I understand well. One of my daughter-in-law's father escaped from communist Czechoslovakia around 1980 and made it to the US a year later. My maternal grandfather was born in the Czech Republic in 1906. I recently worked with a couple of guys whose parents came from Latvia - one of Latvian decent, the other Russian. Luckily, they were friends having not lived through it themselves. For a short time, I dated a woman from Kiev. It is unfortunate that the world has such harsh history, yet encouraging that we can somehow get through it...