ABSTRACT
Walking with a friend through Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, and Prague in the summer of 1939 as a young man, Charles E. Merrill Jr. began a quest to discover how individuals “survive History and retain some sense of identity and integrity.” He continued his journey as a soldier in Italy during World War II and during a dozen visits to postwar Prague and Warsaw. Merrill not only explored what it meant to live in a Communist police state, he checked into tyrannies on the right side of the Cold War.
