Darkness Over Europe [antikvár]

preface Evil, as old as mankind itself, is distinguished from generation to generation and from era to era only by minor variations, although they are intensified by the mass possibilities of scientific methods of obliteration. The hate and oppression of World War I merely ebbed after the Armistice in 1918 to return with vastly magnified virulence as World War II. By the time of VJ Day, in September, 1945, this global conflict had claimed the lives of nearly thirty-eight million civilians and mihtary. It was and still remains difficult to comprehend the misery and slaughter of those six terrible years. It is perhaps no easier to appreciate the conditions under which occupied Europe existed or to understand how so many people were in fact able to survive. Murky in the distancing years is the chronicle of day-to-day living, the events which are a part of being under abject tyranny. The object of this book is to probe behind the front lines. It is not a history of armies and battles, but rather the life and times of the average man—drama and tragedy on a large scale, as well as in lesser vignettes. Some of the accounts are translated and published here for the first time. The authors, with few exceptions, are not professional writers but people who themselves hved to tell about World War II at home. Of all the persons who made this collection possible, the editor wishes to thank in particular H. R. Baukhage; Mrs. Margarete Buber-Faust of Stockholm, Sweden; Mrs. Ruth Che-nault; Carlo Christensen, Cultural Attaché of the Royal Danish Embassy in Washington; Mrs. Kate Cohn (Catherine Klein) of London; Bjoern Heimar, Washington correspondent for the Oslo Aftenposten; Ceorgi I. Isachenko, Counselor, Embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Washington; Lieutenant Colonel Donald B. Stewart (United States Army, ret) of San Antonio, Texas; Emil Trinka of Lidgerwood, North Dakota; and Miss Lena A. Yovitchitch of Edinburgh, Scotland.