ABSTRACT
In this short paragraph, Kundera, a great writer and an émigré himself, captured in a nutshell the problem of the differing assessments of the crimes of Nazism, Fascism and Communism. One needs only to recall that it was in the mid-1950s when Jean-Paul Sartre confronted Albert Camus on the issue of the existence and implications of the Soviet Gulag camp system. ‘Like you, I find these camps unacceptable’, wrote Sartre. ‘But I find just as unacceptable the use to which the bourgeois press is putting them.’2
