Daviborshch's cart
Subtitle: narrating the Holocaust in Australian war crimes trials
By: David Fraser
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Lincoln
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780803234123
Description: "In the spring of 1942, Nazi forces occupying the Ukraine launched a wave of executions targeting the region's remaining Jewish communities. These mass shootings were open, public, and intimate. Although the victims themselves could never testify against their killers, many eyewitnesses could and did identify the perpetrators.

Among these communities, three local men from the villages of Serniki, Israylovka, and Gnivan were intimately implicated in such killing operations: Ivan Polyukhovich, a forester in the German-controlled administration; Heinrich Wagner, a Volksdeutscher liaison officer; and Mikolay Berezowsky, a member of the local police force. More than fifty years later, these three men were arrested and brought to trial in Australia for their alleged war crimes.

Daviborshch's Cart is more than an account of Holocaust perpetrators who found a safe haven in postwar Australia. It is also the story of the Holocaust in the Ukraine, the War Crimes Act, Nazi policies, and the ways in which future generations translate history into law, archives into proof, and law into justice. Based on a review of previously unexamined historical and legal documents and transcripts, Daviborshch's Cart offers the first critical examination of Australian attempts to bring alleged Nazi criminals to justice."--Pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: History, war crimes, and law in Ukraine; title: A brief political and legal history of Australia and Nazi war criminals; title: Law and history in Australian war crimes trials : Ukrainian foresters, the Shoah, and the Polyukhovich case; title: Mikolay Berezowsky : the case of "the witness who knew too much"; title: The story of Daviborshch's cart : law, history, truth, and the Holocaust in Ukraine; title: Translating law, translating history, in Australian war crimes trials; title: Telling stories about the Shoah : perpetrators, victims, and the politics of Australian identity in the hand that signed the paper; title: Law, memory, and justice : the Australian experience.