On December 2, 2022, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, University of Notre Dame organized a virtual launch of the new publication “The Trauma of Communism” edited by the University of Notre Dame professors Clemens Sedmak and A. James McAdams. The publication is a result of a collaboration between six universities from the Catholic Universities Partnership within a project “Faith and Freedom”.

 In the book, contributors reflect on the traumas caused by the totalitarian regimes in the countries from the Central and Eastern Europe. Besides the chapters from the editors, there are contributions from scholars from Czechia, Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Ukraine. Several faculty members and students from the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, from the Faculty of Arts and Letters, participated in the Faith and Freedom project and this also led to two contributions to the volume from Marek Babic and Jan Banas. The former tells a story of “a broken political prisoner”, an ordinary Catholic from the north of Slovakia, the latter offers a dive into the life of “a witness of the century”, a physician and a politician Anton Neuwirth. Both these two stories and other recollections and narratives of scholars from other countries included in the volume provide personal testimonies about the traumas of communist regimes. Thus, the book gives its readers an opportunity to learn and not to forget.

The book is available here.
https://issuu.com/nanovicnd/docs/trauma-of-communism