Sergey Aleksashenko was Russia’s Deputy Finance Minister between 1993 and 1995 and former deputy chairman of the Central Bank of Russia and former chairman of Merrill Lynch Russia. He is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Vladimir Ashkenazy regularly makes guest appearances with major orchestras around the world. Conducting has formed the larger part of his activities for the past 30 years, but he maintains his devotion to the piano, these days mostly in the recording studio where he continues to build his comprehensive recording catalogue.
Andreas Austilat was 32 when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and was writing for the West Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. He married the girlfriend he had at the time and they have two children. He still writes for Der Tagesspiegel and has published travel guides about the area around Berlin.
Betty Barr went to Wellesley College in the USA after the tumultuous events of Shanghai in 1949, then did teacher training at Jordanhill College in Glasgow. She taught in Glasgow, Hong Kong and Shanghai, experiencing the end of the Cultural Revolution there in the 1970s. After teaching in Fife for nine years, she married George Wang in Shanghai, where she worked as a British council lecturer for ten years. She retired in 2002.
Ingrid Bartel was working as an accountant in West Berlin when the relaxation of travel restrictions allowed her to see her cousin Eva Eberbeck again after a long separation. Until her retirement in 2003 she was an adviser in employment and collective bargaining law. Throughout the years, her relationship with her cousin Eva Eberbeck has remained close and when the Berlin Wall fell, she instinctively knew that her cousin would come the following day with her family. Without hearing a word from her, she prepared everything for their visit, and indeed, that evening they all arrived.
Ciro Bianchi is a prominent Cuban intellectual. He is a journalist and interviewer, and for over 40 years has been one of the main architects of Cuban literary journalism. His work has been published in the magazine Cuba Internacional, and he is a regular columnist for the newspaper Juventud Rebelde.
Gisela Bilski worked for the East German railway, as a train driver for Berlin’s overground trains, as a fire safety inspector, and eventually as deputy manager of building control of operations. She retired in 1989. She never joined the SED Party. Her brother and parents fled to the West, but she remained in East Berlin. Bilski married in 1955, got divorced in 1963 and has four children. Since the early 1990s she has volunteered for the Green Party as an adviser for transport policy and still works in an honorary capacity for the rail union.
Jürgen Blask completed an apprenticeship as an engine fitter and worked in the metal industry until 1963. He then applied to customs and held posts among others at Checkpoint Charlie and Tempelhof Airport. Since his youth he has had a keen interest in photography and he has now turned his hand to painting. He married in 1964 and his daughter was born in the same year. His wife died in 1988 and he remarried in 1995, becoming stepfather to another daughter. He retired in 2003.
Jerzy Borowczak is a politician and trade union activist. A close associate of Lech Wałęsa, he was dismissed from the Lenin Shipyard during the period of Martial Law. He was reinstated in 1989 and became chairman of Solidarity at the shipyard. He is director of the Solidarity Centre Foundation and, since 2010, has represented the Civic Platform party in the Polish parliament.
Bogdan Borusewicz continued his democratic activism after the 1980 strike in Gdansk. He went underground during the period of Martial Law in Poland and was imprisoned in 1986. He has been a long-term member of the Polish parliament and is currently Deputy Marshal of the Senate of the Republic of Poland. He was Acting President of Poland for one day in 2010.
Guy Bower worked as a FedEx Airbus A400 captain after his retirement from the US Air Force. A food and wine enthusiast, he is the host of The Good Life radio show and regularly attends major national wine events and judges at several national and international wine competitions. Bower teaches food and wine pairing classes at Wichita State University and has a Level 1 Sommelier certificate with the Court of Master Sommeliers. In 1992, he founded the Wichita Chapter of the American Institute of Wine and Food.
Jacques Brassinne de la Buissière is a writer, historian and former diplomat.
Gerhard Bürger worked for the Americans at the Air Base Fire Department at Tempelhof Airport from 1945 to 1951, becoming manager of the German crew during the Airlift. In 1951 he became a customs officer at the border between East Germany and West Berlin, and he remained in the customs department until he retired in 1987. During the Airlift he met his future wife, a dancer, and they married in 1953. Since the 1960s Bürger has volunteered giving talks about the Berlin Airlift to school classes and groups at the Allied Museum.
Scott Camil and seven other members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (the ‘Gainesville 8’) were charged in 1972 with conspiracy to disrupt the Republican National Convention in Miami. They were acquitted on the grounds that they were trying to protect the rights of anti-war protestors. Camil is now president of Veterans For Peace in Gainesville, Florida, and is political chair of the environmental non-profit Suwannee St Johns Group Sierra Club and coordinator of the environmental organization Stand By Our Plan (SBOP). In 2017 he received an award from the League of Women Voters for Citizen Activist of the Year.
John Clarke was wounded in 1946 and returned home for rehabilitation after a military career that had taken him to North Africa, Italy, Greece and Palestine. He was later awarded an MBE for services to veterans. He is currently campaigning for a Chelsea Hospital-style home for elderly soldiers to be built in Manchester.
Leslie R. Colitt went on to report for The New York Times in the mid-1960s, then for The Observer (London) and the Financial Times as their Berlin-based East Europe correspondent from 1968 until the fall of the Berlin Wall. He witnessed the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Polish uprisings of 1970–71 and the 1980s, and wrote extensively on West Germany’s Ostpolitik. He married Ingrid in 1962 and they have two children. Ingrid didn’t see her parents again until they retired and were able to visit West Berlin. They moved to West Berlin in 1969.
Norman Deptula used the education benefits provided to Korean War veterans to attend Boston University, graduating in 1956 with a degree in liberal arts. He began a career in teaching, did graduate work at Worcester State University and retired in 1990 following a 34-year career. He is a life member of many veterans’ organisations. With his wife of over 50 years, he has travelled extensively, including a trip to Korea in 1976, funded by the Revisit Korea programme.
Farhad Diba returned to England after the Iranian Coup. After studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford, he returned to Iran in 1961 to work for his father’s company. He left Iran on a business trip in 1978 and temporarily became a stateless UN refugee due to the Islamic Revolution. He obtained UK citizenship and now spends his time researching the history of the Mosaddegh era.
Jack Devine was awarded the CIA’s Meritorious Officer Award for his work as head of the Afghan Task Force. Between 1990 and 1992, he headed the CIA’s Counternarcotics Center. He served as both Acting Director and Associate Director of the CIA’s operations outside the United States from 1993–1995. He is the recipient of the Agency’s Distinguished Intelligence Medal and several meritorious awards. He lives in New York City and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Eva Eberbeck was 23 in 1966 when she was able to see her cousin Ingrid again for the first time after the Berlin Wall was built. She had just married and given birth to a child. She worked as a stenotypist and secretary until she was made redundant in the mid-1990s. From then on she only worked intermittently, including a period in a care home for the elderly. In 2006 she took early retirement. She is the mother of two sons and still lives with her husband in Falkensee, northwest of Berlin.
Dmitri Fedorov returned to his hometown of Kolomna, near Moscow, after his service in Afghanistan. He spent time in Kosovo with the Special Forces of the Russian Federation and returned to Afghanistan in 2006. He is currently Chairman of the Kolomna section of the Russian veterans organisation Boevoe Bratstvo.
Hardy Firl spent some time in West Germany after leaving prison, but decided to return to his friends and family in East Berlin. He worked as driver for the Kaufhaus Zentrum, East Berlin’s most prestigious department store, until he retired in 1990. He married in 1958 and has two children. Firl is a member of the Association 17 June 1953, which aims to keep alive the memory of the first people’s uprising in Europe against the communist regime after the Second World War. The association awarded him a golden badge of honour for his work for Germany’s freedom and unity.
George Flint left the British Army after his National Service and, after working on a pile driving rig, in 1958 he set up his own small tipper haulage business. He became a qualified scuba diving instructor in his spare time and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joined the official organization of ex-BRIXMIS members, which meets two or three times a year. He retired at 68, moved to the Isle of Sheppey and bought a motorhome, which he uses to travel the world.
Kenneth Ford finished work on the H-bomb in October 1952 and returned to Princeton to work on his PhD dissertation, which he completed in six months. Although he continued to consult on secret military projects for a few years, his main career was in academia and he held various faculty positions teaching and researching theoretical nuclear physics. In 1968, influenced by his opposition to the Vietnam War, he decided he would no longer work on weapons. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife Joanne. They have seven children and thirteen grandchildren.
René Gatorno stayed in the Special Forces after his return from Angola until 2014, when he retired from the army. Today, he contributes his expertise to those professionally interested in Angola’s war.
Alexander Gergel did his best to forget his military experience after returning from Afghanistan. He worked at the State Construction Bureau and studied English at evening classes. After the collapse of the Soviet Union he became an insurance company manager. He has two sons and is currently a freelancer in the insurance business. He writes novels with an Afghan theme.
Frances Glasspoole is a mother, a photographer and a theatrical costumer. Her professional career was as an orthopaedic nurse, but she has also worked in arts administration, on archaeology sites, with museum collections and even on a steam locomotive crew. Later in life she attended college, majoring in Anthropology and American Indian Studies. It was only then that she realised that her keen interest in other cultures had been shaped by her experiences as a teenager in Cuba.
John Guerrasio went to Catholic seminary and was almost expelled several times for his staunch anti-communist beliefs. He was the only seminarian who belonged to The John Birch Society and wore a Goldwater For President button in 1964. After deciding against the priesthood, he became a professional actor, director and television presenter.
Jacqueline Hayden lectures in politics at Trinity College, Dublin. In August 1980, she travelled all over Poland interviewing dissidents and was the first foreign journalist to interview future Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa in Gdansk. She was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland ‘for outstanding services rendered to the promotion of Poland’s transition to democracy’ in 2013.
Elisabeth Heller worked as a music radio producer at Radio DDR 1 in East Berlin until the GDR’s entire broadcasting service was closed after German reunification. As a single parent at the age of 42, she found it difficult to find permanent employment again despite gaining numerous qualifications, and she became severely depressed. She has since recovered and through her interest in music and people, she continues to engage with life while working on a range of multimedia projects.
Katharina Herrmann was 23 and had just started her first job at a teaching hospital in East Berlin when the Wall fell. Two and half years later she was made redundant and, seeing no future for herself in a country where she felt like a second-class citizen, she moved to London in 1992 to complete a Masters in Politics of Human Rights. Having found employment in the city, she stayed and now uses her annual leave to travel the world.
Gisela Hoffmann taught English and Russian at a secondary school in Röbel, a small town in Mecklenburg-Hither Pomerania. After the Berlin Wall fell, she was involved in the transformation of her polytechnical school into a grammar school, which hadn’t existed as such in the GDR. During that time, she was headmistress – a post she would not have been able to hold before as she had not joined the SED party. She continued teaching until her retirement in 2014.
Eddy Hsia served as a Commander in the navy before becoming a journalist. He lives in London.
Kathryn Jackson is now a licensed psychologist. Her research interests have centred on the resolution of political trauma. Her experiences as a clinician and supervisor have emphasized the significance of social and political events on individuals and families.
Karel Janovický left Czechoslovakia in 1949 and a year later came to England to study at the Royal College of Music. He joined the BBC in 1964, eventually directing the Czechoslovak Section of the World Service for ten years before retirement. Throughout his career he has continued to compose music and has also built up a reputation for coaching choirs, singers and opera in the Czech vocal repertoire.
John Ketwig went back to his career in the automotive servicing and parts industry after leaving the US Army, first at local stores and then moving up to factory level. He worked with Toyota, Rolls Royce Bentley, Ford Motor Company and Hyundai, in various technical, marketing and consulting roles. He eventually became General Manager of a large New Jersey factory service operation for Prevost high-line buses and motor homes as part of Volvo Bus and Truck.
Sergei Khrushchev is an author, educator and lecturer. Until 1968 he was an engineer for the Soviet missile and space programme. From then until 1991 he served at the Control Computer Institute in Moscow, rising from Section Head to First Deputy Director in charge of research. Beginning in 1967 he helped his father, Nikita Khrushchev, to work on his memoirs. He is the author of many books and articles on engineering, computer science, history, and economy. He lives in Rhode Island in the United States and teaches at Brown University.
Annemarie Knecht fled the GDR as a child in 1953. In 1971, when she was 28 years old, she and her husband moved to Steinstücken, an exclave of West Berlin, where she worked at the local supermarket until the end of 1983.
Lorenz Knecht was born in 1974, three years after his parents moved to Steinstücken in West Berlin. He works as a director of a bank and still lives in Steinstücken.
Hana Laing graduated from the philosophy faculty of Charles University in Prague in 1973. After working in psychiatric clinics and research institutes, troubled by the lack of freedom and resistant to joining the Communist Party, she emigrated to England in 1979. She further trained in neuropsychology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery and later also at the Institute of Psychiatry. She worked as a neuropsychologist until her retirement in 2016.
Otfried Laur grew up in West Berlin. He was 19 when he saw the Berlin Wall being built and 47 when it fell. As manager of a theatregoer club and concert organizer, he has put all his effort into reuniting the two halves of the city, putting on shows in Berlin and the surrounding area. In 2017 his club celebrated its 50th anniversary.
Marju Lauristin is a Member of the European Parliament in the Group of Socialists and Democrats. She has an academic career in social sciences and has been a Professor at Tartu University since 1995. In 1988 she was one of the establishing members of the first large-scale independent political movement in Estonia since the beginning of the Soviet occupation. She has since been Chairman of the Estonian Social Democratic Party, deputy speaker of the Estonian parliament, minister of Social Affairs of Estonia, and member of the Estonian Parliament.
Lee Hoo Ja attended South Korea’s top nursing school and worked as a nurse before she starting a family and becoming a homemaker. Her brother stayed in North Korea and she never saw him again.
Osvaldo Leitão was the only survivor of his armoured unit. He continued to fight in the north of Angola until its liberation, and was an officer in the merchant navy of Angola for 12 years. After training in electrical engineering in Cuba and Italy, he worked for 22 years for the Portuguese bank Espirito Santo Group. He is currently administrator of the company Seguros Bonws in Angola.
Pavel Litvinov left the Soviet Union with his family in 1974. They went to Vienna by train and from there to Rome until they moved to United States. He has lived in New York ever since, where he taught physics and mathematics at Hackley School in Tarrytown until his retirement in 2006.
Giorgio Napolitano was born in Naples in 1925. From 1946 to 1948 he was a member of the Secretariat of the Italian Economic Centre for Southern Italy. He also took an active part for over 10 years in the Movement for the Rebirth of Southern Italy. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the first time in 1953, and was a Member of Parliament in Italy until 1996. Giorgio Napolitano was President of Italy from 2006 to 2015.
Gisela Nicolaisen studied at Hamburg University and after graduating she taught natural sciences at a secondary school. After her escape to the West she didn’t see her parents again for five years, until she and her husband, whom she’d married a few months before, were allowed to visit them for a few days in 1965. In the early 1980s, after a career break during which she raised three sons, Nicolaisen began teaching reading and writing to adults at a community college. She later led the department for adult literacy until her retirement in 2005.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja is a specialist in African politics, development policy and administration, and political theory. He is currently professor of African Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and professor emeritus of African studies at Howard University in Washington, DC. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on African politics, development, and conflict issues.
Matashichi Oishi was hospitalised with radiation sickness in 1954. Afterwards he moved to Tokyo and opened a dry cleaning shop. He didn’t talk about his experience aboard the Lucky Dragon until 1983, but since then he has used those experiences to call on international societies to commit to a non-nuclear future.
Andrus Öövel has been Director General of the Estonian Border Guard, a member of the Estonian parliament and Estonia’s Minister of Defence. Since 2000, he has served in the Geneva Center for the Security, Development and Rule of Law as a chairman of the International Advisory Board on Border Security.
Carla Ottman studied theatre in Leipzig and worked at the Komische Oper in East Berlin. Her father was in West Berlin when the Wall was built, and her mother moved to the West in 1969. In 1974 Ottman married. She was discovered helping her sister flee to the West in 1978 and both were imprisoned. In 1980 Ottman got divorced and a year later she was officially allowed to leave the GDR with her daughter. She was reunited with her parents in West Berlin. Ottman is now chairwoman of Lindenstrasse 54, a memorial to victims of political persecution.
Pavel Palazhchenko was the principal English interpreter for Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. He participated in all US–Soviet ministerial and summit meetings leading up to the end of the Cold War. Since 1992, he has served as head of international and media relations for The Gorbachev Foundation. He also serves as an analyst, spokesperson, interpreter and translator, as well as the president of the Russian Translation Company.
John Palka was born in France, already a refugee from Hitler. Later he was a refugee from Stalin. These early experiences had a profound impact on his life. He was fortunate to find shelter in the United States, a superlative education, and an academic career path filled with opportunities. He has been married for 56 years.
Péter Pallai escaped from Hungary in 1956, eventually making it to the UK. After working on a building site and learning English, he received a scholarship to study economics at LSE, followed by a postgraduate degree in education. He taught history and economics at a London grammar school, then worked for the BBC Hungarian Service, finishing his career as Bureau Chief in Budapest. He now commutes between London and Budapest, organising jazz concerts.
Terry Pinner was chairman of The Stukeleys Parish Council from 1975 to 2013 and has recently taken up the post again. As well as a long career handling and breaking in horses, he has continued to farm next to RAF Alconbury, and still farms land that was once part of the airbase today.
Lev Ponomarev is a physicist and human rights activist. He was an elected member of the Congress of People’s Deputies from 1990 to 1993. In 1997, he founded the Russian human rights organisation For Human Rights, later becoming its executive director.
Peter Pragal was 35 when he moved with his wife and two young children from Munich to East Berlin to take up the newly created post of the GDR correspondent for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. When his assignment ended there, he was able to take up this role again in 1984 while working for the magazine Der Stern. This time he divided his time between both parts of the city as his family settled in the West, while he lived in a flat in the East. In 1991 he started writing for the Berliner Zeitung, a daily newspaper that originated in East Berlin. He remained with the paper until his retirement in 2004.
Osvaldo Puccio was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime. He left Chile in 1974 and went into exile in Romania and Germany. He returned to Chile ten years later. He is the former Chilean Ambassador to Austria, Brazil and Spain.
David Remnick’s experiences in Moscow formed the basis of his 1993 book Lenin’s Tomb, which received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism. He became editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has taught at Princeton, where he received his B.A., in 1981, and at Columbia. He lives in New York City.
Nicholas X. Rizopoulos was born in Athens, Greece, in 1936 and lived there until the age of fourteen, when he moved to the United States. He received his doctorate in history from Yale, where he taught modern European and American history for ten years. He was one of the founders and, for fifteen years, the executive director of the Lehrman Institute, and served for five years as vice president and director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Since 1995, he has served as academic director and lecturer in international politics and diplomacy in the Honors College at Adelphi University.
Sergio Romano is an Italian writer, journalist, historian and former diplomat.
Joachim Rudolph built a tunnel to help others escape the GDR, among them his future wife whom he married in 1971. In West Berlin he worked as an engineer for several years, then trained as a grammar school teacher. From 1979 to 1987 was a deputy headmaster at a German school in Lagos, Nigeria. Afterwards, until he retired in 1993, he became a director of studies at a grammar school in Berlin. Since 1995 he has also been involved with different foundations and memorial places commemorating German 20th century history.
Mátyás Sárközi studied book illustration at Central St Martin’s in London and after graduating he worked for the BBC Hungarian Service and Radio Free Europe. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union he made his first return to Budapest after an absence of 33 years. He is now an author and journalist, has won the Hungarian József Attila Prize and for a while was an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Hungarian Writers’ Association. He makes a point of attending the 1956 commemorative celebrations, often in Budapest at the National Museum Gardens or Kossuth Square.
Homa Sarshar was raised in Tehran. Until 1978 she worked as a correspondent, reporter, and columnist for Zan-e Ruz weekly magazine and Kayhan daily newspaper in Iran. In 1978, Sarshar moved to Los Angeles where she resumed her career as a freelance journalist, radio and television producer, and on-air host. She has received numerous awards for her work.
Sylva Šimsová went into exile with her parents in 1949. In London she worked in public libraries and was Principal Lecturer of librarianship at the Polytechnic of North London. She became a Fellow of the Library Association and obtained an M.Phil degree from the University College London. In her retirement she writes about Czechoslovak exile.
Vladimir Snegirev returned to Moscow after a year in Afghanistan and studied at the Academy of Social Sciences. He continued working as a journalist and editor before and after the fall of communism. At the same time he regularly visited Afghanistan. In 1991 he began to be involved with the issue of the release of prisoners of war in Afghanistan, clarifying the fate of missing soldiers and officers. He has written several books about the Afghan war. He is currently a correspondent for the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
Sian Snow’s family moved from the USA to Switzerland in 1959. They planned to return after a year so her parents could rebuild their careers, but stayed in Europe as the McCarthy witchhunts continued. Sian became fluent in French and went on to work as a translator in Geneva, first for the UN and then for the International Red Cross. Her mother gave up her acting career and wrote several books, while her father continued to work as a journalist. In 1972, shortly before his death, he received a letter from Richard Nixon congratulating him on his ‘long and distinguished career’. He ignored the letter.
Sohn Dong Hun arrived in South Korea with a thirst for education and went to university in Seoul. After receiving his doctoral degree in pharmacy, he served as a professor for 36 years.
Jeanne Steinhardt continued to look for ways to practise and to communicate the ideas of non-violence, in particular concentrating on the work of founding and developing a community of support and services for people with learning difficulties and mental health needs.
Paul Sutton worked in private industry for 16 years after leaving the US Marine Corps. He became active in veterans’ advocacy in mid-1970 and continues to this day. In 1984, he joined the staff of the New Jersey Agent Orange Commission. He moved to the New Jersey homeless veterans’ programs in 1991, working there until he retired from state government in 2002. Afterwards Sutton worked for several not-for-profit organizations, focusing on homelessness generally and homeless veterans in particular. He finally retired from the working world in mid-2011 and since then has devoted his time to a number of specific veterans’ causes.
Minh-Hoa Ta’s family settled in Berkeley, California, in 1978. She is now vice president of student services at Ohlone College in Fremont, California.
Artur Talvik is a father of four children, a community activist and head of the voluntary Juminda Sea Rescue Society. He was previously co-owner of two successful production companies in Estonia and has produced and directed a number of documentaries, commercials and feature films. He is currently Chair of the Estonian Free Party and a member of the Estonian Parliament, the Riigikogu.
Julius Tomin was refused an academic position in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and so worked as a turbine operator and a nightwatchman in a zoo. He was a signatory to Charter 77 and became involved with the Jan Hus Educational Foundation offering philosophy seminars in people’s homes. After a period of intense official harassment, he travelled to the UK and his Czech passport was removed in 1981.
Zdena Tomin is a writer and journalist. In the late 1970s she was a spokesperson for Charter 77 and wrote for samizdat publications. She and her husband were declared enemies of the state by the Czech government and their citizenship was revoked in 1981.
Aldo Tortorella is a journalist and former politician. He was a member of the Italian parliament from 1972 to 1992.
Vitaly Tretyakov is a political scientist and journalist. He is Dean of the Television Department at Moscow State University and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Political Class.
Sándor Váci moved to London, where he studied architecture. He became a British subject and worked as an architect before beginning a masters degree at the University of Michigan. In 1967 he returned to London, starting his own architectural practice in 1973. He met his future wife on a visit to Budapest, and they now have two children. Váci has been involved in various projects to foster Anglo–Hungarian cultural connections.
Steven S. Volk is Professor of History Emeritus at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he continues to direct the Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence. He has published widely on Chile, US–Latin American relations, Mexico, and various issues in pedagogy. In 2011 he was named US Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2001 he was recognised by the Chilean government for his work to help restore democracy in Chile.
Willem van der Waals stayed in the South African army after his participation in the Angolan Civil War and worked in various intelligence roles. From 1990 to 1991 he was the Director of Operations of the South African Defence Force and also completed a doctorate in Political Science at the University of the Orange Free State with Portugal’s War in Angola (1961–74) as the subject of his dissertation. After serving as the Director of Foreign Relations of the SADF until 1993 he became the first Executive Director Community Safety of the capital city of Pretoria, finally retiring in 2006.
George Wang started out working as a messenger boy at the age of 14 and retired as an Associate Professor of English at a Community College in Xuhui District.
Alfred Wegewitz completed his law studies in East Berlin in 1954. At first it was difficult to find work because he had been a prisoner of war in Great Britain and was regarded with suspicion by the communist party, but he worked as a lawyer from 1956 until his retirement in 2002. He married in 1960. His younger brother had been interned by the British after the war and later moved to his mother’s family in West Germany where he stayed and supported his relatives in East Germany by sending packages. They were able to visit each other over the years.
Sir John Weston continued in the diplomatic service, in various roles both abroad and in the UK. As Political Director in the Foreign Office (1990–1) he was the UK negotiator for talks on German reunification. He served as the UK’s Permanent Representative to NATO (1992–95) and finally as UK Ambassador to the UN and Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council (1995–8). Since his retirement, Weston has been a non-executive director with two FTSE 100 companies and worked in the arts and voluntary sectors. He has had two collections of his poems published. He keeps bees and has six grandchildren.
Liliane Willens was born of Russian–Jewish parentage in the former French Concession of Shanghai, China. She studied as an undergraduate at Boston University where she also received a PhD in French Language and Literature. She taught these subjects at Boston College and at MIT. Later moving to Washington, DC, she worked for the US Agency for International Development and the Peace Corps. Since retirement Willens has given lectures on history and culture on cruise ships sailing around the world. Presently she speaks at various organisations and book clubs on old and new Shanghai.
Sergey Yevdokimov lives in Moscow. He served in the military office of the Northern District of Moscow until 2000 when he retired from the armed forces.
Zinovy Zinik lost his Soviet citizenship when he emigrated in 1975 to Israel, where he worked as a theatre director for a student theatre group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 1976 he has been living and working in Britain, writing in English as well as in his native Russian. He became a British citizen in 1988. The duality of émigré existence, cultural dislocation, estrangement and the evasive nature of memory have become the main topic of Zinik’s novels, short stories, essays, lectures and radio broadcasts.