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Resources by CommunityTribute to Liberty's sole purpose is the construction and erection of a monument to the victims of totalitarian Communism. Those wishing to obtain information about the impact of Communism will find certain information on the listed web sites and resources, which are not affiliated with Tribute to Liberty.General Resources | Resources by Community This resource section will continue to be developed. Please email us at info@tributetoliberty.ca if you have a resource to suggest. Tribute to Liberty welcomes your suggestions.
Cambodian
One
of the most devastating periods in twentieth-century history was the
rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge over Cambodia. From April 1975 to
the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation in late December 1978, the
country underwent perhaps the most violent and far-reaching of all
modern revolutions. These six essays search for what can be explained
in the ultimately inexplicable evils perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
Accompanying them is a photo essay that provides shocking visual
evidence of the tragedy of Cambodia's autogenocide. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
“Nothing
has shaped my life as much as surviving the Pol Pot regime. I am a
survivor of the Cambodian holocaust. That's who I am," says Haing Ngor.
And in his memoir, Survival in the Killing Fields, he tells
the gripping and frequently terrifying story of his term in the hell
created by the communist Khmer Rouge. Like Dith Pran, the Cambodian
doctor and interpreter whom Ngor played in an Oscar-winning performance
in The Killing Fields, Ngor lived through the atrocities that
the 1984 film portrayed. Like Pran, too, Ngor was a doctor by
profession, and he experienced firsthand his country's wretched
descent, under the Khmer Rouge, into senseless brutality, slavery,
squalor, starvation, and disease—all of which are recounted in
sometimes unimaginable horror in Ngor's poignant memoir. Since the
original publication of this searing personal chronicle, Haing Ngor's
life has ended with his murder, which has never been satisfactorily
solved. In an epilogue written especially for this new edition, Ngor's
coauthor, Roger Warner, offers a glimpse into this complex, enigmatic
man's last years—years that he lived "like his country: scarred, and
incapable of fully healing." (From description on publisher’s web site.)
A
harrowing account of life in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and
particularly the evacuations of Phnom Penh, written by an engineer for
the Ministry of Public Works. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Chinese
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese people suffered what may have been the worst famine in history. Over thirty million perished in a grain shortage brought on not by flood, drought, or infestation, but by the insanely irresponsible dictates of Chairman Mao Ze-dong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone horribly wrong. Journalist
Jasper Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed
in painstaking detective work to produce Hungry Ghosts, the first full
account of this dark chapter in Chinese history. In this horrific story
of state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder, China's
communist leadership boasted of record harvests and actually increased
grain exports, while refusing imports and international assistance.
"Mr. Becker's remarkable book...strikes a heavy blow against willed
ignorance of what took place."—The New York Times (From description on publisher’s web site.)
In
August 1966 a group of Red Guards ransacked the home of Nien Cheng. Her
background made her an obvious target for the fanatics of the Cultural
Revolution: educated in London, the widow of an official of Chiang
Kaishek's regime, and an employee of Shell Oil, Nien Cheng enjoyed
comforts that few of her compatriots could afford. When she refused to
confess that any of this made her an enemy of the state, she was placed
in solitary confinement, where she would remain for more than six
years. Life and Death in Shanghai is the powerful story of
Nien Cheng's imprisonment, of the deprivation she endured, of her
heroic resistance, and of her quest for justice when she was released.
It is the story, too, of a country torn apart by the savage fight for
power Mao Tse-tung launched in his campaign to topple party moderates.
An incisive, rare personal account of a terrifying chapter in
twentieth-century history, Life and Death in Shanghai is also an astounding portrait of one woman's courage. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
“Prisoner of Mao
is a harrowing account of life in China's vast apparatus of prisons and
labor camps, describing how Chinese authorities used psychological
techniques to coerce the innocent and the guilty into submission. It
also reveals how thin the line between survival and starvation became
during China's famine in the early 1960's.”—The New York Times
A
searing eyewitness account of what life was like in the prison camps of
China during the 1960s and 1970s—through the rise of the Cultural
Revolution and the Red Brigade, the death of Mao to the struggles of
post-Maoist China. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Croatian
Operation Slaughterhouse The
atrocities and horrors perpetrated by the Nazi's and Japanese are well
known and documented. Equally abhorrent, but far less well known, are
the barbaric actions committed by the Allies, particularly in the
aftermath of the war when power was being consolidated and centralized
by the new Eastern European regimes. In Yugoslavia, the anti-communist
Croat population became the victims of one of the most vicious
peacetime purges in the annals of western civilization. Operation
Slaughterhouse relates, through a series of eyewitness accounts, the
horrible suffering of the entire Croatian nation endured at the hands
of Yugoslav Partisans. The widespread and indiscriminate slaughter of
hundreds of thousands of innocents marks the history of then
Communist-dominated Yugoslavia, whose rivers and fields were tainted by
mutilated Croatian corpses, both military and civilian. That these
genocidal horrors went on without a world-wide outcry of protest is
largely that the Americans were unaware of these horrors because the
postwar Western press was only concerned with the ignominy of its
conquered adversaries—and because the victors in any war are never
accused of committing "atrocities." Operation Slaughterhouse is a
monument of testimony to those voiceless times and forgotten
victims—and an antidote to the observation that those who forget
history, are themselves doomed to repeat it.—Midwest Book Review
Goli
Otok - Hell in the Adriatic is one man's story of life, death, escape,
and punishment in post-World War II Yugoslavia. The man was Josip
Zoretic and the setting is Goli Otok, the "Naked Island" prison camp in
the Adriatic Sea. The story is straightforward and brutally frank in
its descriptions of day-to-day life on the island-prison. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn gave a similar picture in One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich about life in the Gulags of the Soviet Union. This book
brings light to the other gulags in the former Yugoslavia and puts to
rest once and for all the myth of "Communism with a Human Face." (From
description on publisher’s web site.) Cuban
Unvanquished
is the first history in English on the resistance Cubans have waged
against Castro's regime. This carefully documented narrative by a
veteran historian allows the story to unfold in participants' own
words. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Against All Hope
is Armando Valladares’ account of over twenty years in Fidel Castro’s
tropical gulag. Arrested in 1960 for being philosophically and
religiously opposed to communism, Valladares was not released until
1982, by which time he had become one of the world’s most celebrated
“prisoners of conscience.” Interned all those years at the infamous
Isla de Pinos prison (from whose windows he watched the failure of the
Bay of Pigs invasion), Valladares suffered endless days of violence,
putrid food and squalid living conditions, while listening to Castro’s
firing squads eliminating “counter revolutionaries” in the courtyard
below his cell. Valladares survived by prayer and by writing poetry
whose publication in Europe brought his case to the attention of
international figures such as French President Francois Mitterand and
to human rights organizations whose constant pressure on the Castro
regime finally led to his release. When Against All Hope first appeared, it was immediately compared to Darkness at Noon and other classic prison narratives about the resilience of the human spirit in the face of totalitarianism. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Czech & Slovakian
Spanning
twenty-five years, this historic collection of writings shows Vaclav
Havel's evolution from a modestly known playwright who had the courage
to advise and criticize Czechoslovakia's leaders to a newly elected
president whose first address to his fellow citizens begins, "I assume
you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to
you." Some of the pieces in Open Letters, such as "Dear Dr.
Husak" and the essay "The Power of the Powerless," are by now almost
legendary for their influence on a generation of Eastern European
dissidents; others, such as some of Havel's prison correspondence and
his private letter to Alexander Dubcek, appear in English for the first
time. All of them bear the unmistakable imprint of Havel's intellectual
rigor, moral conviction, and unassuming eloquence, while standing as
important additions to the world's literature of conscience. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
The
Prague Spring of 1968 was among the most important episodes in postwar
European politics—one of the few pre-Gorbachev attempts to reform
one-party communist rule. In this book Kieran Williams analyzes the
attempt at reform under Alexander Dubcek and its suppression by the
Soviet Union, using archive materials and other sources that have
become available in the wake of the 1989 revolution. The book will
provide new information for specialists as well as introductory
analysis and narrative for students of East European politics and
history and Soviet foreign policy. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Estonian
With
the Soviet reoccupation after World War II, Estonians faced a choice of
submitting to Communist puppets or trying to survive in the traditional
refuge of their forests while waiting for help from the West which
never came. Those who chose the second course, Estonia's "Forest
Brothers," mounted an armed resistance which, for more than a decade,
seriously challenged Soviet rule. This is their story, told for the
first time by sources within Estonia. This account is drawn from
interviews with Forest Brothers who survived and relatives of those who
died, and from documents and photographs from Soviet KGB files. It
reflects Estonian courage and humor, the faith and sacrifice of a
people suppressed, and the indomitable determination of a free nation
to regain independence. (Description from Amazon.com.)
Exiled
at four years of age to Siberia by Soviet authorities after the
occupation of Estonia during World War II, in their process of what is
now called ethnic cleansing, the author finds herself in the bitter
harshness of the barren and frigid region, where she and her mother,
along with many others, were destined for extermination. Witness to the
suffering and death of helpless women and children, including her
younger brother, nearly losing her mother to encephalitis, and herself
going through hunger and disease, she miraculously survives. Her life
unfolds in the remote parts of the vast Soviet Union, continues in
postwar Estonia, follows in post-Stalinist Moscow during the period of
the ‘thaw,’ where she manages to obtain an excellent education and
launches a successful scientific carrier in academia while she cares
for tragically ill mother, and then starts again from scratch in
America. The book provides a fascinating eyewitness account of the
cruelties and absurdities of daily life under a totalitarian regime
where terror and fear is a way of life and ‘food for soul’—arts and
literature—substitute for real nourishment and other real life
necessities. It’s a story of a tragedy, endurance, and luck with a
happy ending. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Finnish
The
105-day war between Finland and the Soviet Union in the winter of
1939-1940 has been overshadowed by the larger conflicts of the Second
World War, which followed closely after it. The courageous resistance
of the only neighbor of Stalin's Russia, which fought the Red Army and
survived as a free and independent nation merits this closer look.
Although the diplomatic background of the Winter War has been covered
before, this is the first substantial English-language study of its
dramatic military encounters. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
In
1939, tiny Finland waged war—the kind of war that spawns
legends—against the mighty Soviet Union, and yet their epic struggle
has been largely ignored. Guerrillas on skis, heroic single-handed
attacks on tanks, unfathomable endurance, and the charismatic
leadership of one of this century's true military geniuses—these are
the elements of both the Finnish victory and a gripping tale of war. (From description on publisher’s web site.) German
The
genocidal barbarism of the Nazi forces has been well documented. What
is little known is the fate of fifteen million German civilians who
found themselves on the wrong side of new postwar borders. All over
Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of communities that had been
established for many centuries were either expelled or killed. Over two
million Germans did not survive. Some of these people had supported
Hitler, but the great majority were guiltless. In A Terrible Revenge, de Zayas describes this horrible retribution. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Truth can be stranger—and more fascinating—than fiction. Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories from the underbelly of the most perfected surveillance state of all time, the former East Germany. Funder meets Miriam, the sixteen-year-old who might have started World War III. She visits the regime's cartographer, obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary 'Mik Jegger' of the east, once declared by the authorities 'no longer to exist'. And she finds spies and Stasi men, still loyal to the Firm as they wait for the next revolution. Stasiland is a lyrical, at times
funny account of the courage some people found to withstand the
dictatorship, and the consequences for those who collaborated. Funder
explores the daily chaos and harsh beauty of Berlin, a place where some
people are trying to remember, and others just as hard to forget. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Hungarian
The definitive account of one of the largest spontaneous, leaderless revolutions the world has ever seen — tragically crushed by the Soviet Union in 1956. Triggered by a confluence of fateful events in 1956, Hungarian students led hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in a spontaneous revolt against the Soviet-sponsored government. They succeeded for just two weeks, until the USSR released a vengeful blitzkrieg. More than 200,000 Hungarian refugees fled to Austria; many made their way to the U.S. The true story of the uprising had to await the fall of the Iron Curtain. A Radio Free
Europe journalist, the author sensed the importance of that moment in
time and saved his notes, articles, and dispatches, and uses it all to
create a picture of life in that exhilarating and tragic time. This is
by far the most comprehensive account of the revolt. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Twelve Days is a riveting day-by-day account of the defining moment of the Cold War—the inspiring but brutally crushed Hungarian Uprising. Victor
Sebestyen, a journalist whose own family fled Hungary, gives us a
totally fresh account, incorporating newly released official documents,
his family's diaries, and eyewitness testimony. We witness the
thrilling first days when—armed only with a few rifles, petrol bombs,
and desperate courage—the people of Budapest rose up against their
Soviet masters and nearly succeeded. As the world watched in amazement,
it looked as though the Hungarians might humble the Soviet empire. But
the Soviets were willing to resort to brutal lengths—and, sadly, the
West was prepared to let them. Dramatic, vivid, and authoritative, Twelve Days adds immeasurably to our understanding of this historic event and reminds us of the unquenchable human desire for freedom. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Korean
North
Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its
leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any
nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to
its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is
the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story
to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and
providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror
story, part historical document, part memoir, part political tract,
this record of one man's suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing
sorrowful chapter of modern history. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Hyok Kang was eighteen when he escaped from North Korea, a country locked away from the outside world. This personal, illustrated account of school days in a rigidly communist institution and everyday life with his family and community provides a rare glimpse of this secretive nation. His shocking and moving portrayal bears witness to this spirited young boy’s resilience and survival in a society forced to operate under the shadow of labour camps, public executions and the deception of UN representatives by Korean officials. When the famine comes so too does death by starvation of friends and close ones, and Hyok Kang watches as his classmates drop out of school one by one, too weak to attend. All this is normal. After all, the propaganda North Koreans are fed by their government insists that compared to the rest of the world, this is paradise! Hyok Kang’s childhood and
courageous escape through China, Vietnam and Cambodia to South Korea is
a remarkable story that goes to the heart of a nation living under a
disturbing delusion of ‘paradise.’ (From description on publisher’s web site.) Latvian
Kalniete's
book is a moving and eloquent testimony to her family and to the
Latvian nation—to their shared fate during more than fifty years of
occupation. It is an indictment of the inhuman repression of both the
Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Above all, it is the story of human
survival, and it has become the most-translated Latvian book in recent
history. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Part history, part autobiography, Walking Since Daybreak
tells the tragic story of the Baltic nations before, during, and after
World War II. Personal stories of the survival or destruction of Modris
Eksteins's family members lend an intimate dimension to this vast
narrative of those millions who have surged back and forth across the
lowlands bordering the Baltic Sea. The immense cataclysm of World War
II devastated the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia,
sending many of their inhabitants to the ends of the earth. Eksteins's
two-pronged narrative is a haunting portrait of national loss and the
struggle of a displaced family caught in the maw of history. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Lithuanian
Odyssey of Hope is the life story of Joseph Kazickas, a Lithuanian immigrant who found freedom and success in America after a dramatic escape from his country during World War II but never lost his longing and devotion for his beloved homeland. The Kazickas “journey”—finding
courage in the face of danger and home in the world of exile— spans
most of the 20th century. It traverses the globe and covers the history
of Lithuania from independence in 1918 through the Nazi invasion and 50
years of Russian occupation. When finally, independence was regained in
1991 after the many years he and so many worked to keep the dream
alive, Kazickas embarked upon a mission to help bring economic
prosperity to democratic Lithuania. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Mennonite
A father and mother plead to their relatives in Canada: "Remember us. Do not forget us." Their children write: "What will become of us?" Written from their prison barrack behind the barbed wire, their letters travel to a tiny prairie town in Canada. Yet, writing letters to the "West" during Stalin's Reign was a crime. NKVD documents confirm that "contacts abroad" were forbidden. Somehow, a subversive network of mail delivery was found during one of the most horrific eras in human history. Men, women and children were sentenced to Stalin's vast Gulag of over 2000 prison camps. The survival rate was one winter. The plea to "Remember us" describes not only the horror, but also the strength of the human spirit in the bleakest circumstances. Remarkably,
the world knows little of these catastrophic events. But the letters
change this. These are first-hand eye-witness accounts written in the
moment; not years later after time has eroded the experience. Their
immediate readers (relatives in Canada) will remember. Their children
will remember. Now we too can remember what happened. We can honor the
victims and commemorate the survivors. The letters confirm the
day-to-day experiences of those in the prison camps. (Description from book’s web site.)
Mennonites
of Dutch/German ancestry began emigrating from Prussia and settling in
the Ukraine in 1789, following invitations and guarantees granted by
Catherine II of Russia. One hundred years later, the Mennonites in
Russia had prospered. They now numbered some 70,000 persons living in
progressive settlements, leading the way in farming and manufacturing.
The Mennonites who settled in Russia kept their language, their
religion, and their culture intact. But as the nineteenth century drew
to a close, Mennonite community identity was increasingly seen as a
threat. There was first a drive for "russification" under the Czars;
there then was increasing suspicion of all things German with the
outbreak of the First World War; and finally the Bolshevik Revolution
brought Christianity and prosperity into question. The Second World War
and its brutal Stalinist aftermath succeeded in destroying life in the
Mennonite colonies. The first person accounts translated here tell the
stories of people who almost miraculously survived successive waves of
revolution, civil war, assassination, economic and political purges,
and arbitrary arrest and banishment. The stories of these survivors are
just now beginning to be published, in both German and Russian. Sarah
Dyck's selection and skillful translation of these memoirs opens a rare
window through which English readers can begin to grasp the reality of
life in the Soviet empire for those judged to be "enemies of the
People." These stories provide graphic and personal documentation of a
land and a people in turmoil. (Description from book’s web site.) Polish
Often overlooked in accounts of World War II is the Soviet Union's quiet yet brutal campaign against Polish citizens, a campaign that included, we now know, war crimes for which the Soviet and Russian governments only recently admitted culpability. Standing in the shadow of the Holocaust, this episode of European history is often overlooked. Wesley Adamczyk's gripping memoir, When God Looked the Other Way, now gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Soviet barbarism. Adamczyk was a young Polish boy when he was deported with his mother and siblings from their comfortable home in Luck to Soviet Siberia in May of 1940. His father, a Polish Army officer, was taken prisoner by the Red Army and eventually became one of the victims of the Katyn massacre, in which tens of thousands of Polish officers were slain at the hands of the Soviet secret police. The family's separation and deportation in 1940 marked the beginning of a ten-year odyssey in which the family endured fierce living conditions, meager food rations, chronic displacement, and rampant disease, first in the Soviet Union and then in Iran, where Adamczyk's mother succumbed to exhaustion after mounting a harrowing escape from the Soviets. Wandering from country to country and living in refugee camps and the homes of strangers, Adamczyk struggled to survive and maintain his dignity amid the horrors of war. When God Looked the Other Way is a memoir
of a boyhood lived in unspeakable circumstances, a book that not only
illuminates one of the darkest periods of European history but also
traces the loss of innocence and the fight against despair that took
root in one young boy. It is also a book that offers a stark picture of
the unforgiving nature of Communism and its champions. Unflinching and
poignant, When God Looked the Other Way will stand as a
testament to the trials of a family during wartime and an intimate
chronicle of episodes yet to receive their historical due. (Description from publisher’s web site.)
The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government. Three
leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at
Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver—now subsumed under “Katyn”—present 122
documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes
coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents,
with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet
killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the
Katyn question in Soviet/Russian–Polish relations up to the present. (Description from publisher’s web site.)
Twenty years ago, Allen Paul wrote the first post-communist account of one of the greatest but least-known tragedies of the 20th century: Stalin’s annihilation of Poland’s officer corps and massive deportation of so-called “bourgeoisie elements” to Siberia. Today, these brutal events are symbolized by one word, Katyn—a crime that still bitterly divides Poles and Russians. Paul’s richly updated account covers Russian attempts to recant their admission of guilt for the murders in Katyn Forest and includes recently translated documents from Russian military archives, eyewitness accounts of two perpetrators, and secret official minutes published here for the first time that confirm that U.S. government cover-up of the crime continued long after the war ended. Paul’s
masterful narrative recreates what daily life was like for three Polish
families amid momentous events of World War II—from the treacherous
Nazi-Soviet invasion in 1939 to a rigged election in 1947 that sealed
Poland’s doom. The patriarch of each family was among the Polish
officers personally ordered by Stalin to be shot. One of the families
suffered daily repression under the German General Government. Like
thousands of other Poles, two of the families were deported to Siberia,
where they nearly died from forced labor, starvation, and neglect.
Through painstaking research, the author reconstructs the lives of
these families including such stories as a miraculous escape on the
last transport of Poles leaving Russia and a mother’s daring ski trek
over the Carpathian Mountains to rescue a daughter she had not seen in
six years. At the heart of the drama is the Poles’ uncommon belief in
“victory in defeat”—that their struggles made them strong and that
freedom and independence, inevitably, would be regained. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Among the great tragedies that befell Poland during World War II was the forced deportation of its citizens by the Soviet Union during the first Soviet occupation of that country between 1939 and 1941. This
is the story of that brutal Soviet ethnic cleansing campaign told in
the words of some of the survivors. It is an unforgettable human drama
of excruciating martyrdom in the Gulag. For example, one witness
reports: “A young woman who had given birth on the train threw herself
and her newborn under the wheels of an approaching train.” Survivors
also tell the story of events after the “amnesty.” “Our suffering is
simply indescribable. We have spent weeks now sleeping in lice-infested
dirty rags in train stations,” wrote the Milewski family. Details are
also given on the non-European countries that extended a helping hand
to the exiles in their hour of need. (Description from publisher’s web site.) Romanian
Victim of Stalinist-era terror, Lena Constante was arrested on trumped-up charges of "espionage" and sentenced to twelve years in Romanian prisons. The Silent Escape is the extraordinary account of the first eight years of her incarceration—years of solitary confinement during which she was tortured, starved, and daily humiliated. The only woman to have endured isolation so
long in Romanian jails, Constante is also one of the few women
political prisoners to have written about her ordeal. Unlike other more
political prison diaries, this book draws us into the practical and
emotional experiences of everyday prison life. Candidly, eloquently,
Constante describes the physical and psychological abuses that were the
common lot of communist-state political prisoners. She also recounts
the particular humiliations she suffered as a woman, including that of
male guards watching her in the bathroom. Constante survived by
escaping into her mind—and finally by discovering the "language of the
walls," which enabled her to communicate with other female inmates. A
powerful story of totalitarianism and human endurance, this work makes
an important contribution to the literature of "prison notebooks." (From description on publisher’s web site.)
This
is the first general single-volume history in English of Romania under
Gheorghiu-Dej, its first Communist ruler and predecessor of Nicolae
Ceausescu. Based extensively on Securitate and Party documents
inaccessible under the Communist regime and consulted since 1990 by
only a handful of scholars, the book focuses on the use of terror by
the Communists and the attempt to transform Romanian society totally
through Communist rule. The Ceausescu regime, for all its appalling
abuses of human dignity, never repeated the tactics of mass arrests and
wholesale deportations that were a feature of most of the Gheorghiu-Dej
era. The book provides a case-study in totalitarian methods of change,
giving the reader an idea of what it was like to live in the Romania of
Gheorghiu-Dej. (From description on Amazon.com.)
Following the Communist takeover of Romania in 1945, Dr. Stanciu Stroia refused to join the party, suffering professional humiliation and political persecution. He was arrested in 1951 and sentenced to seven years in prison; his estate was nationalized, his family exiled, and his practice confiscated. Ill with scurvy, he survived the prison ordeal and wrote his memoir, despite the risk of being detained again. The
book includes thirty-six pages of original photographs and one thousand
never-before-published names of political detainees. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Slovenian
In
May 1945, the British Army in Austria put 12,000 Slovene soldiers on
board trains. The Slovenes thought they were on their way to freedom in
Italy. Their true destination was Slovenia, and death. "Slovenia 1945"
follows the fate of Slovene anti-Communists who fled to Austria at the
end of World War II. The British Army sent them back home, where their
war-time enemies, Tito's Partisans, put them to death. Six thousand
civilians narrowly escaped the same fate, after intervention by British
Red Cross and Quaker aid workers. Based on moving interviews with
survivors, the story follows the massacre of the soldiers, the
survivors' tough years in refugee camps and triumph in making new lives
in Argentina, the USA, Canada and Britain. The book recounts how deeply
issues of wartime collaboration and the Communist domination of the
Partisan movement divide Slovenes today. (From description on book’s web site.) Ukrainian
The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside—even from other areas of the Soviet Union—from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million—more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I. Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow
is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in
the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's
history. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
Seven million people in the "breadbasket of Europe" were deliberately starved to death at Stalin's command. This story has been suppressed for half a century. Now, a survivor speaks. In 1929, in an effort to destroy the well-to-do peasant farmers, Joseph Stalin ordered the collectivization of all Ukrainian farms. In the ensuing years, a brutal Soviet campaign of confiscations, terrorizing, and murder spread throughout Ukrainian villages. What food remained after the seizures was insufficient to support the population. In the resulting famine as many as seven million Ukrainians starved to death. This
poignant eyewitness account of the Ukrainian famine by one of the
survivors relates the young Miron Dolot's day-to-day confrontation with
despair and death—his helplessness as friends and family were arrested
and abused—and his gradual realization, as he matured, of the absolute
control the Soviets had over his life and the lives of his people. But
it is also the story of personal dignity in the face of horror and
humiliation. And it is an indictment of a chapter in the Soviet past
that is still not acknowledged by Russian leaders. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
The
Soviet Man-made famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine claimed the lives of
millions of people, yet until recently it has remained veiled in
obscurity. This pioneering volume, which appeared before the
publication of Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow and the
establishment of the US Congressional Committee on the Famine, was one
of the first scholarly efforts to analyze the famine. (From description on publisher’s web site.) Vietnamese
This comprehensive review of the gulag system instituted in communist Vietnam explores the three-pronged approach that was used to convert the rebellious South into a full-fledged communist country after 1975. This
book attempts to retrace the path of these imprisoned people from the
last months of the war to their escape from Vietnam and explores the
emotions that gripped them throughout their stay in the camps.
Individual reactions to the camps varied depending on philosophical,
emotional and moral beliefs. This reconstruction of those years serves
as a memoir for all who were incarcerated in the bamboo gulags. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
The biggest diaspora in Vietnamese history occurred between 1975 and 1992, when more than two million people fled by boat to escape North Vietnam’s oppressive communist regime. Before this well-known exodus from Vietnam’s shores, however, there was a massive population shift within the country. In 1954, one million fled from north to south to escape war, famine, and the communist land reform campaign. Many of these refugees went on to flee Vietnam altogether in the 1970s and 1980s, and the experiences of 1954 influenced the later diaspora in other ways as well. This book reassesses the causes and
dynamics of the 1975–92 diaspora. It begins with a discussion of
Vietnam from 1939 to 1954, then looks closely at the 1954 “Operation
Exodus” and the subsequent resettlements. From here the focus turns to
the later events that drove hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee
their homeland in 1975 and the years that followed. Planning for
escape, choosing routes, facing pirates at sea, and surviving the
refugee camps are among the many topics covered. Stories of individual
escapees are provided throughout. The book closes with a look at the
struggles and achievements of the resettled Vietnamese. (From description on publisher’s web site.)
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Cambodia, 1975-1978
Survival in the Killing Fields
Stay Alive, My Son
Hungry Ghosts
Life and Death in Shanghai 
Prisoner of Mao
Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag 
In Tito s Death Marches and Extermination Camps
Goli Otok: Hell in the Adriatic
Unvanquished: Cuba's Resistance to Fidel Castro
Against All Hope: A Memoir of Life in Castro's Gulag
Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990 
The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968-1970 
War in the Woods
The Way it Was
The White Death: The Epic of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War
A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940 
A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans 
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall 
Explosion: The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
This is Paradise!: My North Korean Childhood 
With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows 
Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II and the Heart of Our Century 
Odyssey
of Hope: The Story of a Lithuanian Immigrant's Escape from Communism to
Freedom in America and the Return to His Beloved Homeland 
Remember Us - Letters from Stalin's Gulag (1930-37) Volume One: The Regehr Family 
The Silence Echoes: Memoirs of Trauma and Tears (Mennonite reflections) 
When God Looked the Other Way: An Odyssey of War, Exile, and Redemption
Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series)
Katyn: Stalin’s Massacre and the Triumph of Truth
The Polish Deportees of World War II: Recollections of Removal to the Soviet Union and Dispersal Throughout the World 
The Silent Escape: The Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons 
Communist Terror in Romania: Gheorghiu-Dej and the Police State, 1948-1965 
My Second University: Memories from Romanian Communist Prisons 
Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival After World War II
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine 
Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust
Famine in Ukraine, 1932–1933
The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam
The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975–1992