Description: "For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacz--today part of Ukraine--was home to a highly diverse citizenry ... Then came World War II, and three years later the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish residents ... [In this book], Bartov [argues] that ethnic cleansing doesn't occur as is so often portrayed in popular history, with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leader and the unleashing of military might. It begins in seeming peace, slowly and often unnoticed, the culmination of pent-up slights and grudges and indignities"--Amazon.com.
Brief description: Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He is the author of Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, along with several other well-respected scholarly works on the Holocaust and genocide, including Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories and Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine. He has written for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Review Quotes: "This is a gripping, challenging, and masterfully written book...Understanding the destruction of the Jews as part of genocidal perils that have not passed even today, the horrific case of Buczacz thus comes as a powerful warning against bigotry everywhere at any time."
-- Tom Segev, author of The Seventh Mllion: The Israelis and the Holocaust and Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends