Timothy Garton Ash travels across Europe and into its past

History can be found not only in books and archives, but in people, too. Take the white-haired Jewish lady whom Timothy Garton Ash, a British historian, met at an art gallery while living in Berlin in the 1970s. Hailing from the Soviet-controlled eastern part of the city, she had first-hand experience of not one, but two totalitarian regimes. After a hasty departure from Berlin in the 1930s, she had ended up in one of Stalin’s labour battalions while her husband languished in a gulag. Mr Garton Ash praised her in his diary; later he learned she had informed on him to the Stasi, the East German secret police.