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And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was. .Christopher Hitchens
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45, 000 sections of reinforced concrete–three tons each. Nearly 300 watchtowers. Over 250 dog runs. Twenty bunkers. Sixty five miles of anti-vehicle trenches–signal wire, barbed wire, beds of nails. Over 11, 000 armed guards. A death strip of sand, well-raked to reveal footprints.200 ordinary people shot dead following attempts to escape the communist regime.96 miles of concrete wall. Not your typical holiday destination. J F Kennedy said the Berlin Wall was a better option than a war. In TDTL, the Anglo-German Bishop family from the pebbledashed English suburb of Oaking argue about this–among other–notions while driving to Cold War Berlin, through all the border checks, with a plan to visit both sides of it. .Joanna Campbell