On the paradox of scale

The Weekly Wrap Up (4/9/21)

Stalingrad, World War 2

Josef Stalin once said that one death is a tragedy, while a million is a statistic. In other words, humans can only truly internalize a certain amount of pain. When we’re told about the millions of Jews that perished in the Holocaust, we’ll nod our heads respectfully, but we aren’t truly comprehending the sheer scale of suffering.

I experienced this recently when listening to Dan Carlin’s podcast on the Eastern Front in World War 2.

9 million Germans dead. 20 million Chinese. 24 Million Russians.

What does that even mean? Those numbers bounced right off my brain.

Clever data people can slice the numbers a certain way to get more of a reaction out of us. For example, 85% of Russians conscripted into the army were wounded, captured, or killed. Statistics like these are shocking, and they do help put things in more perspective.

Nevertheless, the atrocities on the Eastern Front, while ginormous in scale, don’t move us as much as seeing a brutal death that’s caught on camera. Just think about the videos of those brutal beheadings by ISIS in the 2010s. We become impassioned by seeing how visceral the death is, not necessarily by the scale of the tragedy.

Ideally, our sense of sadness for a tragedy scales proportionally with the size of the tragedy at hand. But to Stalin’s point, our brains seemed wired to do the exact opposite. It’s really quite the paradox: we say that life is precious but it seems to be less so as more life is lost.

During the podcast about the Eastern Front, I cried.

The podcast host Dan Carlin shared many statistics around one particularly gruesome battle: the Siege of Stalingrad. In that battle, 450k lives were lost. That’s more than the United States lost in all of World War 2, fighting both the Japanese and the Germans.

But as you might imagine, it wasn’t the enormity of those numbers that got to me. It was the story of Tanya Nikolayevna Savicheva, a young girl who was in Stalingrad during the siege.

Here are her diary entries during those 6 months:

Zhenya died on December 28th at 12 noon, 1941

Grandma died on the 25th of January at 3 o'clock, 1942

Leka died March 17th, 1942, at 5 o'clock in the morning, 1942

Uncle Vasya died on April 13th at 2 o'clock in the morning, 1942

Uncle Lesha May 10th, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, 1942

Mama on May 13th at 7:30 in the morning, 1942

The Savichevs are dead

Everyone is dead

Only Tanya is left

Amidst all this tragedy, Tanya soldiered on.

She dutifully carried all her family’s belongings to her aunt’s house where she stayed for a while before being transferred to an orphanage away from Stalingrad.

Sadly, she was ill. A visiting doctor said that she needed “rest, special care, nutrition, better climate and most of all, tenderly mother care.”

Tanya never got the tenderly mother care that she needed.

She died the following month, just as the war was beginning to come to a close.

She was 14.