Shared Childhood Behind the Iron Curtain PDF Download

Author: Ann Kimmage
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 9780820320786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This is the story of a young woman's secret life behind the Iron Curtain.

Author: Eugene Yelchin
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 153621552X
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Eugene Yelchin recounts growing up in Cold War Russia.

Author: Nasi︠a︡ Kralevska
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789549257199
Category : Bulgaria
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Author: Hadwig Gofferje
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 059534271X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A Memoir in Letters: My Life on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain is the touching autobiography that first chronicles the young life of German-born Hadwig Gofferje, born during World War II, then living under communist rule. She describes her journey to freedom, complete with an American university education, and a new life in the United States. During her war-torn childhood in Germany, Hadwig lived in her own world, where she occupied herself for hours with drawing and playing with her dolls and imaginary friends. But at night, she endured many terrifying bombing raids by the Allied Forces in her family's basement bomb shelter. In 1945, after packing one carefully-chosen favorite toy in her suitcase, Hadwig and her family fled the approaching Russian Red Army and immigrated to a small village in Thuringia. Hadwig describes not a peaceful beginning to her life, but a life in which actions and choices were incredibly influenced by World War II and the division of Germany. Eventually moving, without her parents, to West Germany and later to the United States, Hadwig receives the university education that changes her life forever. In this remarkable personal narrative, Hadwig Gofferje describes how she was able to escape oppression and seek freedom, ultimately achieving personal peace, inner-strength, and a greater understanding of the world around her.

Author: Levente Batizy
Publisher: Outskirts Press
ISBN: 1977215335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The Batizy family was Eastern European nobility during the thirteenth to twentieth centuries and continued to lead comfortable lives even as the importance of aristocracy faded. Then, the unimaginable happened. These centuries of happy, committed citizenship would all seemingly fade away in an instant as communism took over. Driven from their home after the 1956 Hungarian revolution against communist rule failed, the Batizys found themselves starting over, seeking and creating a new dream: the American dream. "The Biggest Hole in the Iron Curtain: The Batizy Story" is Levente Batizy's sweeping yet intimate immigration story. Starting with the story of the Batizy patriarch, the architect of the family's great escape, and following the sacrifices that the Batizy's mother and stepmother made during the resettlement. "The Biggest Hole in the Iron Curtain" also includes recollections from Batizy and his thirteen siblings following the fiftieth anniversary of the revolt.

Author: Peter Sís
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780329643287
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
"I was born at the beginning of it all, on the Red side-the Communist side-of the Iron Curtain." Through annotated illustrations, journals, maps, and dreamscapes, Peter Sis shows what life was like for a child who loved to draw, proudly wore the red scarf of a Young Pioneer, stood guard at the giant statue of Stalin, and believed whatever he was told to believe. But adolescence brought questions. Cracks began to appear in the Iron Curtain, and news from the West slowly filtered into the country. Sís learned about beat poetry, rock 'n' roll, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola. He let his hair grow long, secretly read banned books, and joined a rock band. Then came the Prague Spring of 1968, and for a teenager who wanted to see the world and meet the Beatles, this was a magical time. It was short-lived, however, brought to a sudden and brutal end by the Soviet-led invasion. But this brief flowering had provided a glimpse of new possibilities-creativity could be discouraged but not easily killed. By joining memory and history, Sis takes us on his extraordinary journey: from infant with paintbrush in hand to young man borne aloft by the wings of his art.--Publisher information.

Author: Mnemo ZIN
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1805111884
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
What was it like growing up during the Cold War? What can childhood memories tell us about state socialism and its aftermath? How can these intimate memories complicate history and redefine possible futures? These questions are at the heart of the (An)Archive: Childhood, Memory, and the Cold War. This edited collection stems from a collaboration between academics and artists who came together to collectively remember their own experiences of growing up on both sides of the ‘Iron Curtain’. Looking beyond official historical archives, the book gathers memories that have been erased or forgotten, delegitimized or essentialized, or, at best, reinterpreted nostalgically within the dominant frameworks of the East-West divide. And it reassembles and (re)stores these childhood memories in a form of an ‘anarchive’: a site for merging, mixing, connecting, but also juxtaposing personal experiences, public memory, political rhetoric, places, times, and artifacts. These acts and arts of collective remembering tell about possible futures―and the past’s futures―what life during the Cold War might have been but also what it has become. (An)Archive will be of particular interest to scholars in a variety of fields, but particularly to artists, educators, historians, social scientists, and others working with memory methodologies that range from collective biography to oral history, (auto)biography, autoethnography, and archives.

Author: Orsolya Cseh
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3710895359
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
My family originates from Romania, where they spent the chaotic decades of the 20th century as members of the largest Hungarian minority. During the darkest years, the feared dictator, Nicolae Ceauescu governed socialist Romania, where people were merely striving to survive. But what was happening beyond the Iron Curtain? These twelve tales of mine, based on true stories, convey this message. "Then the Wall fell, holes were shot into the rotten heart of the dictatorships, but in my youth, the shadow of the Eastern Bloc still bared its iron fangs at me."

Author: Marita Patos
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781942661160
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Marita's book is about life under a tyrannical government during the Cold War in East Germany. This is the first book of its kind in the United States of America.

Author: Antonina Duridanova
Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1649521103
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Burning with desire to share the value of freedom, Antonina takes you from her plight in communist Bulgaria to the free shores of America. Following unfortunate events of life in a totalitarian regime in Bulgaria, Antonina bids goodbye to her homeland and flees to the Western world. She provides true experiences and observations of what life is in a communist society-her family's lands and cattle being confiscated by the agricultural labor cooperatives; the censorship of the press and any literal, artistic, and scientific works from the West; religion being prohibited; and any deviation from the norm leading to detention in a labor camp. Her last crossing of the Bulgarian-Yugoslavian border almost costs Antonina her life and makes up her mind to never go back. She describes her life as an immigrant at the refugee camp in Traiskirchen, Austria, while waiting for an American visa. Antonina is ecstatic when the plane cruises over the Statue of Liberty and lands in the most amazing city in the world-New York. She describes how she could taste, smell, feel, and touch freedom as she gets off the plane, ready to embark on new adventures. Antonina gets educated and becomes a good specialist in taxation, working for the United States Treasury Department. Ultimately, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she is invited to go back to Bulgaria and fix a broken tax system as a representative of the United States government. Her work in the newly democratic society of Bulgaria paved the way for the country to become a member of NATO, escaping Soviet influence, and later being accepted in the family of the European Union. 20