At the end of May 1945, 12,000 Slovenian soldiers boarded trains in Austria. They thought they were on their way to freedom in Italy. Their true destination was Slovenia, and death. One of the most moving and tragic diaspora stories of World War II, Slovenia 1945 follows the fate of a strongly Catholic and non-Communist community in Slovenia - including members of the anti-Communist Home Guard 'domobranci' - caught up in the maelstrom of war and politics in the Balkans in World War II and the problems of post-war settlement. Thousands of soldiers returned to face death and exile at the hands of their war-time enemies - Tito's Partisans - who had triumphed by the war's end. Six thousand more civilians narrowly escaped the same fate, after the intervention of Red Cross and Quaker aid workers. Yet the story of exile is also one of triumph as the surviving refugees built new lives in Argentina, the USA, Canada and Britain. In this unique book, the authors call on more than half a century of research and an unsurpassed knowledge of the Slovene migrant communities around the world to tell their stories. For the first time, the survivors tell their vivid tales of wartime cruelty, of reviving their battered community in refugee camps, and of their emigration to Argentina, the US, Canada and Britain building successful new lives through courage, self-help and strong cultural identity. Slovenia 1945 is a vivid, personal and deeply moving story of an episode that marked all those involved indelibly.

The Istrian Peninsula, which is made up of modern-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy suffered from the so-called "Istrian exodus" after the Second World War. This book looks at this difficult, silenced past and shifts the usual focus from migrants to those who stayed behind and to the new immigrants who came to the “emptied” towns.The research, based on individual memories, deals with silences and competing national discourses, reasons to stay and leave, hybrid border ethnic identities, and the renewal of Istrian society and its new social relations. It is a self-critical reflection on an ignored chapter of national history, which, with an empathetic approach, allows the silence to speak.

Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.

"The Ethnic German Refugee in Austria 1945 to 1954" is an objective book and that is why the reading of this extremely interesting study creates a feeling of sadness, but at the same time a conviction that it is still possible to alleviate the grief of the numerous refugees in Austria, provided properly co-ordinated assistance is offered. The resultant feeling of sadness, which is most acute, is due to the characteristic of this book in which facts and figures are given in a purely scientific and sober manner, thus driving home the truly horrible human folly that was at the bottom of two world wars. Millions of people were turned from house and home, people for whom the very notion of "native country" has become a lata morgana. As flotsam and jetsam they have drifted to lands and places where they are not at all or barely welcome, and where, on the whole, they cannot find a permanent and humane existence. This thorough study which is averse to sentimentality cannot fail to make a deep impression on the reader. Allowance is made for the difficult position in which Austria found herself after the first world war, and especially after the second; it is granted that nevertheless much has been done for the refugees there. Further it cannot be ignored that various official and private agencies have contributed greatly to lighten the burden of the refugees.