We are grateful for the aid and support of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, without which the development of this book would not have been possible. We thank colleagues who contributed to early meetings and discussions of this theme, and Mishkenot Sha'ananim, which offered a congenial venue for completing this project.

The structure of the book is straightforward. We have aimed at a shift of emphasis in discussions of the general themes of memory and forgetting, by privileging a third element, that surrounding silence and silencing in the way individuals and groups reconfigure the past. In the first part of the book, we offer two multi-disciplinary approaches to silence. We then divide the chapters geographically, into those discussing European, African, and Middle Eastern wars and their aftermath. We have included a chapter on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the grounds that the Apartheid regime waged war brutally against its own people. To deny this fact is tantamount to denying the war the Nazis waged against the Jews. To be sure, the institutions of war changed over the twentieth century, but that very mutation is one of the themes of this book.

Recognizing that no one volume can do justice to a subject of manifest importance, we believe these studies, taken as a whole, offer a point of scholarly departure for further research in a field which has become central to our understanding of the ways wars' survivors make sense of the violent times in which they lived and live.