Book Review of Slovenia 1945 Memories of Death and Survival after World War II

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Slovenia 1945 is a well-crafted blend of personal memories, historiography,

and eyewitness accounts. The result is moving narrative that avoids the

turgidity and dryness historical studies may fall prey to, as well as the

indulgent emotionalism of some memoirs. The starting point for the volume

was the letters written by John Corsellis, a conscientious objector working

in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Austrian Carinthia from 1945 to 1947.

This material was fleshed out with several dozen interviews, a diary by

camp survivor France Perni?ek, and the journalist Marcus Ferrar. Although

Corsellis is a central participant in the story, his presence in the book is

subtle and unobtrusive.

Structurally, the book is attractive to both casual readers and

serious researchers. In addition to the main text, there are fifteen photos,

three maps, an outline of the chief characters, a four-page catalogue of other

persons, a tightly packed six-page bibliography, and a five-page index of

people, subjects, and places.

A striking feature of the book is its impartiality?a goal that the

authors explicitly state in the prologue (p. 2). Negative sides of all

participants are depicted: Germans (slave labor, attacks on civilians, book

burning), Italians (the Rab concentration camp, the myth of kind and

romantic soldiers), Partisans (theft, murder, rape), Catholics (the Black

Hand death squads), the western Allies (shooting at civilians, looting), and

the Village Guards (burning prisoners to death). However, the book is much

more than a catalogue of crimes; it also relates the human sides of all

involved: individual acts of kindness by combatants and civilians on all

sides. The narrative is replete with religious imagery?priests, ...

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...jana: Modrian.

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Reindl, Donald F. 2001. Mass Graves from the Communist Past Haunt

Slovenia?s Present, RFE/RL Newsline 5.225 (29 November),

available at http://www.rferl.org/ newsline/2001/11/5-not/not-

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Sirc, Ljubo. 1989. Between Hitler and Tito: Nazi Occupation and

Communist Oppression. London: Andre Deutsch.

Tolstoy, Nikolai. 1986. The Minister and the Massacres. London: Century

Hutchinson.

John Corsellis & Marcus Ferrar. Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and

Survival after World War II. London: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2005. xi

+ 276 pp., �24.50 ($47.97) (cloth). ISBN: 1-85043-840-0.

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