@Ted. Thank-you for your comment.  As you've pointed out, I wasn't there.  I was too young and if I were older there probably would have been too many other political, cultural and social barriers in place to keep me out--to keep me the other. I don't pretend to know what communism was like here in Bulgaria.  But this doesn't mean that I am not an avid reader, that I am not the kind of person who asks questions, or that I am somehow oblivious to the things going on around me.  My goal for this post was to addresses the question: how do we know our past? What do we make of our past (do we commodify it, turn it into kitsch?) and what does this say about us?