During the 1940s Greece was torn apart twice, first by World War II and second by Civil War.Beginning in 1941, the occupation of Greece by Germany was intensely brutal. Children starved on the ...streets of Athens. The Jewish population was decimated in the Holocaust. Heroic acts of resistance - performed in concert with the SOE - were met with vicious reprisals. When Greece was finally freed from Nazi rule in 1944, the fractured and embittered nation became engulfed in civil war, as conflict flared between the British and American-sponsored government and communist-led rebels. Acclaimed historian of Greece David Brewer here investigates this tumultuous decade in Greece’s modern history, providing a compelling military and political history.
Drawing from engrossing survivors' accounts, many never before published, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943 recounts a heroic yet little-known chapter in Holocaust history. In vivid and moving detail, ...Barbara Epstein chronicles the history of a Communist-led resistance movement inside the Minsk ghetto, which, through its links to its Belarussian counterpart outside the ghetto and with help from others, enabled thousands of ghetto Jews to flee to the surrounding forests where they joined partisan units fighting the Germans. Telling a story that stands in stark contrast to what transpired across much of Eastern Europe, where Jews found few reliable allies in the face of the Nazi threat, this book captures the texture of life inside and outside the Minsk ghetto, evoking the harsh conditions, the life-threatening situations, and the friendships that helped many escape almost certain death. Epstein also explores how and why this resistance movement, unlike better known movements at places like Warsaw, Vilna, and Kovno, was able to rely on collaboration with those outside ghetto walls. She finds that an internationalist ethos fostered by two decades of Soviet rule, in addition to other factors, made this extraordinary story possible.
As a force that had to serve two masters, both the Jewish population of the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania and its German occupiers, the Kovno Jewish ghetto police walked a fine line between helping Jews ...survive and meeting Nazi orders. In 1942 and 1943 some of its members secretly composed this history and buried it in tin boxes. The book offers a rare glimpse into the complex situation faced by the ghetto leadership and the Jewish policemen, caught between carrying out the demands of the Germans and mollifying the anger and frustration of their own people. It details the creation and organization of the ghetto, the violent German attacks on the population in the summer of 1941, the periodic selections of Jews to be deported and killed, the labor required of the surviving Jewish population, and the efforts of the police to provide a semblance of stability. The secret history tells a dramatic and complicated story, defending the actions of the police force on one page and berating its leadership on the next. A substantial introduction by distinguished historian Samuel D. Kassow places this powerful work within the context of the history of the Kovno Jewish community and its experience and fate at the hands of the Nazis.
A powerful and unique study of the realities and long-term impact of occupation, Mussolini's Greek Island reveals the Italian dictator's imperial vision, the mechanisms of Italian occupation and its ...tragic consequences. The small island of Syros is a vital entry-point illuminating Italian imperialism - its ethos, fascist connection, pretension and administrative achievements, marred by famine. Here Lecoeur examines the devastating effects of war and occupation on the local community - starvation, corruption and survival - and, drawing on local archives and interviews with survivors, offers new insight into this crucial but little known episode. Enriching our understanding of Mussolini's hegemonic visions and the mechanisms of occupation, a key issue of our times, this path-breaking book will appeal to scholars of fascism, World War II and military occupation in general._x000D__x000D_'Sheila Lecoeur has written a path-breaking and moving study of the Italian wartime occupation of the Greek island of Syros. This is the very first study I know which shows the realities of Italian fascist - as opposed to German - Second World War occupation from the ground up...this is an important contribution which offers us a badly needed point of comparison with German policy elsewhere.' -- Professor Mark Mazower, Department of History, Columbia University.
Swastika over the Acropolis is a major reinterpretation of the conduct and significance of the Greek campaign of 1941, and its place in the history of World War II.
Allied Fighting Effectiveness is a collection of scholarly papers focusing on a variety of different aspects of the major campaigns of North Africa, Sicily and Italy, ranging from operation TORCH to ...the end of the war in Europe.
The Agony of Greek Jews tells the story of modern Greek Jewry as it came under the control of the Kingdom of Greece during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it deals with the ...vicissitudes of those Jews who held Greek citizenship during the interwar and wartime periods. Individual chapters address the participation of Greek and Palestinian Jews in the 1941 fighting with Italy and Germany, the roles of Jews in the Greek Resistance, aid, and rescue attempts, and the problems faced by Jews who returned from the camps and the mountains in the aftermath of the German retreat. Bowman focuses on the fate of one minority group of Greek citizens during the war and explores various aspects of its relations with the conquerors, the conquered, and concerned bystanders. His book contains new archival material and interviews with survivors. It supersedes much of the general literature on the subject of Greek Jewry.
Through the poetry of Bouena Sarfatty (1916-1997), An Ode to Salonika sketches the life and demise of the Sephardi Jewish community that once flourished in this Greek crossroads city. A resident of ...Salonika who survived the Holocaust as a partisan and later settled in Canada, Sarfatty preserved the traditions and memories of this diverse and thriving Sephardi community in some 500 Ladino poems known as coplas. The coplas also describe the traumas the community faced under German occupation before the Nazis deported its Jewish residents to Auschwitz. The coplas in Ladino and in Renée Levine Melammed's English translation are framed by chapters that trace the history of the Sephardi community in Salonika and provide context for the poems. This unique and moving source provides a rare entrée into a once vibrant world now lost.
Germany's 1941 seizure of Yugoslavia led to a bloody insurgency, and the Wehrmacht waged a brutal campaign in response--massive reprisal shootings, destruction of entire villages, and huge mobile ...operations against civilians. Terror in the Balkans explores the reasons behind Germany's extreme security measures in southern and eastern Europe.
