Omer Bartov, PhD, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University and author of Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, visited the Museum to deliver a General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Distinguished Lecture on World War II on June 27, 2018.

The book is the result of 20 years of research, Bartov said, with the aim of examining the Holocaust as it occurred beyond Nazi extermination camps. His focus was the Eastern European border town of Buczacz, which today is part of Ukraine.  

“About half of the victims of the Holocaust died where they lived,” said Bartov, whose mother was raised in Buczacz. “I wanted to understand what was the encounter? What did the encounter between the perpetrators and victims actually look like when there was no such detachment, when there was no such distance, when everything was very close? This was the question that I asked myself.

“This was a journey that took me to nine different countries, to well over 50 archives, working with multiple languages.”

Watch the presentation below. Shop the Museum Store for a signed copy of the book. Learn more about upcoming Museum programming here. Learn more about the Museum’s Institute for the Study of War and Democracy here.