Scars and memory

These memoirs revive the events of World War II, the invasion of Yugoslavia, resistance coupled with civil war, and the postwar communist revolution. Here is the authentic story of a young man who joined the nationalist, pro-Western resistance of General Draza Mihailovic in his native Serbia, who survived the horrors of Nazi concentration camps during the war, and communist Yugoslav gulags after peace was declared. Caught at the threshold of their lives, inspired by democratic idealism and facing cataclysmic events beyond their comprehension, young men of the author's generation lived through two totalitarian regimes in succession. They were the generation that battled first the swastika and then the red star, and paid with their youth for the similarities between them. The memoirs are based on a manuscript secretly written in the late 1940s, hidden for 20 years, and finally smuggled out of Yugoslavia, a compassionate story of the historian Dimitrije Djordjevic and the dramatic lives he lived. This testimony can serve as a source for better understanding of the complex Yugoslav drama during and after World War II.