Drago Jančar. And Love Itself

After the occupation of Yugoslavia by German forces in 1941, the Slovenian city of Maribor, historically a German-speaking town with a large German minority, is annexed to the Third Reich. In the city renamed Marburg an der Drau, neighbours and friends of yesterday are torn apart and a resistance movement is organised in the surrounding hills. The three characters at the heart of the novel, Valentin, a partisan resistance fighter, his girlfriend Sonja, and the SS officer Ludwig, once called Ludek, each try in their own way to defend their love from the senselessness of evil and the downfall of human dignity. The war upsets their perception of the world and of themselves and inevitably breaks their lives.

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John-Paul Himka. Ukrainian-Jewish Relations: From History to Memory

Збірка статей відомого українсько-канадського історика Івана-Павла Химки висвітлює проблеми українсько-єврейських відносин часів Другої світової війни, вивчення яких досі потребує не лише професіоналізму, а й інтелектуальної сміливості. Спираючись на джерела з архівів України, США, Канади, Польщі, Німеччини та Ізраїлю, автор розповідає, як звикання до насильства, організованого та підбурюваного нацистською владою, вивільняло руйнівний потенціал людської психіки, що уможливив етнічні чистки навіть поза сферою контролю окупаційного режиму. Досліджуючи поведінку місцевого населення України під час Голокосту, він показує, що за різних обставин одні й ті самі індивіди могли бути і пасивними спостерігачами, і співучасниками злочинів, і рятівниками. (more…)

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Olena Styazhkina. Stigma of Occupation: Soviet Women of the 1940s in Self-Vision

This is a book about war and the inability of people to comprehend the occupation experience both when living it and in the first years after the expulsion of the Nazis.

The study is based on the story of three women and two regimes, one of which forced its citizens to be Soviet and die heroically, and the other, the Nazi one, to renounce what they had both Soviet and human. The book is about despair and survival, differences in understanding and perception of good and evil, the search for and choice between the strategies of living and dying, the subtle and uncertain boundaries between collaboration and righteousness, resistance and alienation, looting and support for others.

It is also an analysis of women’s experiences, of their traumatic and unstable search for words and mechanisms of self-description in the contexts of the “feat”, “betrayal”, “enemies”, and “heroes”. Those concepts were changing in the 1940s both due to the women’s internal intentions and the pressure of established state propaganda guidelines on the “correct conduct” of Soviet citizens under occupation. This is the story of the formation of a state policy of stigmatizing the occupied, as well as the self-stigmatization of people who considered themselves Soviet. It is a story of the nonlinearity of war experience, told in the uncodified language of women themselves, one of whom sought a canonical heroic biography, the second fought bravely and desperately for survival, and the third saved others despite the risk of punishment by Nazi or Soviet authorities.

Olena Styazhkina
Стигма окупації: Радянські жінки у самобаченні 1940-х років = Stigma of Occupation: Soviet Women of the 1940s in Self-Vision. – Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2019. – 384 p. – (Library of Resistance, Library of Hope).

ISBN 978-966-378-653-7

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Mikhail Fishgoit. Hope Dies Last

The book is a publication of memoirs by Mikhail Fishgoit, a witness of the Soviet era. He began his thorny path as a Red Army volunteer who went through all the horror of fighting in Crimea during World War II. Later, as an intelligence officer, Mikhail Fishgoit would enter Berlin as a victor of Nazism, yet after the denunciation of one of his “comrades-in-arms”, he would have to spend years in Gulag.

Fishgoit’s book convincingly rebuts falsified Soviet versions of World War II history and is one of the most cogent testimonies of that time. (more…)

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Yuriy Skira. The Called: Monks of the Studite Statute and the Holocaust

The book explores the efforts made by the Studite Statute monks of the Lviv Archdiocese of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to save the Jews during the Holocaust. The author answers various issues related to their sheltering. He analyzes the motivations, methods, and risks of the rescuers and the rescued alike, and also debunks myths developed due to the previous researchers’ insufficient awareness of local conditions and rescuers’ capabilities. The study restores the historical truth and develops a comprehensive vision of the Studites’ rescue action, which was launched by their Archimandrite, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, and saved lives of several hundred adults and children. (more…)

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