In high schools in Prague they did [an] opinion poll asking about Communism and most of them-70 percent-said they didn't have a clue . . . . It's one thing not to know anything about Communism in America, but in Prague your parents can tell you if they want. However, the parents didn't want to tell them . . . . We do have this in us, to try to repress, to try to forget.

Slavenka Drakulić has written for newspapers and magazines in many languages. She is a contributing editor for The Nation and a free-lance author whose essays have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review Of Books.

In the U.S. she has published five novels. Her nonfiction books include As If I Am Not There, about crimes against women in the Bosnian war; They Would Never Hurt a Fly, which analyzes her experience overseeing the proceedings and the inmates of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; and How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.