[13] His mother was raised in the town of Buczacz, then part of Poland, in the interwar era,[14] and emigrated to Israel before the war; the rest of her family was murdered during the Holocaust.

[13] Bartov began work on the book in the mid-1990s after interviewing his mother and realizing that genocide "was determined not only by the encounter between external killers and local residents, but also by the existing social fabric long before the arrival of the génocidaires".

[17] Historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe states that Bartov wrote "an important and in many ways innovative study" that elucidated the Holocaust in Galicia.

"The combination of the micro-historic approach with the history of a town and the concentration on everyday life and intimate facets of the Holocaust revises our understanding of how the genocide actually took place on the local level and what it caused.

Historian Havi Dreifuss states Anatomy of a Genocide artistically describes the way in which ethnic relations have been interwoven over the years, and it stresses the tensions that led to their tearing apart.