President Emmanuel Macron vowed an economic revival, but as he seeks re-election, a Potemkin factory in the town where he was raised shows just how hard that can be.
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April 12, 2021
Awakening
I have no memory of my birthplace of Tallinn, Estonia. I was two years old when Red Army busted through the Leningrad Blockade and marched in.
The Russians were hardly liberators. They were almost worse than the Nazis. They’d culled the population of Estonia to a million people, and who knows what fate my family would have met had we not fled on one of the last boats out.
My earliest memory is the raw, dank smell of the earth. I was huddled in the dark next to my mother in a root cellar in the west of Germany, surrounded by sacks of potatoes, while sirens blared above.