Victims of Communism Remembered Powerfully

This was the dedication of the Victims of Communism Museum, honoring the millions who perished under the ham-handed rule of Communist tyrants in Russia, China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and throughout Southeast Asia. 

As late as the 1980s, one out three people on the planet lived under Communist tyranny.  Beginning with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and culminating in the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, the Iron Curtain has been relegated to the dustbin of history. 

In the process, more than 100 million perished — many of whom battled their Red slave masters for freedom, such as in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 or the Tiananmen Square in 1989. It is to these victims in the cause of freedom that the Museum is dedicated.

A walk through the museum and its chronological memorial brings to life the martyrs in the war against Communism as well as a few who emerged triumphant. Marshal Józef Pilsudski, considered the national savior of Poland, successfully drove back the embryonic Soviet state from overtaking his country in their war from 1919-21 and defeated Russian invaders in the Battles of Kiev and Warsaw in 1920. 

Also memorialized is Cardinal Josef Mindzenty, Roman Catholic primate of Hungary, who spoke out against the Communist regime that took power in his country after World War II. He was imprisoned, drugged, and tortured to the limit of human endurance. Freed during the 1956 uprising that briefly forced the Russian occupiers out of Hungary, Mindzenty fled to the U.S. Embassy in Budapest when the revolution was quashed. He remained there until 1971, when an agreement between the Vatican and the Kremlin finally got the fearless churchman into the outside world.

But also remembered are the less famous figures who nonetheless displayed incredible valor fighting Communism: Ida Siekmann, the first person to try to escape East Berlin after construction on the Berlin Wall was begun in 1961 and died after leaping from her 4^th floor apartment and hitting the ground before firefighters in West Berlin were able to rescue her with what they called a “jumping sheet;” Chris Gueffroy, an East German waiter shot in the heart in 1989 as he tried to escape and thus became the penultimate casualty before the Wall came down; and Siegfried Kroloth, an adolescent boy drowned on May 14, 1973 as East German soldiers looked on and did nothing.

Every word of this alarming history was edited by Elizabeth Spalding, Ph.D., historian and political scientist. Her words explain explicit pictures that spell out the saga of one of darkest chapters of modern history.

Initially envisioned by author Anne Edwards, the Victims of Communism Museum was nurtured and brought to life by her husband, Heritage Foundation Scholar and Catholic University Professor Lee Edwards. Honored by the Museum with its annual Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom, Edwards recalled to Newsmax how the medal was dedicated to the “Tank Man of Tiananmen Square” — the hero of the student uprising against the Chinese Communists in 1989 who stopped a tank by lying in front of it — and one of its early recipients was Rep. (and now House Majority Leader) Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

“The fight against Communism has always been bipartisan,” said Edwards, noting that Bill Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are among the supporters of the museum.

Among those singled out for salutes at the dedication ceremony were Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and his wife Aldona Wos, a Polish-American diplomat who served as ambassador to Estonia under President George W. Bush. Their eponymous family foundation donated $2 million toward seeing the vision of the Victims of Communism Museum come to life.

Communism, of course, still rules in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba and still has power under other names in other parts of the world. But learning of its past victims and seeing how so many overcame this particularly odious ideology will almost surely inspire those who live under Communism to eventually defeat it. 

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.