Also had problems with sortable earlier: my case was Accordion and sortables inside. I could not get a clear answer, but if you look at any of the tree implementations they are using drag-and-drop directly and not sortable. Based on this experience - not very exact I know - I would agree with akiller and say: take a good tree plugin instead of trying to do this yourself with sortable.
JsTree is quite good and should do the job - there are also others if for some reason jsTree does not suit your needs.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.