Winner of the Yad Vashem International Book Book Prize for Holocaust Research

"A substantive contribution to the history of ethnic strife and extreme violence" (The Wall Street Journal) and a cautionary examination of how genocide can take root at the local level-turning neighbors, friends, and family against one another-as seen through the eastern European border town of Buczacz during World War II.

For more than four hundred years, the Eastern European border town of Buczacz-today part of Ukraine-was 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 truth, though, this genocide didn't happen so quickly.

In Anatomy of a Genocide, Omer Bartov explains that ethnic cleansing doesn't 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 aren't just sociopathic soldiers. They are neighbors and friends and family. 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.