Volume 56, Number 11 · July 2, 2009
He Understood Evil
By Charles Simic
1941: Godina koja se vraća [1941: The Year That Keeps Returning]
by Slavko Goldstein
Zagreb: Novi Liber, 494 pp., HRK180.00
I came across this remarkable book, which has not yet been translated into English, while writing recently about the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It deserves attention, because it explains, perhaps better than any book I know of, how different ethnic groups, who lived side by side in peace for centuries, were made to turn against one another and become each other's executioners in that unhappy country. Written by the distinguished Croatian journalist and publisher Slavko Goldstein, whose father was killed by the Ustashas, the pro-fascist nationalists who were brought to power in Croatia by the Nazis when they occupied Yugoslavia in 1941, the book is a memoir of that fateful year, a meticulous historical recreation, and the cautionary account of the events that led to the deaths of some 32,000 Jews, 40,000 Gypsies, and 350,000 Serbs between 1941 and 1945.
Review, 4329 words
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