In the modern Greek city of Thessaloniki, the ruins of a vast
Jewish cemetery lie buried under the city s university. Nearby is
the site of the childhood home of one of the founders of the modern
Turkish state. These are tantalizing reminders of what was once the
bustling cosmopolitan city of Salonica, home not just to Greeks but
to thousands of Sephardic Jews, Turks, Bulgarians, and Armenians
living and working peacefully alongside one another. Thessaloniki
is just one example among many of what used to be. Over the past
two centuries, ethnic cleansing has remade the map of Central and
Eastern Europe and the Middle East, transforming vast empires that
embraced many ethnic groups into nearly homogenous nations. Towns
and cities from Germany to Turkey still show traces of the vanished
and nearly forgotten ethnic and religious communities that once
called these places home. In Terrible Fate, Benjamin Lieberman
describes the violent transformations that occurred in Salonica and
hundreds of other towns and cities as the Ottoman, Russian,
Austro-Hungarian, and German empires collapsed, to be reborn as the
modern nation-states we know today. His book is the first
comprehensive history of this process that has involved the murder
and forced migration of tens of millions of people. Drawing upon
eyewitness accounts, contemporary journalism, and diplomatic
records, Lieberman s story sweeps across the continent, taking the
reader from ethnic cleansing s earliest beginnings in Bulgaria,
Greece, and Russia in the nineteenth century, through the rise of
nationalism, both world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust,
and the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, up to the breakup of
Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Along the way he examines the decisive
roles of political leaders not only monarchs and dictators but also
those who were democratically elected as well as ordinary people
who often required very little encouragement to rob and brutalize
their neighbors, or who were simply caught up in the tide of
history."
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