When the Communists took control of Hungary in 1949, my parents’ textile shop (and everything that was in it) was taken from them. They were considered the “bourgeoisie,” and therefore dangerous.
That same year, 1949, my grandfather was sentenced to ten years hard labor by the Communists for having a small American flag in his possession (much like the kind we wave at July 4th celebrations or with which we decorate the graves of our fallen heroes). At my grandfather’s “trial” they asked him why he had the flag. Was he a spy? He replied that it represented freedom better than any other symbol he knew and that he had a right to have it.
In 1956, when my grandfather got an early release from the labor camp, I was ten years old, and the Hungarian Revolution against the Russian Communists was in full swing.
My grandfather returned looking like a victim of the Holocaust. Still, the first thing he wanted to know was whether we still had the flag. Of course, we did not. It had long ago been confiscated. But my father did not want to break his father’s heart, so he somehow managed to secure another one. Seeing that flag somehow erased much of the pain and torment those years of imprisonment caused my grandfather. That flag restored in him something like hope. In my father, it also stirred up righteous anger.
It soon became clear that although the Soviets had finally pulled out of our immediate area, the Communists were winning. The Revolution was going to fail.
And then came the final straw for my Dad. On one of his trips out to secure some bread, a hand grenade landed next to him but, miraculously, it did not go off. The spark that should have set off that grenade set off my father instead. He came home and announced to my mother that that was it. He said we must leave the country.
“But where are we going?” I asked.
“We are going to America,” my father said.
“Why America?” I prodded.
“Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place,” he replied.
My father said that as naturally as if I had asked him what was the color of the sky. It was so obvious to him why we should head for America. There was really no other option in his mind.
What was obvious to him, unfortunately, took me nearly 20 years to learn.
How is it that this simple man who had none of the benefits or luxuries of freedom and so-called “education” understood this truth so deeply and so purely and expressed it so beautifully?
It has something to do with the self-evidence, as Jefferson put it, of America’s principles. Of course, he hadn’t studied Jefferson or America’s Declaration of Independence, but he had come to know deep in his heart the meaning of tyranny. And he hungered for its opposite.
The embodiment of those self-evident truths and of justice in America was an undeniable fact to souls suffering under oppression. And while a professor at Harvard might have scoffed at the idea of American justice in 1956 (or today, for that matter), my Dad would have scoffed at him. Such a person, Dad would say, had never suffered in a regime of true injustice. America represented to my Dad, as Lincoln put it, “the last, best hope of earth.”
The wonderful thing about self-evident truths, in a way, is that they don’t have to be taught.
Or do they?
They don’t have to be taught in the same way, for example, that we teach grammar. It isn’t an artificial order of things that we impose upon ourselves. Still, these truths must be understood. For if they are not fully understood (as they frequently are not by those who take them for granted), they are easily forgotten.
Dad just never had the luxury to forget.
Peter W. Schramm teaches political science at Ashland University and serves as Senior Fellow and Director of the Ashbrook Scholar program at the Ashbrook Center in Ohio. This column is the first of two pieces for the NewBostonPost on American civic identity. Read Part 2
Courtesy of Wikimedia. 
