Resistance, Imprisonment, and Forced Labor: A Slovene Student in World War II
Second Printing (Studies in Modern European History, V. 47) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The holocaust in Europe during the years of World War II, from approximately 1939 to approximately 1945, resulted in the deaths of approximately 50 million people, most of them civilians. Some of this is approximate because the killings began earlier and continued after these dates, with many of the names and places forgotten. That this tragedy befell millions of Jews is well known, that political prisoners of the Nazis were placed into concentration camps and left to starve is well known, and the "collateral damage" to civilians from bombs and bullets gone astray (or not) is mostly accepted. What seems to have been forgotten is that these were in fact people who had families, hopes, dreams, and aspirations, and that the affected peoples were of virtually all nationalities in Axis-occupied Europe. This memoir by Metod Milac, which describes how he survived WWII in Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), reminds us that the holocaust of WWII created civilian victims of fights that came to visit them during the night, uprooted them into horror, and left them to fend for themselves as best they could even after the fighters went home.

This riveting book describes the life of a boy who was 17 years of age in 1941 when the German armies invaded his home in alpine region of northern Slovenia where it borders Austria. The narrative ends ten years later with his emigration from the displaced persons camps in southern Austria to the United States in 1950. I have to admit to being more than a casual reader, as my parents and other relatives similarly left Slovenia and came to Canada and America after the war. Many relatives survived the war and stayed in Slovenia, and their tales echo those of Milac as well. I have heard scattered bits of the stories of Italian concentration camps where political prisoners starved (e.g. my father), students being expelled from closed universities (both parents), men shipped off to forced labor camps in Germany (uncles on both sides of the family), starvation (all of them), and executions of political opponents by the victorious communist Partizans (my grandfather). In Milac's book, I hear these events described I vivid detail, with memories of places, people, and events (enhanced by painstaking research). The young Milac had the misfortune of being caught in all of these: deportation from his home by German occupiers, laboring for the Partizans in the hilly regions of south-eastern Slovenia, surviving an Italian concentration camp on the isle of Rab in the Adriatic, imprisonment by the Gestapo and forced labor in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland (where the murders were rumored, but not known until after the war), and the brutal execution of his older brother Ciril along with more than 12,000 others refugees from southern Austria when the British army "repatriated" them into the hands of the Partizans in May of 1945, after the German surrender.

In many ways, this is an awful tale. But Milac has a flair both for gruesome details and for seeing the best in people he met or came to know. For instance, he describes the lice, bedbugs, dysentery, and damp cold of his prisons. But he also describes the humanity that somehow failed to be extinguished by the misery. Love of music provides a thread that weaves together and raises up these people caught in the direst of circumstances. I was constantly struck by the chance meetings that transported Milac into and out of his various troubles. The most memorable character is his friend Hinko Spendl, who leads a ragtag group out of Poland back to Slovenia by a highly improbably route. The description of the starving young family in eastern Poland, where the Slovenian fugitives find shelter and leave the last of their bread, again reminds us that in war the youngest suffer the most.

The book is also published in the native Slovenian language, under the title "Kdo solze nase posusi: Dozivljaji slovenskega dijaka med drugo svetovno vojno" (Who dries our tears: memoirs of a Slovenian student during the second world war"). This title points to one of the Slovenes' most abiding traits: their deep slavic sentimentality. But this memoir reads like an adventure. The story is alive, without rank sentimentality, without self pity, and mostly without condemnation of individuals. Nonetheless, Milac reminds us that at least some of the misery suffered by Slovenes was perpetrated by other Slovenes, and that unleashing the hounds of hell in war inevitably causes civilian bystanders to suffer, intentionally or not. Lasting peace and justice will require the dogged determination of humanity to rise above its plight. Milac's book shows us that determination.

Metod Milac's account of the dark days before WWII, the rise of fascism, Nazi rule, and communist domination is a chilling perspective of his experiences as a young Slovenian student caught in the vice of political forces that viewed him - and many others - as expendable parts in their quest for world domination. Metod's graphic depictions of life in a succession of forced labor camps and ghettos, of escape, betrayal, and recapture are interlaced with stories of compassion and heroism that paint a vivid panorama of the turmoil, despair, and hope that swallowed the Kingdom of Jugoslavia in the thirties and forties. The narrative is compelling. I was impressed with the detail and research Metod included in this impressive work.Given his advanced degrees, this is to be expected - yet the text is quite approachable. An impressive and important contribution to the library of anyone interested in a very specific insider view of the horrors that befell an ordinary man at an extraordinary time in history! G. Evan Brooks, Cincinnati Ohio

An immensely important and necessary book to record WWII history from a personal point of view. Well written, this is a rare book from a Slovenian who survived the Italian concentration camp on the occupied island of Rab, Croatia. In addition to the forced labor camp in Auschwitz, Dr. Milac was a witness to some of the events in May of 1945 in Carinthia, Austria. He writes about events leading up to the brutal deception by the British 5th Corps in Carinthia, where his brother Ciril and 12,000 others were massacred by the Communist Partisans in former Yugoslavia.

This book should be read by everyone who values freedom of expression and struggles to balance democratic ideals.