30-04-2025
I fled a dictatorship. Trump and his policies are hauntingly familiar.
In the early hours of March 10, 1948, the body of Czechoslovakia's foreign minister was found beneath a window of the ministry's palace in Prague. The official explanation was suicide. The public consensus — then and now — is murder. Two weeks earlier, the Communist Party had staged a bloodless coup, seizing full control of the government. The minister's death symbolized the definitive end of Czechoslovakia's democracy. Forty years of dictatorship followed.
I was born into that dictatorship. Like more than thirty other children (including the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright) whose stories I document in my recent book, Czechoslovakia's Cold War Refugee Children: Contemporary Resonance, my family fled a country no longer safe for political dissent or independent thought. We were the children of artists, politicians, academics, and ordinary people who refused to toe the party line.
Today, as I watch troubling developments unfold in the United States, I can't help but feel history knocking — not softly, but insistently. The parallels between the collapse of Czechoslovak democracy in 1948 and the democratic backsliding occurring in the U.S. under the Trump administration in 2025 are unnerving. And for those of us whose families once lived through such unraveling, they are all too familiar.
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The coup in Czechoslovakia was not a sudden explosion. It was a meticulously executed erosion. The Communists deployed police and militias loyal to the Party, pressured rivals to resign, and staged a façade of legality by forcing the democratically-elected president to accept a new, Communist-dominated cabinet. When the foreign minister died — likely pushed from the window by agents of the regime — the message was clear: resistance was futile.
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Today's circumstances are different, but the tactics feel hauntingly similar. A charismatic leader returns to power and quickly begins reshaping government structures to entrench loyalty. Independent federal agencies are gutted. Inspectors general and civil servants are removed en masse. Immigrant activists disappear into detention without due process. Democratic norms bend — not broken all at once, but weakened over time until they no longer resemble what came before.
This is the kind of creeping change those of us who fled authoritarianism remember well. It's not just the loud spectacles — the tweets, the rallies, the televised outrage. It's the quiet dismantling of rules and safeguards. The normalization of once-unthinkable behavior. The way fear settles into communities, into families, into children.
Czechoslovakia's Cold War Refugee Children brings together oral histories and personal reflections from those of us displaced as children during the regime (1948-1989). We were small, but we remember.
We remember the whispered conversations between adults. The fear of being watched or turned in. The hurried packing. The confusion of arriving in new countries where languages, customs, and values were alien. And we remember — always — that we left something behind that was both dangerous and precious.
The United States welcomed me as a refugee child. It would not do so today.
When today's migrant children are demonized and American children witness the fracturing of their country's ideals, I worry — not just for their safety, but for the imprint it leaves on their souls. History is not just taught; it is lived and transmitted, often unconsciously, across generations.
Parallels are not predictions. They are warnings. They are invitations to pay attention.
In 1948, many Czechoslovak citizens hoped the Communists would restore order after wartime chaos. They underestimated how quickly the government could become a tool of surveillance and suppression. They thought democracy would return in a few years. It took over four decades.
History shows us that authoritarianism starts with the silencing of critics, the politicization of bureaucracy, and the erosion of public trust. It starts with windows opening in the night, and no one daring to ask why.
History is speaking, and it is up to us to decide whether we will listen.
Miriam Potocky Rafaidus is a researcher at the International Rescue Committee and author of "Czechoslovakia's Cold War Refugee Children: Contemporary Resonance". She is a resident of West Palm Beach.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Trump reminds me of the dictatorship I fled | Opinion
