Scars and memory
Subtitle: four lives in one lifetime
By: Dimitrije Djordjevic.
Series: East European monographs ;; no. 471
Publisher: East European Monographs; Distributed by Columbia University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Boulder, Colo; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 463
Subjects: Djordjević, Dimitrije, 1922-; World War, 1939-1945 -- Prisoners and prisons, German.; World War, 1939-1945 -- Personal narratives, Serbian.; Political persecution -- Serbia and Montenegro -- Serbia.; Concentration camp inmates -- Serbia and Montenegro -- Serbia -- Biography.; Political prisoners -- Serbia and Montenegro -- Serbia -- Biography.; Yugoslavia -- History -- 1945-1980.
Genres: Personal narratives, Serbian.; Biography.
Description: These memoirs revive the events of World War II, the invasion of Yugoslavia, resistance coupled with civil war, and the postwar communist revolution. Here is the authentic story of a young man who joined the nationalist, pro-Western resistance of General Draza Mihailovic in his native Serbia, who survived the horrors of Nazi concentration camps during the war, and communist Yugoslav gulags after peace was declared.

Caught at the threshold of their lives, inspired by democratic idealism and facing cataclysmic events beyond their comprehension, young men of the author's generation lived through two totalitarian regimes in succession. They were the generation that battled first the swastika and then the red star, and paid with their youth for the similarities between them.

The memoirs are based on a manuscript secretly written in the late 1940s, hidden for 20 years, and finally smuggled out of Yugoslavia, a compassionate story of the historian Dimitrije Djordjevic and the dramatic lives he lived. This testimony can serve as a source for better understanding of the complex Yugoslav drama during and after World War II.