Download or read book Escape From Behind The Iron Curtain written by Silke Nied and published by Booktango. This book was released on 2013-06-30 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the true story of an escape from East Germany for Freedom. My familiy planned this escape carefully and with a lot of detail. It is a very scary thought to risk your life, just to be free, however, it was the only way out.

Download or read book Escape over the Iron Curtain written by CRISTINA ROSI and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ESCAPE OVER THE IRON CURTAIN is a work of fiction, based on the true story of a young girls escape from former Socialist Romania. In search for a true identity and spirituality she ends up in New York City, where she has plenty of freedom to create her own reality and to follow her dreams. Bound by the invisible chains of poverty Anna encounters unexpected situations and learns many difficult and sometimes uplifting lessons. Glimpses in the life of a misguided teenager in former Socialist Romania, and her brave escape into a new life facing unexpected and puzzling situations. They sat me next to one of the officers. I had no idea where they were taking me. We drove for about an hour. It was so dark that I couldnt see anything except for the road in front of us illuminated by the headlights. We were in a mountainous terrain and the Jeep was taking many turns. As I was getting used to the darkness I could distinguish silhouettes of trees by the side of the road, black phantoms rushing into the night. The Jeep stopped by a brick wall with barbed wire on top. A large gate opened and we drove in In search for an identity and plagued by poverty she joins a spiritual community hoping to fulfill the void in her life, only to find herself immersed in a web of emotional drama.

Download or read book Escapes from Behind the Iron Curtain written by Zoltan Bartok and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author was accused of sabotage on the 10th anniversary of the 1956 revolution. He was 17 years old. He tried to escape through the Hungarian-Yugoslav border with one of his classmates. Caught by border patrol, he was jailed and treated very badly. He barely survived the month-long ordeal. Stamped as an enemy of the state, he was taken to a labor camp at age 19. He had to do forced labor instead of regular military service. Against all odds, he was able to brake free from the communist bloc at age 23. Of course, given the brainwashing his generation was subjected to, when he reached the Italian shore, swimming from Yugoslavia during a night in August of 1973, his quest for freedom was just beginning. After spending 6 months in Italy, he was admitted to the USA as a political refuge. In 1976, after the communist governments signed the Human Rights Declaration at the 1975 Helsinki Conference, he believed that the amnesty the Hungarian government issued was credible and returned to his homeland. How he managed to free himself again and survive the torture he had to endure when captured on the Yugoslav-Italian border in the fall of 1977 is also described in "Escapes from Behind the Iron Curtain".

Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

Download or read book The Picnic written by Matthew Longo and published by Bodley Head. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dramatic and intensely moving reconstruction of the greatest border breach in Cold War history and its tumultuous aftermath. In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border between Hungary and Austria, awaiting an opportunity, fearing prison, surveilled by lurking Stasi agents. The stage was set for the greatest border breach in Cold War history: that day hundreds would cross from the Communist East to the longed-for freedom of the West. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union - the so-called end of history - all would flow from those dramatic hours. Drawing on dozens of original interviews with those involved - activists and border guards, escapees and secret police, as well as the last Communist prime minister of Hungary - Matthew Longo reconstructs this world-shaping event and its tumultuous aftermath. Freedom had been won but parents had been abandoned and families divided. Love affairs faltered and new lives had to be built from scratch. The Picnic is the story of a moment when the tide of history turned. It shows how freedom can be both dream and disillusionment, and how all we take for granted can vanish in an instant.

Download or read book Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain written by Jim Willis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-01-24 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling book describes how everyday people courageously survived under repressive Communist regimes until the voices and actions of rebellious individuals resulted in the fall of the Iron Curtain in Europe. Part of Greenwood's Daily Life through History series, Daily Life behind the Iron Curtain enables today's generations to understand what it was like for those living in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, particularly the period from 1961 to 1989, the era during which these people-East Germans in particular-lived in the imposing shadow of the Berlin Wall. An introductory chapter discusses the Russian Revolution, the end of World War II, and the establishment of the Socialist state, clarifying the reasons for the construction of the Berlin Wall. Many historical anecdotes bring these past experiences to life, covering all aspects of life behind the Iron Curtain, including separation of families and the effects on family life, diet, rationing, media, clothing and trends, strict travel restrictions, defection attempts, and the evolving political climate. The final chapter describes Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall and the slow assimilation of East into West, and examines Europe after Communism.

Download or read book Freedom Flight written by Frank Iszak and published by Morgan James Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting account of a daring escape from Communist Hungary in a twin-engine plane: “I couldn’t put it down” —San Diego Union-Tribune. On the rainy afternoon of Friday, July 13, 1956, seven desperate young people boarded a twin engine DC-3 in the People’s Republic of Hungary, with the intention of diverting it to West Germany. They had no weapons, no map, and no idea whether the plane carried enough fuel to get them there. They would have to brave the gun of the security officer on board, the wild maneuvers of the pilot, the Russian MiG fighters in hot pursuit, and a harrowing flight over the stormy Alps, without navigation. Failure would mean certain death. And a spectacular escape from tyranny was born . . .

Download or read book Iron Curtain Escape written by Irene Kucholick and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-23 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irene Kucholick was still inspired by her childhood adventures where once she sneaked aboard a forbidden train only to find it packed with wounded soldiers from the Russian front. Determined from that moment on to be a nurse, nineteen-year-old Irene donned dresses again and pursued her vocation. Fielding questions about politics from Examining Boards, she entered nursing school and learned about "capitalistic" venereal diseases. Soon she tread the fine line between comrades at work eager to inform on her and planning a freedomless-future with her beau. Her own convictions and courageous missteps ran her afowl of the Communist party and forced Irene into her last harrowing flight for the border and the freedom which lay beyond.

Download or read book The Collapse written by Mary Sarotte and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West. The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident. In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin. We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control. Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.

Download or read book Special Forces Berlin written by James Stejskal and published by Casemate Publishers. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The previously untold story of a Cold War spy unit, “one of the best examples of applied unconventional warfare in special operations history” (Small Wars Journal). It is a little-known fact that during the Cold War, two US Army Special Forces detachments were stationed far behind the Iron Curtain in West Berlin. The existence and missions of the two detachments were highly classified secrets. The massive armies of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies posed a huge threat to the nations of Western Europe. US military planners decided they needed a plan to slow the expected juggernaut, if and when a war began. This plan was Special Forces Berlin. Their mission—should hostilities commence—was to wreak havoc behind enemy lines and buy time for vastly outnumbered NATO forces to conduct a breakout from the city. In reality, it was an ambitious and extremely dangerous mission, even suicidal. Highly trained and fluent in German, each of these one hundred soldiers and their successors was allocated a specific area. They were skilled in clandestine operations, sabotage, and intelligence tradecraft, and were able to act, if necessary, as independent operators, blending into the local population and working unseen in a city awash with spies looking for information on their every move. Special Forces Berlin left a legacy of a new type of soldier, expert in unconventional warfare, that was sought after for other deployments, including the attempted rescue of American hostages from Tehran in 1979. With the US government officially acknowledging their existence in 2014, their incredible story can now be told—by one of their own.

Download or read book Faith and Devotion written by Laszlo Geder and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2007-12-12 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the occupation of Hungary in 1945, Stalin crushed the democratically elected Hungarian Parliament and the political parties. A Communist dictatorship was established. The Secret Police, directed by the Soviet KGB, persecuted, arrested the members of the opposition and closed the escape route to the West with the Iron Curtain. The lives of many families were destroyed by the Communist system. This is a story of a family, where the father dies in 1946 and the mother marries an American Hungarian who visits Hungary in 1948. The marriage is approved by the Communist authorities, but the wife and her two teenage children from her first marriage are not allowed to leave Hungary to the U.S. They try to escape through the Iron Curtain. They are caught and imprisoned. After 9 years of separation, the wife and her daughter are allowed to leave Hungary, but her son, a young physician can not follow. He never gives up plans to join his family in America. This finally happens in 1974 when he misleads the ever watching Secret Police. He establishes a successful career in Medicine and Medical Research in the U.S.

Download or read book Iron Curtain Memoirs written by Irene Kucholick and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 732 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story about what it was like to grow up in a Germany, dominated by Adolf Hitler and feared Nazis; of what civilian life was like during the war that Hitler thrust upon us with a destructive fury; what life was like in our section of my native land--East Germany--when, after the war, we were released from the hand of the Nazis only to be seized at once by the equally strangling bonds of Communism. This complete set contains all three of Irene's memoirs from before WWII to her escape as well as additional photos, maps, and a historical timeline not available in previous releases.

Download or read book Iron Curtain Memoirs written by Irene Kucholick and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-27 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a story about what it was like to grow up in a Germany, dominated by Adolf Hitler and feared Nazis; of what civilian life was like during the war that Hitler thrust upon us with a destructive fury; what life was like in our section of my native land--East Germany--when, after the war, we were released from the hand of the Nazis only to be seized at once by the equally strangling bonds of Communism. This complete set contains all three of Irene's memoirs from before WWII to her escape as well as additional photos, maps, and a historical timeline not available in previous releases.

Download or read book The Biggest Hole in the Iron Curtain written by Levente Batizy and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Behind the Iron Curtain written by Jeffrey M. Byford and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines various pedagogical approaches and historical background associated with East Germany’s role throughout the Cold War, including methods of differentiated instruction, the beginnings of East Germany, the creation of the Ministry for State Security, the Berlin Wall, life and society of East Germans, and the fall of communism.

Download or read book Escape from Communism written by Dumitru Sandru and published by Chivileri Publishing. This book was released on 2013-11-10 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life under communism is cruel and inhumane. Commit the smallest political infraction, and the secret police will arrest you. The only ray of hope is the West, but getting out from communism is difficult. Communist countries have a “Berlin Wall” around them. It is a crime to escape by crossing the border illegally, and anyone caught is beaten and imprisoned, sometimes even shot. I was eighteen, and I was living in hell. However, I would rather have died than keep living as a communist slave. This is my story of what happened and how I reached freedom.

Download or read book Breakaway written by Tal Pinchevsky and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From behind the Iron Curtain onto hockey's biggest stage The incredible true story of the trailblazing men who risked everything to pass through the Iron Curtain and become NHL superstars, Breakaway is a thrilling look at the untold stories that changed hockey forever. From midnight meetings in secluded forests, to evading capture by military and police forces, this is the story of the brave players whose passion of the game trumped all. Featuring exclusive interviews with the legends of the ice who put everything on the line just for the chance to play on the world's greatest stage, many of them speaking about their experiences for the very first time, the book looks at how Peter Stastny, Igor Larionov, Petr Klima, Petr Nedved, Sergei Fedorov, Slava Fetisov, Alexander Mogilny, and other hockey superstars captured the imaginations of fans around the world. The remarkable true story of some of the true pioneers of hockey, told for the very first time, often in the players' own words A fascinating look behind the Iron Curtain and the trials these brave men endured for a taste of freedom, through their love of the game Looks at how some of the NHL's greatest players made it onto North American ice As much a tale of espionage and social history as a gripping hockey chronicle, Breakaway sheds light on the untold stories of some of the sports' most inspiring heroes.