The Cuban family stayed only a few weeks and then reunited with relatives in Michigan. Freedom is a gift in America that we don’t often stop to think about why it matters. Our “rights” are supposed to protect against people who want to harm or hurt us. They are in place to help us get along with each other and live in peace.

The beautiful Cuban people lost many of their human rights when Castro decided to deny these rights— rights written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, developed by the United Nations in 1945 after WWII. The first truly universal human rights document for the world, Eleanor Roosevelt led the committee created this document. The Declaration grants rights for all in a list of 30 basic concepts, with #30 being: No One Can Take Away Your Human Rights.

The history of this idea has been around a long time – first documented on a clay tablet in 539 B.C. from statements made by Cyrus the Great. After conquering Babylon, he freed all the slaves to return home and declared people should choose their own religion. In 1791, the US Bill of Rights limited the powers of the federal government and protected the rights of all citizens, residents, and visitors on United States Territory.  It is still a work in progress for America.  With this passing Fidel Castro who took many people’s lives, rights, property, and dignity away – I hope now is a time for the Cuban people to peacefully ask to have their freedom and democracy restored.

This won’t come from building a wall.  It will come through America’s caring attitude and encouragement at this moment in history.  It happened in the Czech lands in 1989 with the Velvet Revolution which restored their freedom from communism.  It can happen again!  In 2011, Roger and I had the privilege of visiting Cuba and met many Cuban people who knew this day would come. To them I say we stand ready to help you enjoy freedom again.

“Shout for Freedom”

A memory from the Velvet Revolution – Twenty-Five years ago – Czechoslovakia, November, 1989

I have a memory that embodies the emotions I felt when my dad’s native land, Czechoslovakia, recovered their freedom. After forty-one years of communist rule, in what is now known as the “Velvet Revolution,” a brave country shouted for freedom and would not be denied.

The TV news broadcasts in late November 1989 weren’t constant like they are today. To know what stories were breaking worldwide, you had to wait patiently until the evening reports. For weeks, my dad followed anything and everything that was about his countrymen sitting on the cusp of regaining freedom.

As I lived over an hour away from my parents’ Indialantic, Florida home, my father and I spoke often by telephone during those weeks speculating what might happen next. His voice filled with excitement and apprehension as the world looked on. His similar hopes for freedom had been dashed some twenty years earlier when his remaining Czech family and friends thought the communists were easing their tight hold. Back then, he’d eventually watched television images of Soviet tanks filling Prague’s streets.

But in the fall of 1989 he assured me, “This is different. There is a chance.” My dad had the right to speculate. He’d been forced in to being a stateless citizen in 1939 when the Nazis occupied his homeland and the Czechs lost their democratic state.  He first found safe harbor in China before making his way to the USA.  I know now following WWII that my parents in 1947 considered a move from America with their young family to Czechoslovakia. Dad wrote a letter to his Aunt Valla saying he wanted to return and practice medicine. She tried to dissuade him. She told him things weren’t the same as before WWII. “You will do better to remain in the U.S.”   I still think had the communist party not taken over the Czechoslovak government in early 1948, my parents would have moved there. Perhaps there never would have been a ‘me’. I was born in Florida in December 1948 after Dad and Mom decided to stay free in America.

So as the Velvet Revolution unfolded in 1989, I stayed glued to television reports. My heart was in my throat, hoping on Dad’s next visit to his homeland he would find his relatives living in freedom, in a country returned to democracy!   When the moment arrived with over 200,000 people celebrating in Prague’s Wenceslas Square, I was won over by the humanity of the people. I marched down to the Orlando Sentinel’s newspaper office and asked if I could purchase news photos from Prague.

Over the next few days I kept returning. Each time the Sentinel made good on their offer to share powerful Associated Press wire photos hot off the press. Every AP photo grabbed my attention. One was titled “Shout for Freedom.” The long cold war had ended with little bloodshed. Days later, I had the pictures framed and gave them to my dad with a plaque that simply reads “Freedom.” As if it were yesterday, I remember the moment I handed it to him. I recall my dad’s slow forming smile and his voice cracking as he simply said, “Why do some images reach inside us?”

Clearly resonating with readers is the humanizing of history through the letter excerpts of my dad’s Czech friends and relatives who lived through incredible Nazi-caused life-changing events. The real Adventurers of my book were the “lucky ones.”  They survived and rebuilt their lives after WWII. My dad with my mom chose to do that in America. The details that spill from the old letters – hopes, fears, comfort and advice that they shared with my dad – are as relevant today as they were seventy years ago.

At the end of the book club session, one attendee said: “I came to care deeply about these people through reading their own words. Thank you for reminding me what matters in life.”

As I think of Memorial Day and remember those Americans who have given so much across the world so that we Americans and millions of others can enjoy freedom, I think of my father and his immense pride from becoming an American citizen in 1944. My dad knew what it was like to be persecuted, to proclaimed as ‘undesirable,’ and to lose your freedom and native land.

From the Congressional Record, 1941, Vol. 87, Pt. 1 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt described well what I believe my father sought in his dream of coming to America:

Dr. Oswald “Valdik” Holzer 1941

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor– anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception — the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change — in a perpetual peaceful revolution — a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions — without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”