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 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, ... ...jana: Modrian. Markovski, Venko. 1984. Goli Otok: The Island of Death. Boulder: Social Science Monographs. Mila?, Metod. 2002. Resistance, Imprisonment & Forced Labor. A Slovene Student in World War II [= Studies in Modern European History 47]. New York: Peter Lang. 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- 291101.asp 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., ï ¿ ½24.50 ($47.97) (cloth). ISBN: 1-85043-840-0.