Bogdan is a pensioner living in Minsk, Belarus. He was born in Lviv, Ukraine. His grandfather still lived during times when Lviv (formerly known as Lemberg) was a part of Austria before WWI. He always used to tell Bogdan that those were the best times when everyone was living well…
Ostblog Posts
Lena is originally from the Tajik capital Dushanbe. As is the case with many from the former USSR, her family history could be the material for a movie script. Her mother is Russian, and her father was German. Her great-grandfather had been an industrialist in Donetsk, then in the Russian…
Eduard Kaufmann was born in Tula, Russia. But as both his parents have German roots, his family moved to Offenbach in Western Germany when he was 10 years old. He said that he was not interested in going back to Russia at all and that he does not even feel…
Gilbert is a former inmate of the infamous Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen in East Berlin. He was always a quite outspoken critic of the politics in East Germany and a member of the church, which first got him excluded from the FDJ (GDR youth organisation) and later from his desired…
„When I was watching the news that night and this central committee guy announced that we could travel abroad from now on, I could not believe it. I thought it was a mistake. But the next day we went to the border fence and my husband started cutting it with…