Goodbye Stalin: A True Story of Wars, Escapes and Reinvention

Goodbye Stalin - a True Story of Wars, Escapes and Reinventions is a real life Gone With the Winds. Sigrid von Bremen Thomas and her family escaped communism, usually under gunfire, not once but four times. They went from feudal glory under the Tsars through the Soviet revolution to democracy in Estonia, Nazism in Poland during World War II, then communism in East Germany, and finally freedom in West Germany and the United States. All this was packed between the years 1917 and the early 1950s. As the author says in her Forward, the von Bremen's wild ride compressed 250 years of Western European social and political history into just a third of a century. The narrative unfolds as a personal coming of age story, ending with the 24 year old von Bremen Thomas aboard a U.S. Army refugee transport steaming into New York harbor. But wrapped inside are flashbacks to her parent's and grandmother's earlier and equally tumultuous lives. Readers of Goodbye Stalin thus witness all of the greatest events of modern Europe up close and personal through Sigrid and her parents' own eyes. This is grand history on a unique and utterly intimate scale.