europe, eastern

Examines how it is part of the human condition to try and reconcile acts committed under former systems of thought with contemporary ideology, focusing on the attempts of the people and governments of Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic,and Slovakia to face their Communist pasts.

Rita Gabis comes from a family of Eastern European Jews and Lithuanian Catholics. As a child, she was close to her Catholic grandfather. She knew he fought to end the Russian occupation of Lithuania before Hitler's Nazis came, but she did not know her grandfather's history from 1941-1943. She found out he was the chief of security police under the Gestapo in a Lithuanian town near the killing fields of Poligon where eight thousand Jews were murdered in three days in the fall of 1941. In 1942 the local Polish population was also killed. As Gabis continued to research her grandfather's life, she knew she needed closure. No matter what she learned she had to know the complicated truth about the man she thought she knew.

A tailor's very old overcoat is recycled numerous times over the years into a variety of garments and other uses.

Examines the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, describing how the killings were more widespread than many believed, and explores how those crimes influenced other events in modern history.

A history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed the individuals who came under its sway.

Brano Sev, a spy in Eastern Europe in the 1960s, prides himself in being unswervingly devoted to the socialist cause, whether his superiors have him interrogating a suspect or working in a factory, but when it becomes clear that he is being deliberately framed for murder, he begins to question his loyalties.

Yugoslavian writer Slavenka Drakulic writes of everyday life in communist Eastern Europe before the Iron Curtain fell.

Chronicles the transitions from Soviet or authoritarian order in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic States, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine since 1977, covering processes of political change and integration as depicted in "The New York Times" articles, with biographies of key figures and analyses of pivotal events.