Italy’s participation alongside Nazi Germany in the war against the USSR was only one episode of the vast global conflict of World War II. Yet for both Italy and Ukraine this episode proved especially revealing and, in some respects, unique even on the scale of world history. For perhaps the first time, the relationship between occupiers and the population of occupied territories was often marked not solely by hostility and hatred, but also by sympathy, mutual respect, and even acts of saving the lives of formal “enemies.”

This book offers readers a comprehensive account of this dramatic and deeply human chapter of history, presented in accessible scholarly essays by leading experts on the subject — Maria Teresa Giusti (Italy) and Oleksandr Potylchak (Ukraine). The volume is further enriched by the documentary novella Sergeant in the Snow by the renowned Italian writer Mario Rigoni Stern, a classic of war memoir literature, published here for the first time in Ukrainian translation. Through its protagonist, readers will witness the defeat and retreat of the Italian troops and discover a lesser-known yet significant aspect of twentieth-century wartime history.

Length: 256 pages. Hardcover.

Translated from Italian