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 moving narrative that avoids theturgidity and dryness historical studies may perish prey to, as well as theindulgent emotionalism of some memoirs. The starting 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 by refugee camp survivor France Perni?ek, and the journalist Marcus Ferrar. AlthoughCorsellis is a central participant in the story, his presence in the playscript issubtle and unobtrusive.Structurally, the book is attractive to both casual readers and sobering researchers. In addition to the main text, there argon fifteen photos,three maps, an outline of the chief characters, a four-page catalogue of otherpersons, a tightly packed six-page bibliography, and a five-page index ofpeop le, subjects, and places.A striking feature of the book is its impartiality?a goal that theauthors explicitly state 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 death squads), the western Allies (shooting at civilians, looting), andthe Village Guards (burning prisoners to death). However, the book is muchmore than a catalogue of crimes it also relates the human sides of allinvolved individual acts of kindness by combatants and civilians on allsides. The narrative is occupy with religious 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 innovative European History47. New York Peter Lan g.Reindl, Donald F. 2001. Mass Graves from the Communist 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. Between Hitler and Tito national socialist Occupation andCommunist Oppression. London Andre Deutsch.Tolstoy, Nikolai. 1986. The Minister and the Massacres. London CenturyHutchinson.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.