What Totalitarianism Could Not Destroy

By Anna Smith Lacey

Sunday, August 23, 2026

 

Every August 23, Black Ribbon Day commemorates the victims of Europe’s totalitarian regimes. The date marks the anniversary of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the 1939 agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that divided much of Central and Eastern Europe between them. For millions of Europeans, totalitarianism was not an abstraction debated in classrooms. It came to their villages, knocked on their doors, and called them by name.

 

My father was born in a picturesque small village among the vineyards of northeastern Hungary’s Tokaj wine region. It was founded in 1750 by German-speaking Catholic settlers from the Black Forest. They cleared the land, planted vineyards, built stone houses, and raised a church. Swabian by ancestry, Hungarian by homeland, and Christian by faith, they created an orderly and industrious community whose descendants still live there today.

 

The 20th century taught the people of Hercegkút how dangerous such an identity could become when the state claimed the power to assign guilt collectively.

 

Before the war, Hercegkút had a small Jewish community. Its first known Jewish resident arrived in 1808. At its height, in 1880, the community numbered 38 people. Its members included the Weinstock family, who operated the village general store and extended credit to local farmers until they could pay after the harvest.

 

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, all Jewish villagers were taken first to the ghetto in the nearest town and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. None of Hercegkút’s Jewish residents returned. A presence that had endured in the village for more than a century disappeared completely. Only some gravestones remain, alongside the intricate parts of the wrought iron gate of their old cemetery.

 

Then came another totalitarian power — with a different ideology but the same doctrine of collective guilt.

 

On January 2, 1945, Soviet troops ordered Hercegkút’s able-bodied men between the ages of 17 and 45 and women between 18 and 30 to report with three days’ food, two changes of clothing, bedding, and eating utensils. My great-grandfather was among them. My great-grandmother was spared only because she had a young child to care for — my grandmother.

 

They were told that the men and women were leaving for a few days of public work — malenkij robot, “a little work.” In reality, 135 villagers were loaded into railway cars and transported approximately 1,000 miles east to forced-labor camps in the Donbas, in today’s Ukraine. Their “crime” was their German ancestry.

 

Many of the men had only recently survived the destruction of the Hungarian Second Army on the Don River on the eastern front of the war. Some walked home from the war barefoot. They returned from one nightmare — only to be carried away into another.

 

The deportation hollowed out Hercegkút. The very generation that should have rebuilt the village after the war was instead sent into coal mines and labor camps hundreds of miles away. Fifteen of the 135 deportees never returned. The last 13 survivors did not arrive home until October 1949.

 

Those who came back were weakened to the extreme, traumatized, and frequently silent. They had been warned not to speak about what had happened. By then, Hungary’s Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship consolidated its control, and the victims understood that even memory could be politically dangerous.

 

In less than a year, Hercegkút — like the rest of Hungary — was struck by two totalitarian regimes. The Nazis eradicated the village’s Jewish community because of their ancestry; the Soviets deported much of its working-age population because of theirs. Different ideologies, same deadly principle: People were condemned not for what they had done, but for who the state decreed them to be.

 

It would be understandable if the story ended here. But, remarkably, it didn’t.

 

To understand how this village endured, one must only walk into its church and look up. The local church dedicated to the Our Lady of the Visitation was built in the late 18th century with the labor and contributions of the villagers. In September 1955, the parish council decided that its smoke-darkened interior urgently needed repainting. The scale of the project was extraordinary: Its estimated cost equaled roughly six years of the parish’s operating budget. The villagers planned to finance it partly through a collection of wine after the harvest, and parishioners built the scaffolding themselves.

 

Work began in the summer of 1956 — the same year in which Hungarians rose against Soviet domination and were crushed by Soviet tanks — and was completed in 1957.

 

The artists, the brothers Emánuel and Leó Petrasovszky, were men of profound Christian faith. On the walls and vaulted ceilings, they painted Hungarian saints and blesseds, the four Evangelists, scenes from the life of Christ, and the patron saints of the village’s traditional feast days.

 

Consider what that meant. Hungary’s church schools had been nationalized. Religious orders had been suppressed. Priests and believers were watched, harassed, and imprisoned. The regime’s officially atheist ideology sought to drive Christianity from public life and eventually wipe it out of human memory.

 

Yet in a little wine-growing village recently emptied by deportation, people sacrificed years’ worth of resources and their own labor to cover the ceiling with hope.

 

While the communist party promised a new world without God, the freshly painted church walls quietly disagreed.

 

It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful act of quiet, diligent, strong resistance. It was not a march or a manifesto. It was a community repairing what had been damaged and handing down what the state wanted forgotten. In a system built on fear and historical amnesia, the villagers chose hope and memory. Under a regime that claimed the future, they painted for generations they might never see.

 

Totalitarian regimes are obsessed with permanence. They erect colossal monuments, stage outsized military parades, rewrite textbooks and burn books that disagree with them, rename streets, and insist that history has culminated in their rule. They demand not only obedience but professed belief.

 

Then there’s a breaking point. Their monuments are pulled down. Their slogans become museum pieces. The officials who spoke in the name of history are themselves consigned to it.

 

But the parishioners keep praying. Children learn the names of those who were taken. Grief becomes memory, memory becomes duty, and duty makes renewal possible.

 

A state can confiscate property and abolish institutions. It can turn ancestry into a crime, put innocent people on trains, send soldiers from the Don to the mines of the Donbas, and frighten survivors into silence. It can even succeed in erasing an entire community from a village.

 

But it cannot finally possess the human soul. Faith, family, memory, love of home, and the quiet loyalty of one generation to another remain beyond its rightful reach. These are not sentimental refuges from politics. They are defenses against the state’s most radical ambition: to determine not merely how people live, but what they are permitted to remember, love, and worship.

 

Black Ribbon Day should recall more than what totalitarianism destroyed. It should also remind us of what it could not crush.