My Family Fled Communism for Freedom
By Ashley Sugar
There are ten federal holidays in the United States, but eleven in my home. On November 27th, I celebrate the day my grandparents and mother fled from communist Czechoslovakia to the United States. Choosing to support Communism was never an option for me. An ideology that forced my grandparents to flee their home, leaving behind their families and livelihoods, Communism was utterly unappealing to me.
While in college, I read Karl Marx eight times in four years, under my professors’ instruction. The number of students who supported and agreed with Marx’s ideas and strategies repeatedly stunned me. Their supportive commentary of Marx in class highlighted an overall ignorance regarding what happened to countries that actually experimented with a communist regime. My professors were openly advocating for an ideology that had torn apart my family for generations out of fear of death, violence, and torture. How was Communism even an ideology worth debating? Didn’t these students know how many people suffered? The desire for a communist revolution in the United States, specifically among the young adult population in America, astounds me and scares me to my core. Communism should not be celebrated, it should not be revered, and it should not be encouraged.
Dark and horrendous doesn’t even begin to describe life under a totalitarian regime. Communism penetrates every aspect of an individual’s life. Your family, language, culture, and behavior all change— you must obey the single-party in charge, the only party you can belong to. My grandparents grew up in what is now Slovakia, the Eastern half of Czechoslovakia. Carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, the country enjoyed a functioning democracy and booming economy until its annexation and puppetization by Nazi Germany in 1938. In 1944, the country was liberated from Nazi occupation by the USSR. However, there’s a Slovak saying that goes: “the Russians found their way in, but forgot how to go home.” Though a peaceful transition to democracy was initially guaranteed to the small country, by 1955, it was a puppet to the Soviet Union, and it’s citizens a human shield between the USSR and the West.
My grandmother recalls how Communism directly impacted her everyday life— she had very minimal choices. Freedom and individual liberty did not exist. As Communism pervaded education, society was forced to learn the Russian language. The government decided what she could watch and listen to. My grandparents grew up during the 1950s when show trials became a part of everyday life. These purges typically targeted opposition leaders, Catholics, Jews, or military personas no longer deemed useful to the regime. There was no assumption of innocence, and sometimes there was no trial at all— some people would just disappear in the night. These trials served as warnings and threats to the public to do as they were told. The government utilized the media as their mouthpiece in the public sphere. There was no alternative narrative, no underlying facts, just the party line, and the world view that toed it. You heard what they wanted you to hear unless you were lucky. My grandparents lived in Bratislava, a town that bordered, and quite literally overlooked the West. On a clear day, my grandparents could see the spires of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, but couldn’t visit, let alone dream of visiting.
Luckily, my grandparents were able to escape the information vacuum. How? Given Bratislava’s proximity to Vienna, with certain radios and TVs, radio stations and TV broadcasts from the West could be picked up. They realized that there was a completely different way of life outside of their current one. The communist system was not the only option, in fact, it was a far weaker option. This information enlightened them, and they escaped through a careful plan, which included paying a judge they had grown close with to sign off on a “vacation” for my mother. At the time, the government limited children from traveling with their parents to prevent parents from escaping with their children. Children were used as leverage to ensure parents would return to the Bloc. However, my grandparents circumnavigated the system and ended up in the United States after staying in a refugee camp for three and a half months in Vienna, Austria. Three and a half months, her family didn’t hear her voice. They didn’t know if their daughter, son, and grandchild had made it out safely or if the secret police had reached them.
Even after my grandparents escaped with my mother, they did not contact their family for years, fearful that their letters would be opened, and the Secret Police would investigate their families, or worse. My grandmother never saw her father alive again. Her last memory was of her father learning English and dressing like an “American” to make the journey to the U.S. soon. Freedom of speech, assembly, or expression did not exist under Communism. You either agreed with the regime or, to save your family and your career, you pretended to. It was not a happy place where individuals took care of one another. The country was not united but bound by enforced conformity. Freedom of thought was non-existent; there was one right way to think, and if you strayed away from the censored status-quo, you were punished and deemed a threat to the regime.
The numbers speak for themselves. According to Milan Hauner, a distinguished historian, “around 90,000 Czechoslovak citizens were prosecuted for ‘political crimes’ during 1948–54.” Out of two-hundred and thirty-three death sentences, 178 deaths occurred, typically in cruel ways, such as hanging (Hauner). In the early 1950s, there were 32,638 prisoners, with over 11,000 of them serving sentences for anti-state actions. In Czechoslovakia, 422 labor camps and prisons existed for 12.5 million people (Blazek). The occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by the Warsaw Pact armies claimed 108 deaths with countless injuries (The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes). My grandparents and mother, along with many others, lost their livelihoods, families, and home. They escaped searching for a place that would protect them from Communism, an ideology that should never come to fruition or be idolized.
Critiques of Communism are often met with the argument that “true” Communism has never come to fruition. In the sixth stage of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, Marx describes a society where the government is no longer needed upon the emergence of a self-governing, self-sustaining collective. This stage has never been reached in any country in any point in human history. In every attempt, the government never lets go of power. Communism cannot occur without totalitarian behavior. It cannot happen without fear-mongering tactics, such as gulags, secret police, and show trials. Freedom cannot walk hand-in-hand with Communism. Unless proponents of Communism want to re-create human nature, their ideal society will never exist in a world that values freedom, liberty, and diversity.
Communism has failed in countries because the vacuum seal the state has over its citizens is rarely airtight. Information gets in, and the legitimacy of the state as defined in these systems is inherently eroded. However, the regimes we so often cite from Eastern Europe existed in a world very different from our own. The internet has simultaneously made the world and access to information freer, yet Communism and totalitarianism are rearing a much uglier, much more powerful, and much more realistic head in China. The control the Chinese government has over every aspect of its citizens’ lives is miles beyond what the USSR could have dreamed of. China is the world’s first experiment that efficiently combines a communist, totalitarian system with a surveillance state. Communism has failed, but it has failed insofar as the people within the system were able to resist it. I fear that as our world becomes more digitized, that possibility becomes less and less possible. It is more important than ever to stop its spread.
America is currently approaching a crossroads. We can either move forward as the greatest nation on Earth or take a winding path down the socialist road. That road is lined with promised gifts, such as free college, healthcare for all, and equality. But what is the cost? Our private property, our right to defend ourselves, and the fundamental dismantling of capitalism. This is the time to fight. Fight against Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Fight for our freedoms and our nation. A 2017 article by the Washington Post states that Communism has killed “as many as 100 million people more than all other repressive regimes combined during the same time period.” With what happened in Eastern Europe, and what is currently happening in China, why would we ever even consider the specter of Communism that is knocking at our door?
I have faith in America, in its people, and in its founding ideals. As Ronald Reagan stated in his famous 1987 speech in West Berlin: “This wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.” My family fled Communism, and its horrors, and my family lost everything to do so. They didn’t flee the Eastern Bloc to complicity watch the rise of Communism in the very nation they fled to. Communism is not cute, it’s not kitsch, it’s evil. Don’t fall for its false promises. Fight for liberty, fight for freedom, fight for America.
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