About this book It explores Europe and its people before, during and after WWII, and contains the life and family stories of ordinary and well-known characters, as well as those of the two big players in this war. Stalin. The battered, intelligent boy, the poet with angelic voice, destined to become a priest, but instead turning into one of the most ruthless and cruellest, sharp-witted dictators of human history. Hitler. His yearning to become a famous bohemian painter, when rejected, was overcome by blind, enraged-hatred against all that was Jewish, Royal and Bolshevik, leading Germany into disaster.