Alex Panasenko, "The Long Vacation: A Memoir" (Iris Press, 2020)
NB: This interview contains material about wartime experiences\xa0that may be upsetting to some listeners.\xa0\nWhen Alex Panasenko was born in 1933, his native Ukraine was devastated by Stalin\u2019s program of mass starvation; millions were murdered and, soon after, millions more removed in Stalin\u2019s Great Purge. In 1941, when Panasenko was eight years old, Hitler\u2019s\xa0Wehrmacht\xa0invaded and he was deported with his family for slave labor. As the tide turned against the Nazis, Panasenko, now separated from his family, tramped westward with the retreating German army.\xa0The Long Vacation\xa0is Alex Panasenko\u2019s war memoir, remembering the formative, often harrowing experiences that shaped his character.\nIn this conversation, Mr. Panasenko discusses the extremities of life, death, terror, lust, and hunger from a child\u2019s perspective, and with a child\u2019s canny reactions aimed at survival, even when the prospect seemed most unlikely. With things falling apart around him\u2014laws, governments, the conventions of the adult world\u2014Panasenko came to rely only on himself. Consequently, as an adolescent in the chaotic period following the war, he became an astonishingly successful black marketeer in the liberated Bavarian town of Memmingen. Finally, Mr. Panasenko reflects on his life in the 75 years since the war, including his forty years as a biology teacher at Berkeley High School in northern California.\nKrzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Early Modern Europe and the Spanish Empire; he had the privilege of being one of Alex Panasenko\u2019s biology students in 1993-94.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies