Coexistence and Genocide in One Galician Town
Date of Lecture: February 20, 2019
About the Speaker: Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. He is the author of "Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz," along with several other well-respected scholarly works on the Holocaust and genocide, including "Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories" and "Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine." He has written for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review.
About the Talk: Bartov traces the history of Buczacz, an Eastern European border town now part of Ukraine, where Poles, Jews and Ukrainians coexisted for hundreds of years before their community was decimated by ethnic cleansing in World War II. His story demonstrates — despite common beliefs about genocide — that the killings were intimate, committed by neighbors, the atrocities were intentionally public, and there were no bystanders, only degrees of engagement.
Supported by the Kraft-Hiatt Fund for Jewish-Christian Understanding.