had about a…

The key to the Chinese civil war really lay in Manchuria. The first to take this heartland of heavy industries and mines, set up and run by the Japanese, would be in an almost unassailable position. As we have seen, the Soviets got there first and stripped all the industrial and financial assets that could be transported…

To restore legitimacy to a ravaged country, it helps to have a symbolic figure to rally around. This can be a respected monarch, a resistance hero, even a foreign general who can plausibly pose as a savior. General Douglas MacArthur’s style may have been a little too histrionic, even egomaniacal, for some tastes, but he…

The fact is, Jewish survivors were an embarrassment. They did not fit the heroic narrative that was being hastily constructed in the wreckage of the war, in the Netherlands, in France, or indeed in any country where people sought to forget inconvenient, painful truths about the past. Men and women who had survived the…

The surest way to repay humiliation with humiliation is to rape the women, in public, in front of the men, who are helpless to do anything about it.

During the so-called wild purge (l’épuration sauvage) in France, which took place in 1944, before the war was even over, about six thousand people were killed as German collaborators and traitors by various armed bands with links to the resistance, often communists. Double that number of women were paraded around,…

Behind the bland rhetoric of Potsdam were sentiments expressed in far more brutal terms. Millions of Germans had already been driven from their homes in the Sudetenland, Silesia, and East Prussia. Just before the Potsdam Conference, Stalin had reassured the Czechoslovak prime minister Fierlinger: “We won’t disturb you.…

The fact that many Russians had worn German uniforms under duress, that the women and children, brought to Germany as slaves or lowly workers, had never worn German uniforms, or that a large number of Cossacks had never even been citizens of the Soviet Union and thus were not legally obliged to be “returned” at all,…

Vengeance is one way of covering up a guilty conscience for not standing up when it was dangerous. This too appears to be a universal phenomenon, of all times.

— Аммачи, когда я заканчиваю книгу и поднимаю голову, оказывается, что прошло всего четыре дня. Но за это время я проживаю жизнь трех поколений и узнаю о мире и о себе больше, чем за год в школе. Ахав, Квикег, Офелия и другие персонажи, они умирают на страницах книг, чтобы мы в нашей жизни могли жить лучше.

Мариамма, иногда, когда тебе очень-очень страшно, когда ты чувствуешь себя совсем беспомощной, это и есть момент, когда Господь указывает тебе путь.