Dear friends of the Dashkova Centre, 

We would like to remind you about the upcoming annual honorary Erickson Lecture, to which you are warmly invited! 

"Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz"

Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University

March 30, 17.30-18.30

Playfair Library Hall, Old College

South Bridge

Edinburgh

EH8 9YL

There are some tickets left - please reserve yours here: 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-erickson-lecture-anatomy-of-a-genocide-the-life-and-death-of-a-town-called-buczacz-tickets-43128283858?aff=es2

Summary:
For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacztoday part of Ukrainewas home to a highly diverse citizenry. It was here that Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews all lived side by side in relative harmony. Then came World War II, and three years later the entire Jewish population had been murdered by German and Ukrainian police, while Ukrainian nationalists eradicated Polish residents. In his talk, Omer Bartov will explain how ethnic cleansing doesnt 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 arent 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.