In the general elections on Sunday in Germany, the far -right alternative to Germany (AFD) ranked second for the first time since World War II. Its electoral success is part of the trend in Europe, which is the extreme right -wing emission of many. As a university lecturer, I noticed that in response to this phenomenon, many young people became interested in leftist ideologies, such as communism. Students Carl Marx are studying as a major political thinker and they often admire old ideas in Marxism and other communist ideology writings for criticizing academic and capitalist relations.

Since young people deal with these ideologies, it is important to realize that they are not just theories. Communism was applied as a political ideology of the Leninist Marxist parties in dozens of countries in Europe and Asia, which led to repressive comprehensive systems.

The Communist regime in my country, Czechia, which was in the 1940s, left part of an entity called Czechoslovakia, a terrible legacy. Today, on the seventy -seventh anniversary of the elections that brought the Communists to power in Prague, I can only think about how the regime has a seminar of life of many families, including my country.

She was born shortly after the Velvit revolution in 1989 and grew up in hearing what was the case in living under communism for Czechoslovac. It was a dark and repressive world, as it means nationalizing the means of production in fact stealing factories and homes from wealthy citizens so that the state can turn them into farm homes or housing for senior communist state officials. The concepts of fair elections and freedom of expression were just dreams.

In this world, individuals’ opportunities for studying, traveling or securing good jobs were often identified through their flawless “political file” instead of their capabilities. As a result, it was common to find eligible people who do not agree to the system that works in poor -wage and stigma jobs, while active members of the Communist Party, despite the weak academic performance or lack of experience, occupied high positions. “All this has become normal for us. My mother recently told me:” No one believes that the authoritarian system will decrease. “

Those who disagreed or faced the system paid a heavy price. There are many accounts in the academic circles and the media, brutal practices of state security (STB) directed to Czechoslovak citizens who consider “state enemies”: collective monitoring, extortion, arrest, torture, execution, and forced migration. The stories of prominent dissidents, such as the lawyer who was executed by the birth of Hurakova or the imprisoned writer Fakkalf Havel, who has become the first Democratic Czech president, is well known.

But there are many other stories for people who faced repression that is still unknown to the public. The Institute of Study of Initial Systems has documented the cases of about 200,000 people who were arrested in communist Czechoslovakia due to the social class, their situation, opinions, or religious beliefs. Of these, 4495 died during the prison period.

My father belongs to this mass of prisoners that are not largely known. It was classified as a “danger to the Communist community” in 1977 and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

When I was in my twenties, I found an old and hidden paper file in the stairs of the living room table, with the title “Judgment in the name of the Socialist Czechoslovaki Republic”. The written mutual text revealed that my father, along with his friend, was convicted of avoiding military service and spreading negative political opinions.

My father disagreed with the Communist Party, which leads the country, and refused to serve in the army because it failed in its primary duty to protect the country and civilians during the invasion of the Warsaw Agreement of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In the summer of that year, 200,000 soldiers from the Soviet Union and other Communist European countries invaded the suppression of the Democratic Reform Movement that appeared – what became known as the Prague Spring. By the end of the year, 137 Czechs and Selovak were killed. To maintain control in Prague, the Soviet Union, which is permanently stationed as an occupying power in the country. In 1991, they withdrew, Soviet soldiers killed 400 people and raped hundreds of women.

Despite violence and brutal crimes, the Communist Party still considers the armies of Warsaw the Czechoslovaka allies.

So the court condemned my father because “to be against the Communist Party and society, and to harm the relations between the Czechoslovak Army and the Warsaw Charter forces because of its selfish causes, and that it is a great disappointment, given its promising background of the working class.” He was only 22 years old and was about to marry my mother.

When I asked my father about the document and his time in prison, silence. My mother only shared some ideas: “I was very pregnant and lost the child. Your father came to see me in the hospital and said he would leave for some time. At a later time, I discovered that he was in prison.”

My mother sent dozens of messages, but prison guards did not deliver her. I tried to visit him several times, but he was not allowed to see him. She was waiting outside the prison, hoping to take a look at him when the prisoners returned from forced work. “I saw him once for a few seconds. He was just a thin character without hair. It seemed tired. My mother reminded us. My father was released after 10 months for good behavior.

Recently, I was finally able to persuade my father to visit the National Security Archives in Prague. We were hoping to find more information about who led his case and who spied on him – perhaps a friend or even a family member? Because of our disappointment, the employees handed over a high file with a note: “The majority of the documents have been destroyed in the name of your father by state security.”

To hide the greatest thing I did as possible and make people forget, the Communist regime destroyed the documents before its collapse. What we found is a document of the prison guard who tried to force my father to spy on other prisoners.

“The prisoner is friendly and is very popular in the group, which makes him a good candidate to provide information to us. He relies emotionally on his fiancée, which can be used against him,” I read the document. Perhaps his refusal to become a spy was the main reason for not giving my father any of my mother’s messages and was threatened with solitary confinement.

However, many people cooperated with the regime, making it difficult for families to reconcile with their loved ones who happened to be on the other side. This cooperation was driven either by believing in political propaganda or by fear of a “bad political image”, which may lead to a job loss or the lack of good horizons for their children. Simply put, families were facing daily with a terrible choice; Their lives were full of treachery and crazy spying.

This also happened in my family. For example, while my father was a political prisoner, my mother’s brother was a bad officer in STB that blackmailing people to obtain information about the dissidents and contributed to the arrest of many citizens – perhaps even my father.

My father, my father, tried to escape from the country to West Germany, while one of my uncles worked on the side of my mother in the border guards unit known to shoot people trying to escape from the eastern mass. My parental grandmother was an active member of the Communist Party, where the propaganda columns wrote to a party newspaper, Rudi Bravo (Red Law), and denied any violations by the regime, including the arrest of her son.

My father was rehabilitated by a democratic court in 1993 and his criminal record was shed. My family members who worked in the security forces were expelled from their locations. However, options, beliefs and deeds in the past still affect the present.

There are many families like Lee whose relationships are still characterized by shock experiences in communism. Many family members or relatives have lost in various forms of political violence, including prison in harsh conditions and deaths.

People who read Marxist and Linino -Linin texts or adopt communist ideas in the Western context – as there is no direct experience with communist systems – they often fail to recognize these real dates.

This lack of recognition helps to sterilize the inherent defects in the communist systems – which promised to eliminate economic and social inequality but have provided new factors, and in this process, they participate in serious human rights violations.

When searching for a real alternative to the current social and political climate, we must learn from the experiences of those who live under totalitarian regimes. The main political theories affect our society, and therefore, the living experiences of those who have suffered under these political systems must be learned. Only then we can prevent the repetition of historical errors.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the editorial island.