SEASON’S GREETINGS
Best wishes for Christmas and in the New Year! Sorry to bother you at this busy time of year, but I forgot to put a membership dues reminder in the September newsletter.
MEMBERSHIP REMINDER
Just a reminder that ZVA annual dues of $10 are based on the calendar year. Please check your dues status on the web site. Go to Your Profile in the user menu and look at the last item in the column on the right side of the page where it says “Dues paid to the end of: ____” If you have not paid for 2014, please remit your dues using one of the options described on the Membership page. From September on, I will credit new members for the following year. I will downgrade unrenewed members on the web site in April of each year to give you plenty of grace. We are continually adding new content to the Members Only parts of the site. If you are not connected to the Internet, just drop me a line at the address below and I will update you. Thanks for contributing to our common cause.
NEW IN THE LIBRARY
In the last newsletter I promised a review of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II by Keith Lowe. Here it is:
We have several books in our collection that describe the post-war hardships of ethnic Germans from eastern Europe. This book takes a much broader view and brings to light many issues that are virtually unknown to most of us. Of course, it describes the chaos in Germany as millions of German refugees arrive from easter n Europe to a country devastated by the war. But it also describes the added complication of millions of slave labourers and concentration camp survivors suddenly freed to roam the countryside with no support and nowhere to go. It covers the German Wehrmacht prisoners of war, the many thousands of revenge killings by the various resistance groups, the battles to change the social order in the post-war political vacuum (won by the Communists in the east and the status quo in the west), the ethnic cleansing of Poles and Ukrainians killing each other in large numbers where they were mixed together, battles between Serbs and Croats in Yugoslavia, anti-Soviet partisan movements in Ukraine and the Baltic States, and the civil war in Greece. Of particular interest to us Banaters is a chapter on how the Communists took control of Romania. Strangely, as comprehensive and thorough as this book is, there is not a word about the Germans in Yugoslavia. In fact, on page 369 the author states, “Yugoslavia was the one eastern European nation that had not carried out a programme of ethnic expulsions and deportations after the war.” While technically correct, I don’t see how you earn a free pass by stripping people of their citizenship and all their possessions, placing them in work camps and death camps, and then allowing the survivors to buy their way out several years later. I don’t understand how an otherwise excellent book could have missed this story.
Zichydorf Village Association News
edited by: Glenn Schwartz
2274 Baldwin Bay, Regina, SK, S4V 1H2
Internet: http://zichydorfonline.org
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email: gschwartz@accesscomm.ca“>gschwartz@accesscomm.ca“> gschwartz@accesscomm.ca“>gschwartz@accesscomm.ca