Omer Bartov, Brown University

This book is derived from research I carried out for my recent monograph, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). In the course of looking for documents in scores of archives and libraries, as well as  seeking personal accounts that would help me reconstruct the “biography” of a small town in eastern Europe, I found three remarkable diaries about events in Buczacz during the two world wars. While the monograph I was writing attempted to capture the individual voices of the town’s residents as a way of understanding how a community of interethnic coexistence was transformed into a site of communal genocide, it was not possible to bring to light the different protagonists’ personal stories as told from their own perspective. This is precisely what Voices on War and Genocide offers.