The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Bologna, Italy. November 1920. Ennio Gnudi was a humble railway worker. He was also a revolutionary communist. In the recent local elections, he had been elected to the council. Now, he had risen to be Mayor of the city. The Socialist Party’s radical left was about to...
Shari J Ryan, many congrats on the new book. How hard was it to find inspiration for the plot of The Girl with the Diary amid the horrors and misery of the holocaust? Thank you so much! It wasn’t hard for me to find inspiration for the plot of The Girl with the Diary....
Sometimes in life when realization hits, making us aware that we don’t know exactly who we are or how we got there. For some, a life-changing event is the only window to a view of our world in a different light. This is where my story began. A person who had been a...
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger’s collection of short stories, Souvenirs from Ukraine, which are based on true events, shows the turmoil of the Ukrainian people during the Second World War. It is heart-breaking and captivating to read. The first story tells the tale of a...
Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger, you grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota in a Ukrainian community that you’ve stated had many factions within. Do you know how those factions would view the Russian invasion? I don’t know a single Ukrainian in America, or Ukrainian-American, who...
Mission France Was it worth it? In 1941 Hitler issued an order, Nacht und Nebel Erlass, the Night and Fog Decree. This ordered political activists to be ‘disappeared.’ On 6 July, 1944, Sonia Olschanesky, Vera Leigh, Diana Rowden, and Andree Borrell, female SOE...
During World War Two, 39 women were specially selected to work in a secretive, clandestine and mainly male domain: the Special Operations Executive, French Section (SOE F). Ranging from housewives and mothers to shop assistants and countesses, these women were put...
On a Saturday in 2012, journalist Simon Kuper had the highly sought-after opportunity to interview the last surviving traitor of the Cold War, George Blake, in his dacha (home) outside Moscow. As it turned out, Kuper is believed to have been the last Western...
"Glory to Ukraine!" In 1991, 2004 and 2014, the Maidan in Kyiv was the stage for three major events that etched Ukraine into the European consciousness. These were the fall of the Soviet Union, the Orange Revolution and the Euromaidan respectively, the last of which...
1939-1945 As I Remember A fascinating account of life within a Yeomanry regiment during the Second World War, this book merits a place on the bookshelf of any serious student of Yeomanry units at war. Leslie Wheeler became the Quartermaster and senior non-commissioned...
