Cormac Ó Gráda's "The Hidden Victims"

Cormac Ó Gráda is an Irish economic historian and professor emeritus at University College Dublin. His many books include Famine: A Short History and Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Hidden Victims: Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars, and reported the following:

Page 99 contains part of an account of famine in Moldova, then part of the former Soviet Union, in the wake of World War 2. The first part of the page is a table describing the death rate. The second part contains:

As with all Soviet famines, the underlying causes of the (Moldovan) famine have been disputed. Severe drought in the spring of 1946 in the wake of an occupation that left the economy flattened and twenty million dead is one possibility; official culpability for prioritizing grain exports at the expense of the starving masses is another. In 1946, for the fifth year in a row, grain output in the Soviet Union was less than half its pre-war average. Wiliam P. Forrest believed that in Ukraine it had taken a herculean effort to plant “over 80 percent” of the 1940 harvested area but that the crop yield per acre could not, “at the most optimistic estimate”, have been much more than 40 percent of that of 1940.

If browsers open the book to page 99, would they get a good or a poor idea of the whole work? Yes and No. Page 99 is representative of one important part of a 500-page book, which describes the impact of WW1 and WW2 on civilians in the form of hunger, starvation, and related diseases. It captures the ‘feel’ of the book’s account of the many war-famines that together killed over twenty million civilians. It also reflects the fact that, as the title indicates, civilian deaths are the subject of the book. Page 99 also captures the way the book is written: a mélange of quantification, analysis, and narrative. Famine deaths in the Soviet Union in 1946-7 represented only a small fraction of the sixty million or so deaths of non- combatants during the two wars.

Page 99 also hints at the grim reality that the civilian death toll from both wars continued to mount after 1918 and 1945, respectively. However, it does not capture the fact that the book is about all kinds of civilian casualties. The Hidden Victims also describes and seeks to count civilian casualties by genocide, aerial bombing, and by other means, as well as to document the cost to survivors in terms of forced displacement, trauma, and sexual violence. It also highlights where the likely true figures differ from those most frequently cited, and where the truth will always be difficult to establish. Nor does page 99 contain any of the dozens of black-and-white photographic images employed

Learn more about The Hidden Victims at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue