by Rod Dreher
Why Tolkien? I ask.
“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story”—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—“was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.”
“Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us maybe six times,” recalls Philip Benda. “It’s about the East versus the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that’s not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire.”
This is how Tolkien prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism’s collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation.
Patrik says the key is to expose children to stories that help them know the difference between truth and falsehood, and teach them how to discern this in real life.
“What my mom always encouraged in us and supported was our imagination, through the reading of books or playing with figures,” he says. “She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others.”
DON’T BE AFRAID TO BE WEIRD IN SOCIETY’S EYES
“In our classes at school, where we were different, we were different through our faith but also through our clothes,” says Patrik. “We had more variety of our clothing, because something came from our aunt or someone who gave us our clothing. We were not hurt by being different because we considered this exceptionality was a value and not something bad.”
In this way, the Benda children say their parents vaccinated them against the disease of communist ideology, which was everywhere. They brought them up to understand that they, as Christians, were not to go along to get along in their totalitarian society. Václav and Kamila knew that if they did not strongly impart that sense of difference to their children, they risked losing them to propaganda and to widespread conformity to the totalitarian system.
“Sometimes it was really hard,” muses Patrik. “We were poor, and we felt the difference. It was totally impossible to buy anything fashionable, or to take part in any fad that was popular. Collectible toys that every child had, we didn’t. Sometimes it was hard, but it made us stronger.”
PREPARE TO MAKE GREAT SACRIFICES FOR THE GREATER GOOD
Kamila once received a letter from her husband in prison, in which he said that the government was talking about the possibility of setting him free early if he agreed to emigrate with his family to the West.
“I wrote back to tell him no, that he would be better off staying in prison to fight for what we believe is true,” she tells me.
Think of it: This woman was raising six children alone, in a communist totalitarian state. But she affirmed by her own willingness to sacrifice—and to sacrifice a materially more comfortable and politically free life for her children—for the greater good.
If you fail to do this, thinking that you are making things easier for your kids, it might backfire in a big way.
“We knew people who gave in for the sake of their children,” says Patrik. “They wanted their children to have a better education, so they compromised their values and entered the Communist Party. But in the end, they alienated themselves from their own children. I saw this when I was in college in 1989, during the Velvet Revolution. Some students positively hated their parents who made those compromises for them.”
Today, the children and grandchildren of Dr. Benda have the letters he sent to their mother and grandmother, respectively, from prison. They are a written testimony of how the political prisoner’s rock-solid faith helped him endure captivity. These letters are a catechism for his descendants, made vivid because they came from the pen not of a plaster saint, but a flesh-and-blood hero.
“In one of his letters, he tells us about how being in prison gave him new insights into the Gospels,” says Patrik. “He talks about how Jesus said in his Passion, ‘Not my will, but Thy will be done, Father.’ My dad’s letter shows how he believed that he was giving testimony by suffering persecution. This helped us all to understand the example of the Lord.”
“Dad believed that even though things were bad, and he was suffering, and that he didn’t see positive consequences from his actions, that there is a good God who will eventually win the battle,” adds Marketa, one of the Benda daughters. “God will eventually win, even though I may not see it in my life. So my suffering is not meaningless, because I am part of a greater battle that will be victorious in the end. That is what our father showed us by his life.”
“But father believed that the communists would fall, and that he would live to see it happen,” says Patrik.
“That’s true,” says Kamila. “But he also had the conviction that to destroy the communist regime was his mission in life. He was always talking with God and asking what is the right way. He always struggled to see the right values, and to live up to them.”
“This is something very important about my father,” says Marketa. “He believed that he was accountable before God, not before people. It didn’t matter to him when other people didn’t understand why he did the things he did. He acted in the sight of God. And you know, the Bible gave him strength, because it is full of stories of the prophets and others going beyond the border of what was comprehensible or understandable to people, for the sake of obeying the Lord.”
TEACH THEY ARE PART OF A WIDER MOVEMENT
The Bendas were founding members of Charter 77, the main Czechoslovak dissident community. Charter 77 was a 1977 document signed by over two hundred artists, intellectuals, and others, demanding that the communist regime respect human rights. Some of its signatories, including the playwright and future president Václav Havel, and Václav Benda, landed in prison for their advocacy.
“We pulled our children into our struggles,” says Kamila. “They had the feeling that we were all members of a group and had a common goal. They were raised to know that they were fighting for a good cause, for justice.”
It was not just a matter of holding the correct opinions and proper sentiments. The Benda children took risks on behalf of the resistance.
“Sometimes when we wanted to send something confidential, we would send one of the kids, because it was less likely that he would be captured,” recalls Kamila. “They also learned to swallow small pieces of paper with messages written on them if there was a danger of arrest.”
Being active in a wider movement for liberty, democracy, and human rights helped shape the Benda children in other ways. Though Václav and Kamila Benda held their Catholic beliefs uncompromisingly within the family, they showed their children by example the importance of working with good and decent people outside the moral and theological community of the church.
Patrik reminds me that his family were the only Christians involved in the movement in Prague. All other senior Charter 77 members were secular. Though most were strongly anti-communist in one way or another, one, Petr Uhl, was a self-described “revolutionary Marxist,” but one who believed that a Marxist state without human rights is not worth fighting for.
“In Charter 77, you had people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together,” says Patrik. “You had, for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side. It was totally normal for me that as a small child, I was being raised in a community of people with very different opinions. So it shattered the bubble around me.”
The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace.
“When we look at what’s happening in America today, we see that you are building walls and creating gaps between people,” he says. “For u
s, we are always willing to speak, to talk with the other side to avoid building walls between people. You know, it is much easier to indoctrinate someone who is enclosed within a set of walls.”
PRACTICE HOSPITALITY AND SERVE OTHERS
Kamila says that obeying Christ’s command to love one’s neighbor means never failing to stand up for every persecuted person, not just churchgoers. She brought up the people who would come by their apartment on their way to interrogation. Kamila was a den-mother figure who would share with them strategies for enduring police questioning, which could be quite harsh, without surrendering information.
Up to twenty people would show up every day at the Benda flat, seeking advice, comfort, and community. And after police released the suspects, they would often return to the Benda home. Whether or not they had come through without breaking, or had given up information under duress, Kamila offered them a cup of tea and a glass of wine and encouragement.
“Mom would tell them, ‘That’s okay, next time, you will do better,’” says Patrik. The dissident circle was too small and fragile to turn on one another, despite their failures, frustrations, and disappointments.
Kamila and I talk again about the communist-era teaching seminars the Bendas held in their apartment. It’s a practice her adult children have taken up. These days, Marketa hosts similar gatherings in the family apartment.
“She calls her salon Evenings with Cheese,” said Marketa’s niece, Klara, “because of her nickname. They call her ‘Mouse.’ She invites people she knows from the university, or through her work, and they will all talk about what they are doing.”
Patrik, who is also a host, says they screen a film once a month and invite groups of people to come watch it and talk about it. Sure, he says, you can watch anything you like in your own home, but there’s something unique about sharing the experience with others, and talking about it.
“I think one of the important things about this is that people actually like to meet and want to meet, but when you don’t have a subject to form the meeting around, it usually goes to waste,” says Klara, Patrik’s teenage daughter. “When you have the movie, then you can start from the movie. We end up having a conversation about high school exams and how much we hate them. That’s great, but the point is, you have to start from somewhere real.”
I mention Václav Benda’s well-known idea that in a society of atomized individuals, as communist Czechoslovakia was, it was important for ordinary people to come together and to be reminded of one another’s existence. In a time when people have forgotten how to be neighbors, simply sharing a meal or a movie together is a political act. This, I say, is a way to fight back against the loneliness and isolation that allows totalitarianism to rule.
That’s true, says Patrik, but it is also the case that talking about movies is a way for older members of the community to contribute to the passing on of cultural memory to the young.
“I had the experience with some people who are twenty years younger than me consider a movie great and interesting, but they don’t know that it’s a remake of something older,” he says. “Also, we don’t just screen new movies but also older ones. Jumping between eras helps the young people to understand the cultural context in which the films are made. The fact that the younger ones can learn from the knowledge and experience of the older ones is really meaningful.”
For the Benda family of Prague, their purpose is first to serve God and then to serve others. They did this under communism, and they are doing it under post-Christian liberalism. It’s a family tradition.
The Social Importance of Family
The Bendas were not the only family resisting communism. In many conversations throughout the former Soviet Bloc, I heard stories of how the Christian family was naturally the bedrock of forming faithful resistance to communism.
In Russia, you expect to find Orthodox Christians, but Baptists are much rarer. They were unknown in this country until the latter half of the nineteenth century, and even today are only about seventy-six thousand in a vast nation of 145 million souls. A gentle, white-haired pastor named Yuri Sipko was once the leader of his country’s Baptists.
It was a difficult job, even after the collapse of Soviet power. Baptists are marginalized and at times persecuted in Russia, even by other believers. Under communism, though, they not only had to contend with ostracism from fellow Christians, but like all other religious believers, were also severely attacked by the Soviet state. Communist propaganda depicted Baptists as members of a dangerous, primitive cult. Sipko, born in 1952 into a family of twelve children, says his father and mother planted the seeds of courage in his heart.
“My father was the pastor of our congregation. All sorts of pressure was put on him,” Sipko recalls. “When I was a child, all I knew was that I wanted to be like my father. I saw that he was able to stand alone, with dignity and courage, against all his enemies.”
When Yuri was still a boy, the Soviets sent his father to prison for five years for preaching. His mother, along with several other women in the congregation, was left alone to raise the children. These mothers read the Bible to the kids, prayed with them, wept with them, and taught their little ones what to live for.
One day, Yuri’s teacher called his mother to the school for a conference. The teacher was angry because the child refused to accept the state-mandated lessons in atheism and materialism. Yuri’s teacher demanded to know what kind of cult Mrs. Sipko belonged to and why they taught children such nonsense. The boy watched his mother, whose husband was in prison for his faith, to see how she would react to this dressing-down by an authority figure.
“She got out her Bible and began to read,” he remembers, smiling. “It makes me so happy to think about it. The teacher called me to her and said, ‘This is our boy. He’s learning our lessons.’ But under the protection of my mother, I found the courage to say, ‘No, I believe in God.’ It was a fiasco for the teacher.”
In a vastly more consequential way, Polish authorities plunged headlong into a similar fiasco when they crushed Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, who was chaplain to Poland’s trade union, Solidarity. Despite numerous threats to his life, the Warsaw priest spoke out against the criminal regime. In 1984, the secret police murdered him and dumped his body in a river.
Father Jerzy was a mediocre seminary student and an undistinguished priest—until the rise of Solidarity in opposition to communist brutality called him to his destiny.
Paweł Kęska, who directs the Popiełuszko museum in the martyred priest’s Warsaw parish, told me a story about nearly one million mourners who came to Father Jerzy’s funeral. And then he told me a story about the modest childhood of the priest who would become a national hero, and who is on his way to official sainthood in the Catholic Church.
Kęska said that the impoverished rural village where Father Jerzy was born is nothing special. Kęska had recently returned from a pilgrimage there with a student group.
“The village is very ordinary—there’s nothing spiritual there,” Kęska told me. “In the home where Father Jerzy lived, there’s one room that has been set apart as a kind of museum, but all the items there are under a thick veil of dust. By the wall is a small table, covered with a kind of plastic sheet. There is a small piece of paper with handwriting on it, written by Father Jerzy’s brother. It said, ‘Every day near the table we were praying with our mother.’ There is a photo of that mother as an old, tired woman. On the other side of that piece of paper is a reliquary with Father Jerzy’s relics.”
Father Jerzy’s ended his short life as a national hero of Christian resistance to communism, beloved by millions for his fidelity to God and his willingness to risk his own life to speak out against injustice to others. But it began in a little house in a dull, poor village in the middle of nowhere, in the bosom of a family that prayed together.
“And that’s the answer,” Kęska concluded. “The whole strength
of that man, and what we need today for our identity.”
“It’s no accident that every dictatorship always tries to break down the family, because it’s in the family that you get the strength to be able to fight,” says Mária Komáromi, a Catholic teacher in Budapest. “You have the feeling that they have your back, so you can go out into the world and face anything. It’s just as true today as it was under communism.”
Over and over in my travels in the East, survivors of communism emphasized to me how much more difficult it is to identify the threats against faith and family today than it was under communism. But it is no less necessary to do so—and to do so with discipline, not relying only on sentimentality, but with a hard charity, the only kind that endures.
Tertullian, an early Church Father who wrote under Roman persecution, famously said that the willingness of martyrs to suffer—even unto death—is what plants love of God into the hearts of men. That may be true, but as the stories of the families Benda, Sipko, Popiełuszko, and so many other conquerors of communism show, the love of mothers and fathers is the seed of the church.
See, Judge, Act
In the coming soft totalitarianism, Christians will have to regard family life in a much more focused, serious way. The traditional Christian family is not merely a good idea—it is also a survival strategy for the faith in a time of persecution. Christians should stop taking family life for granted, instead approaching it in a more thoughtful, disciplined way. We cannot simply live as all other families live, except that we go to church on Sunday. Holding the correct theological beliefs and having the right intentions will not be enough. Christian parents must be intentionally countercultural in their approach to family dynamics. The days of living like everybody else and hoping our children turn out for the best are over.
