Learning the history of the crimes of communism from books is one thing.
Hearing it from the mouths of those who have suffered it in their flesh is quite another.
Returning from the Baltic countries, Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic, where missions from the Defense Committee had taken me, it was the same suffering each time that I heard from the mouths of parliamentarians.
The great history that stutters: the Soviet occupation, the annexation by the USSR or the forced integration into the Warsaw Pact, a first time due to the German-Soviet Pact of 1939, a second time after 1945, all after suffering the Nazi boot.
The little story which is the same everywhere: a grandfather shot in the forests of Lithuania or Latvia for having joined the maquis of the Forest Brothers, who held off the Red Army until the end of the 1950s, a grandmother tortured in the KGB cellars or a great-uncle deported to Siberia.
Read alsoWhen half of Europe lived under the yoke of communism
These are not the…
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