Picnic at the Iron Curtain: A Memoir: From the fall of the Berlin Wall to Ukraine's Orange Revolution

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Many people in these stories have kindly given me permission to use their first names. When I was unable to reach someone, I used a pseudonym to protect that person’s privacy. I compressed timelines in some chapters. Chapter One stretches over two years. I met the women on the ward at different times, as I recovered from different operations. Chapter Four compresses two visits to Chernobyl. I first went with Swiss scientists in August 1990. My second trip was with Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi in April 1991.

Picnic at the Iron Curtain is based on diaries, reporting notebooks, letters and memory. Chapter Ten relies heavily on news articles. These are listed in the Sources section.

Many of my friends read the chapters in which they appear, provided details about events that I described and helped catch mistakes. I struggled with the spelling of place names, particularly Kiev. The transliteration from Ukrainian is Kyiv but the more common practice is to write Kiev, so I used this spelling.

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