En el corazón de la Europa civilizada

In the early twenties, the painter Marc Chagall worked as a teacher in a Jewish orphanage on the outskirts of Moscow, where he had the opportunity to listen to the terrifying story of the children who had survived the pogroms in the Ukraine, who, having witnessed from the murder of their parents, the rapes of their sisters, the looting of their homes, they had fled in terror to nowhere in search of shelter and food. "The most unfortunate orphans," Chagall called them. The painter was not the only one to draw attention to what was happening. In the American press, for example, including the New York Times, articles were published in 1919, the headline of which asked: "Is a massacre of Jews the next horror in Europe?" Between 1918 and 1921, more than 1,000 anti-Semitic riots, known by the Russian term "pogrom," were documented in more than 500 locations in what is now Ukraine. In the heart of civilized Europe, Jeffrey Veidlinger masterfully and meticulously reconstructs the bitter history of pogroms in Eastern Europe that killed more than one hundred thousand Jews; in fact, the massacres of the pogroms after the Great War normalized the violence against the Jews. Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, witness testimonies, trial records, and official warrants, Veidlinger writes a compelling book that sheds light on the events that undoubtedly created the conditions for the Holocaust twenty years later.