Aftermath

On the 23rd of August 1939, foreign minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a secret protocol fundamentally dividing Europe into two "spheres of influence" between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Accordingly, Aftermath is a very personal and bittersweet account of a family in a small "insignificant" Baltic country, Estonia, caught in a life and death struggle between two tyrannical world powers. From a broader perspective, the story depicts the fate of countless other refugees who lost members of their extended families, their homes and were subsequently separated from their loved ones by the events of World War II, and later by the Iron Curtain for decades. The work is also a partial chronicle of a small country's frantic struggle against Nazi and Soviet terror, repression, and the eventual systematic Russification attempts of its ten-thousand-year-old language and culture. Finally, Aftermath describes the everlasting hope and endless agonizing efforts to find lost family members, capped by the overwhelming joy of reunification with family members after almost forty years of separation.Ehin, Charles Kalev is the author of 'Aftermath', published 2004 under ISBN 9781413733877 and ISBN 1413733875.