Probably the last page in the book is the most important to me.One of my main purposes was to show how many people were killed—starved, gassed, shot—in the Bloodlands between 1933 and 1945.But another of my purposes was to reclaim the individuality of each victim from these overwhelming numbers. The book ends by recalling individuality and individuals: those who left a trace in notes flung from trains or in diaries found on their bodies.One source that I cannot forget are the loving last words of a Jewish girl to her mother, scratched on the wall of a synagogue before the girl was taken to be shot.We think we understand the age of Hitler and Stalin and the Second World War. But until we see their major killing policies as applied to the peoples between, we really don't.The events that we take to be crucial to our own moral judgments took place in east European countries that are only vaguely familiar.We think we know the similarities and differences between Hitler and Stalin, but thus far we have only scratched the surface.Twenty years of research in eastern Europe allows us to reject myths, complete histories, and see the outlines of the greatest manmade calamity in the modern West.Almost everyone agrees that the Holocaust is a—or the—central event of the century. But only when it is described and explained in the east European lands where it took place and as part of a larger history can it be understood and its lessons learned.