In 1945 They Were Children: Flight and Expulsion in the Life of a Generation
- Author: Alena Wagnerova and Julie Winter
- SKU: 2204
- ISBN: 0-89725-834-7
- Our Price:
$19.95
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Description:
112 pages, soft cover, 2008
"Alena Wagnerova extends empathetic understanding to her narrators whose experiences and perspectives she captures. [Her] book represents painstaking honest work that adds to a growing body of scholarship." - Dr. Brigitte U. Neary, Associate Professor of Sociology, Univ. of South Carolina.
Click here to see the complete review.
This moving book puts human faces on the cold statistics of millions of German expellees of 1945-48, women, children, old and young men - an entire population "ethnically cleansed" just because they were German. In Czechoslovakia 3.5 million Bohemian, Moravian and Karpathian Germans were brutally expelled from areas inhabited by their ancestors for 700 years - a form of ethnic cleansing far worse than what we witnessed in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. The Benes Decrees of 1945 were racist and certainly illegal in international law. Benes was able to commit crimes against humanity in total impunity - because the world did not care - the victims were only Germans. Sixty-three years after the expulsion we owe them at the very least the truth. We also owe them respect, compassion and recognition of their status as victims of terror.
