The last time I was in Romania, with my husband at Peles Palace It’s official and I can’t wait! I am going back to Romania in August. The current staff – over 100 Romanians and only one American – have invited all of us who were part of the team in 1990 – just a […]

When I lived in Eastern Europe and regularly traveled to 18 countries, while I loved all of them, some captured my heart even more than the others. One of those was Poland. I was in awe of the indomitable spirit of the Poles, a nation squeezed between the two 20th century tyrants of Germany and Russia, a […]

Twenty years ago today, while many of us were tucked safely in our homes watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on TV, freedom came to Romania. Romania followed Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, as Communism tumbled like dominoes in Eastern Europe. This revolution, however, was different. It wasn’t a peaceable exchange of power; it involved […]

December 15 is the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Romanian Revolution. It ignited in Timisoara, a border city, on the date set for the militia to force a Hungarian pastor, László Tökés, into exile. Believers of both Romanian and Hungarian descent made a human chain around his apartment block, stopping the eviction. Fighting soon […]

A chunk of the Berlin Wall at the Reagan Library On November 9th, the world will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall being torn down. For 28 years, the wall separated families and kept East Germans imprisoned without basic freedoms. Its demise, which occurred after some of the Eastern European countries had already ousted […]