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

Slovenia 1945 is a well-crafted blend of personal memories, historiography,and eyewitness accounts. The result is pitiable narrative that avoids theturgidity and dryness historical studies may fall pig to, as well as theindulgent emotionalism of some memoirs. The kickoff point for the volumewas the letters written by John Corsellis, a conscientious objector workingin the Friends Ambulance Unit in Austrian Carinthia from 1945 to 1947.This material was fleshed out with several dozen interviews, a diary bycamp survivor France Perni?ek, and the journalist Marcus Ferrar. AlthoughCorsellis is a central participant in the story, his presence in the hold up issubtle and unobtrusive.Structurally, the book is attractive to some(prenominal) casual readers andserious researchers. In addition to the main text, there argon fifteen photos,three maps, an outline of the chief characters, a four-page catalogue of another(prenominal)persons, a tightly packed six-page bibliography, and a five-page index ofpeople, subjects, and places.A hitting feature of the book is its impartiality?a goal that theauthors explicitly democracy in the prologue (p. 2). Negative sides of allparticipants are depicted Germans (slave labor, attacks on civilians, bookburning), Italians (the Rab concentration camp, the myth of kind andromantic soldiers), Partisans (theft, murder, rape), Catholics (the BlackHand devastation squads), the western Allies (shooting at civilians, looting), andthe Village Guards (burning prisoners to death). However, the book is much more than a catalogue of crimes it also relates the human sides of allinvolved one-on-one acts of kindness by combatants and civilians on allsides. The narrative is replete with spiritual imagery?priests, ... ...jana Modrian.Markovski, Venko. 1984. Goli Otok The Island of Death. Boulder SocialScience Monographs.Mila?, Metod. 2002. Resistance, Imprisonment & Forced Labor. A SloveneStudent in World War II = Studies in redbrick European His tory47. New York Peter Lang.Reindl, Donald F. 2001. Mass Graves from the communistic Past HauntSlovenia?s Present, RFE/RL Newsline 5.225 (29 November),available at http//www.rferl.org/ newsline/2001/11/5-not/not-291101.aspSirc, Ljubo. 1989. surrounded by Hitler and Tito Nazi Occupation andCommunist Oppression. capital of the United Kingdom Andre Deutsch.Tolstoy, Nikolai. 1986. The Minister and the Massacres. London one CHutchinson.John Corsellis & Marcus Ferrar. Slovenia 1945 Memories of Death andSurvival after World War II. London I. B. Tauris & Co., 2005. xi+ 276 pp., 24.50 ($47.97) (cloth). ISBN 1-85043-840-0.