He's been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan, not John yet.

Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbürg concentration camp until shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and he was a Travniki, as the 5,000 men were called who helped Germany's Nazi regime commit the crime of the millennium -- the murder of all the Jews in Europe, the "Final Solution."

He was part of it, if only a very minor cog in the vast machinery of murder. Ivan Demjanjuk stayed in post-war Germany for seven years before he emigrated to the US in 1952 with his wife and daughter on board the General Haan. Once he arrived, he changed his name to John. His time as a supposed DP or "displaced person," as the Anglo-American victors called people made homeless by the war, was...

[Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published last year by Yale University Press.]

... Peter Balakian, a poet and professor of English at Colgate University, has written movingly about the Armenian genocide in Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (Basic Books, 1997) and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2003). In the latter, he focused on the genocide itself, offering a good deal of fresh archival research (including interviews with survivors) revealing the origins and inhumanity of efforts to erase the population of Armenian Christians within the Ottoman Empire. It was a conflict that had simmered for two decades, although its roots lay deep in the Middle Ages, when Turks invaded what was the Armenian homeland, in Asia Minor. By 1915, Armenian Christians imagined themselves an integral part of the Turkish state. They served largely as merchants and...

[O'Connor is a freelance writer who has contributed to the Los Angeles Times and the New York Magazine.]

GUATEMALA CITY -- When army helicopters landed in his village in August 1982, Francisco Velasco was away in the cornfields with the men. Then they heard the screams. Velasco rushed back home and found his wife and two baby daughters dead.

Velasco lost 16 relatives, including his mother and father, in the army's scorched-earth campaign against leftist guerrillas. Five years after applying for compensation, his family received $5,400 from the state a few months ago and an official apology.

"You can't pay for a life," Velasco said. "But it is a gesture of support."

Since President Álvaro Colom took office in January 2008, Guatemala has stepped up payments to survivors of the estimated 200,000 people who died in the 36-year civil war. Begun in 2003, the program had compensated 3,000 survivors by 2007, according to its...

[Mr. Bao is one of the translators and editors of "Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang," to be released by Simon & Schuster on May 19. ]

Twenty years after Chinese troops crushed demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, new light has now been shed on the incident by the forthcoming memoirs of Zhao Ziyang. The former general secretary died in 2005, after living in forced seclusion for 16 years for supporting the pro-democracy movement. In those years of seclusion, he managed to record a testimony in audiotapes. His memoirs reveal that bloodshed could have been avoided in 1989.

China's economic reforms in the 1980s led to a rift in the top Chinese leadership between those who supported the reforms and those who opposed them. The students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square were calling for the deepening of reform, including democracy. Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping, Premier Li Peng and other conservatives opposed them and were...

[Clifford Coonan is China correspondent for The Independent.]

The secret memoirs of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader ousted for opposing the military crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square, exploded into the open yesterday, four years after his death.

Dictated during his years of house arrest and smuggled out on cassettes disguised as children's music or Peking opera, the book will be pored over for clues about the workings of the secretive group of men who make up the inner core of China's Communist Party. The decisions made in Beijing's Zhongnanhai compound have global impact as China is an emerging superpower, but little is known about how it functions. Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang may change all that.

The publishers, Simon and Schuster, were so worried about news of the Zhao book leaking that they listed it as Untitled by Anonymous in their catalogue. It was not supposed to go on sale until next...

[Thomas S. Mullaney is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Stanford University. He is the author of Coming to Terms with the Chinese Nation (forthcoming from University of California Press) and is currently writing a global history of the Chinese typewriter. He can be reached at tsmullaney@stanford.edu]

Propelled to international stardom by his multi-platinum single “U Can’t Touch This,” MC Hammer is perhaps not the first person one thinks of when studying Western stereotypes about China. Remarkably, however, the music video accompanying his 1990 hit featured one bit of fancy footwork that has helped perpetuate a distorted view of China dating back more than one hundred years. Known as the “Chinese typewriter,” the dance features MC Hammer side-stepping in rapid, frenetic movements, choreography that would gain immense popularity to become one of the defining dances of the early nineties.

Why the Chinese Typewriter? Hammer’s dance, the idea...

[Joshua Wolf Shenk, the director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, is the author of Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. He can be reached at jw@shenk.net.]

Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition—and into the brilliant, complex mind of the study’s longtime director, George Vaillant.

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Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of...

[Ronald Radosh is the distinguished historian and author of books includingThe Rosenberg File (with Joyce Milton), The Amerasia Spy Case, Spain Betrayed:The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War, and, most recently, with Allis Radosh, Red Star Over Hollywood. The Radoshes’ new book, available online and at bookstores today, is A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and The Founding of Israel]

On May 14, we’ll be celebrating the sixty-first anniversary of President Harry S. Truman’s decision to recognize the State of Israel, the first country to do so. The most complex and controversial issue of Truman’s presidency, the official recognition of Israel was a watershed moment in American foreign policy. His daughter Margaret claimed that Palestine was the most difficult dilemma her father encountered while in office. Indeed, Truman faced pressures from all corners of the globe to reach a decision that would have been a challenge to Solomon: the future of the Middle East, the Jews, and...

... Imre Pozsgay was a leading reformer in Hungary's Communist Party. He had fought his way up to the top of the party, and in 1989 was one of the handful of people who controlled it.

He used his position to open up the Iron Curtain which separated Hungary from Austria. He also helped persuade the Communist Party to give up power voluntarily rather than be forced out as happened elsewhere.

But were Hungarians grateful for the man who had brought free travel and free elections? Not a bit. His campaign to become president was spurned, and these days he has abandoned politics to teach political history. Surely he would have some regrets?

Instead, when I met him in his modest house on the outskirts of Budapest I got a very surprising answer. He told me that back in 1989 he had been less interested in reforming communism that destroying it.

"For a long time," he said, "I believed in communism. But from the early '80s I realised...