ABSTRACT
Transitions began in different parts of the world and under very different social, economic and political circumstances. It is important to focus anew on those regions, where comprehensive oppression has had a devastating effect on the lives of the majority, as the experience makes it clear that more humane political and social systems will enable people to become more than they are. Much has been written on the authoritarian and totalitarian structures which had been put into place by the perpetrators of injustice and the masterminds of comprehensive systems of oppression. Less attention has been given to the experiences of individual victims of human rights abuses. In South Africa as well as Czechoslovakia, years of authoritarian and totalitarian rule were marked by a range of human-rights abuses. Hardly any part of the lives of people who lived in South Africa and the former Czechoslovakia was left untouched.
