Breiner on the road: From Cold War to independence: what we discovered in the less-traveled Europe this summer

Orthodox church in Talinn, Estonia, built by the Russians in 1900 to remind the locals, Who's your daddy. Estonians regard it as a symbol of Russian oppression and have discussed in Parliament the possibility of demolishing it.

We experienced a massive awakening this summer that came from several directions. 1. First, Cindy and I went on a two-week discovery tour of the three tiny Baltic countries that have been subjected by multiple foreign powers over the centuries, most recently by Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich--Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. As a kind of icing on the cake, we spent a couple of days in Helsinki, in Finland.

Our Baltic adventure.

These three tiny countries, with combined population of around 6 million, celebrated their independence in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now they try to survive in the shadow of Russia, which is trying to bring back all its former satellites.

Near Nida, Lithuania, on the lovely barrier island known as the Curonian Spit, which borders Russian territory.

Windmills on the island of Saaremaa, Estonia.

At every stop, we experienced rich natural beauty of hills, forests, wetlands, and farmland. Along the seashore, the sand was filled with bits of amber, which locals use for jewelry and even food additives. Each of the three countries has its own language. Estonian is the outlier. It is related to Finnish and distantly to Hungarian, and these strange three are unrelated to any of the Indo-European languages.

At left, our Lithuanian guide, Bob, in front of the Ninth Fort Memorial near Kaunas, which commemorates the 45,000 Jews and others who were executed here by the Nazis.

The truth is that local people collaborated with Nazis in the genocide in all the countries where they operated.

Do these maps of Northern Europe confuse you? The national boundaries have shifted with invasions, war, and then peace treaties. Poland doesn't exist in 1914 (the map at upper left). It was divided up in the 18th century among the three great powers at the time, Russia, Germany, and Austria. Gradually it emerges as a light green shape in the center map of the bottom row. The maps are from a museum in Latvia.

2. Before we left on our Baltic trip, I was exploring Eastern and Central European media for the first time as part of a paper I was working on with two colleagues. I developed case studies of five independent media in those regions that were achieving financial sustainability. (The paper has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and we are waiting to hear whether it's accepted.)

Roofing from sea reeds can last 70 years.

3. Also before that trip, I had been invited to prepare an online summer course for the College of Europe, based in Warsaw, Poland, on the topic of "The monetization and sustainability of news in the digital age." In order to make it relevant for the course participants, I started to look for more examples of these types of media in the former Soviet Union and other regions where independent quality media are under attack.

4. Back in the U.S. for several weeks, we visited our old book club in Columbus, Ohio, which was reading George Orwell's 1984, a thinly disguised portrait of the Stalinist Soviet Union and, by extension, any ideological dictatorship.

One of our book club members of Polish ancestry had a story to tell about Stalin. Her grandparents and their seven children were living on a farm in eastern Poland in 1940 (it's now in Belarus, an example of arbitrary borders) when the Soviet army invaded. People in that area of Poland were considered "anti-Soviet elements" by Stalin, and some 320,000 were loaded onto trains and shipped east. My friend's family was sent 1,000 miles east into Russia to work in a logging camp. They endured months of near starvation and cold.

Then a year later, when the Germans invaded Russia, Stalin agreed with the British to let Poles form an army to fight the Nazis. He let the exiled Poles leave Russia under British protection. My friend's grandfather and uncle joined the new Polish army, while the rest of the family then went on a long odyssey to British refugee camps in Iran, Tanzania, and England. Finally they made their way to Cleveland, Ohio.

After all their ordeals, America was paradise to them. "I think it’s fair to say their tenacity and resilience through the most trying circumstances certainly influenced the character of my siblings and me," my friend said.

By coincidence, some eight years ago, while I was working with newspaper publishers and editors in Belarus, I spent several days in Baranavichy, which was where my friend's family had their farm before being sent off to Russia.

A Ukrainian synagogue has been re-created inside the Jewish museum in Warsaw. Poland's medieval rulers established laws that protected Jews, so Poland had the largest population of Jews in Europe in 1940 when the Germans invaded.

5. My next lesson came when the College of Europe invited me to Warsaw late in August to present a series of workshops on the topic of sustaining quality journalism. They invited 80 of the 600 participants from the online course to Warsaw for these workshops. When I was not leading the workshops, I visited two marvelous museums in Warsaw, one on The History of Polish Jews and the other on The Warsaw Rising of 1944, in which the Polish resistance army attempted to drive the Nazis out of the capital.

Monument to the Poles of the Warsaw uprising.

6. The university apartment where I stayed had a small library with books in several languages on Poland and central Europe, including Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw, by Norman Davies, and the personal history of Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former political prisoner who, in unlikely fashion, became president of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic after the collapse of the Soviet Union. His remarkable story, To the Castle and Back, is told through his diaries, internal memos to staff, and interviews with journalists. Havel is viewed by many as the Nelson Mandela of Eastern Europe, since he was imprisoned for five years and later became president of his country.

I spent my evenings reading these two books. All of this immersed me in the political, economic, and media history of the region.

We won the war, end of story

Most of our American version of World War II is that of what is called the Greatest Generation. According to this narrative we rescued Europe from the Fascist regimes of Germany and Italy and made the world safe again for democracy.

We don't really have much sense of how the war ravaged more than two dozen nation states of Europe, how tens of millions of people were displaced from their homes and moved around like cattle, nor of the region's complex mix of ethnic and language groups, competing religions, arbitrary boundary changes, and so on.

Much of the political turmoil in Europe in the last two centuries can be understood as local ethnic and cultural minorities trying to be recognized within the arbitrarily drawn boundaries of nation states. And really, if you look at the history of the Middle East since 1914, you see a similar story.

It really is naive and presumptuous of us in the U.S. to assume that we can expect our notion of democracy to work in all of these complex contexts. History has shown us that it doesn't work.

Warsaw restored

Warsaw's market square, meticulously restored after being reduced to rubble by the Germans. Hitler had ordered his troops to kill everyone -- men, women, and children -- and destroy all the buildings in the neighborhoods where the Polish resistance fighters were most active. The Soviet Army was just across the river, and Hitler didn't want anything left standing for them to take control of.

The Nazis crushed the Warsaw uprising after two months, and many historians blame the British and Americans for not bringing timely aid to the resistance fighters. The British and Americans air-dropped some supplies, much of which fell into German hands, but they did not provide the air support that the resistance fighters sought. So the Germans bombed and shelled them mercilessly.

Old Town Warsaw. Teams of architects and historians recreated the buildings as they were before the war.

Krakow survives

Tourists flock to Krakow from all over Europe.

The German headquarters in Poland was based in Krakow, the country's ancient capital. It lay far to the south of Warsaw and escaped shelling and bombing since it was outside of the Soviet Army's path to Berlin.

Today tourists come to admire the medieval and Renaissance architecture and visit Oskar Schindler's factory in the city, which became a haven for some Jews to escape the Holocaust. They also make day trips to the concentration and extermination camps at nearby Auschwitz and Birkenau.

We human beings have animal instincts, but we aspire to be angels.

In Poland -- what today is Poland -- the memories of humanity's sublime achievements and savagery are very much alive.