1941: The Year That Keeps Returning
During WWII, a Nazi-backed regime ruled Croatia, with deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands. One of those was the father of Goldstein, who recounts his family’s experiences during the horrific period. Goldstein, 13 when Germany installed the Ustasha regime in 1941, and his younger brother had a resourceful mother who sensed the imminence of roundups and arranged the eventual flight of the family to the refuge of the Communist Partisans. Goldstein’s father, however, vanished into the regime’s prison camps, a mystery Goldstein investigates amid a recollection of how his friends, schoolmates, and neighbors in his hometown, Karlovac, responded to the Ustasha regime and its persecutions of Jews and Serbs. Representing a range from fanatical nationalists to cynical opportunists, this gallery of Goldstein’s acquaintances captures the atmosphere of genocide on a chillingly interpersonal scale. Meeting some such people decades later at a book trade convention, Goldstein matter-of-factly remarks on their avoidance of the truth of 1941’s massacres in Croatia. Based on his personal story, Goldstein’s brave reconstruction of the massacres and their successor atrocities in 1945 and the 1990s should be added to the Holocaust shelf. --Gilbert Taylor