Please join us at Yale Sterling Memorial Library's lecture hall for a presentation by Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of History at Brown University.

Bartov will present his latest work Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Named Buczacz. In Anatomy of a Genocide, Bartov explains that ethnic cleansing doesn’t occur as is so often portrayed in popular history, with the quick ascent of a vitriolic political leader and the unleashing of military might. It begins in seeming peace, slowly and often unnoticed, the culmination of pent-up slights and grudges and indignities. The perpetrators aren’t just sociopathic soldiers. They are neighbors and friends and family. They are human beings, proud and angry and scared. They are also middle-aged men who come from elsewhere, often with their wives and children and parents, and settle into a life of bourgeois comfort peppered with bouts of mass murder: an island of normality floating on an ocean of blood.

Christopher Browning, author of the pathbreaking work Ordinary Men, wrote "Bartov's masterful study of Buczacz — marked by comprehensive scholarship and a compelling narrative — exemplifies the very best in current Holocaust history writing."

For more information on the book, see the publisher's homepage:

​http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Anatomy-of-a-Genocide/Omer-Bartov/9781451684537