The Wolves of Stanislav: An Improbably True Parable for the Pandemic Age | Hacker News Reader

The Wolves of Stanislav: An Improbably True Parable for the Pandemic Age

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53 pointsThevet22 comments

Why would this be so surprising though, or need corroboration? I would just assume the presence of wild animals in any place where humans aren't.

Also y'know wolves aren't really some dark harbingers of doom, heavy with portent; they're just a kind of dog, doing their dog thing, looking for food and whatnot. Yeah they're ferocious... so is a panda when it's pissed off. But the panda gets to be the beloved symbol of cute cuddliness while the wolf is reviled as the symbol of all that is evil. Grow up, Red Riding Hood!

Agree.

But to nuance, a wolf pack is generally small, but there are a lot of stories, some of them recent, most of them from Europe (I've read at least one from Northern America), about very large gatherings of wolves in the countryside, posing a real threat to villagers and travellers. Maybe it's the case here.

These wolves could also have been feral dogs, which nowadays are omnipresent in Eastern Europe.

> But the panda gets to be the beloved symbol of cute cuddliness while the wolf is reviled as the symbol of all that is evil.

This may be because a hungry panda is unlikely to eat you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_attack

Best part of the whole story was Piotr Grabowski's comment at the bottom. Seems the most illuminating aspect of this story is how disconnected American's are from European history. I don't mean this in a dismissive way. I mysefl, being American, am hoplessly unaware of large parts of European history. But the origin of the author's last name along is actually really easy to understand if one is actually familiar with the culture of the region (if Piotr is to be believed).

Still kind of biased and he says that everything beyond Stanislaw was a "wasteland" and Far-East presumably because it didn't have Baroque and later Habsburg architecture. I live in a country bordering Ukraine to the South, in a part of if where we didn't have Baroque nor Habsburg architecture (we were under Ottoman influence, even though not under direct control), and I have to say that reading about this territory's history it didn't seem like we were in the Far-East. In other words there's a distinct orientalism in some learned people the closer you get to the "have Baroque buildings" / "does not have Baroque buildings" border.

He seems to be correct though about what happened to the Poles living there during WW2, but those very, very complicated times for all those involved.

Everyone is biased, and it's not just American being out of touch with European History. I'm Dutch, I do like history especially parts where changes of borders/nations have impact now.

I was born in 1986, so I don't have memories of the Cold War and such. In school we learn a lot about WWII, that 6 million jews died and such.

But halfway trough Germany started the wasteland. Our Reformed churches sends/sended/smuggled Bible translation to Moldavia, Ukraine, Russia. We donated money to help Hungarian Baptists, Ukrainian Jews and so on.. But that's it.

I've visited quite some 'Eastern European' countries, and when I do I always have to dive into the history. When visiting Krakow for a week I learned about Galicia (I thought it was weird to have a Jewish museum named after a Spanish region ;)).

So, in 2010 I decided to first visit all European countries, before flying somewhere else. I have rules, I have to have visited a bordering country before I'm allowed to visit a country. (E.g. can't go to Portugal I have to visit Spain first). And I have to stay in a country , so a train stop our toilet visit doesn't count for visiting Slovenia..

To know history to some extend, you have to be there. But, it's also around us. When being overwhelmed by the empty mspaces

Everyone is biased, and it's not just American being out of touch with European History. I'm Dutch, I do like history especially parts where changes of borders/nations have impact now.

I was born in 1986, so I don't have memories of the Cold War and such. In school we learn a lot about WWII, that 6 million jews died and such.

To know history to some extend, you have to be there. But, it's also around us. When being overwhelmed by the empty mezuzah spaces, I realized that my hometown only had a 'Synagoguestreet' without a synagogue. That we have Jewish cemeteries, but no burials, and that there almost no Jewish community in the Netherlands, while my late grandmother talked about Jewish shop owners ..

It also points out what most of the comments have missed: this is on lithub, so it's not meant to be consumed on a purely literal level. The presence or absence of the wolves and the way we know about them clearly relates to the deeper, more horrifying questions about the past massacres of humans by humans.

That comment has a serious nationalistic bias so take it with a grain of salt. Pro-tip when learning about Eastern Europe or the Balkans - there are a lot of conflicting versions of historiography. Every nation, regime or even political faction builds their own narrative that often contradict each other.

Could it be that the young poet's father had re-told the literal fact of reprisals against collaborators as a fairy tale of destroying wolves, which are generally accepted as wicked?

Author seems to doubt the poet's story but I'd heard about things like this myself and found this, from the same time period and part of the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirov_wolf_attacks

just a decade ago there was a story about a family of bobcats taking residence in a foreclosure stricken neighborhood near Los Angeles - https://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-bobcats5-2008sep05-story... . When humans are gone, the Nature doesn't seem to cry a river.

Paris too: https://johnknifton.com/2016/02/14/the-wolves-of-paris/

Found the news reel that was mentioned in the article, it has a blooper when one of the "civilian" girls cheerfully greeting the liberators wears Red Army boots: https://youtu.be/7XsXSOSOtq4?t=438

Overall really sad moment in the history of the town, it had seen a a huge amount of violence - the almost total destruction of the Jewish population of the town, but also Nazi attacks on Ukrainian and Polish civilians. The total death toll caused by the Nazis in Stanislaviv/Ivano-Frankivs was 100 thousand people with at least 20 thousand of them Jews. Many people were also forcibly deported to Germany to work in factories (this is unrelated to the millions of Jews in concentration and extermination plants, where conditions were worse).

The mood was actually deeply sombre and the news reel fails to hide it (although keep in mind the music was added by the person adding the video to YouTube). The reason wasn't only the Nazi crimes - the population of the city remembered 1939 when the Soviets took over the city from Poland and 1941 when right before they evacuated the city they killed everyone in the prison (many of them political prisoners) and other people suspecting to aid the German advance. On the day they captured the city another round of repressions began.

Those boots are hardly evidence of membership in the Red Army, come on ..

It just happens that she wears the exact type of boots as the army on parade? In WWII where even food was hard to come by?

Well it is a rather bizarre fashion statement for the 40s, no civilian woman would wear it the era: https://militaryreview.su/uploads/2013/soviet_army1943-1945/...

Its not inconceivable. Those boots were commonly worn by civilians before the war, and are still used by horse-riders all over the world - its an indicator of wealth, not membership in the Russian Red Army, if anything else.

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