As regular readers know, the idea for my bestselling new book Live Not By Lies started with a phone call from a stranger. Here’s how the book starts:

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet totalitarianism. Gone was the communist police state that had enslaved Russia and half of Europe. The Cold War that had dominated the second half of the twentieth century came to a close. Democracy and capitalism bloomed in the formerly captive nations. The age of totalitarianism passed into oblivion, never again to menace humanity.

Or so the story goes. I, along with most Americans, believed that the menace of totalitarianism had passed. Then, in the spring of 2015, I received a phone call from an anxious stranger.

The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the United States, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the United States today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia.

What prompted her concern? News reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater a same-sex wedding. So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on the Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time. Meanwhile, liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.

The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?

It’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off. Many of us with aging parents are accustomed to having to talk them down from the ledge, so to speak, after a cable news program stoked their fear and anxiety about the world outside their front door. I assumed that this was probably the case with the elderly Czech woman.

But there was something about the tension in the doctor’s voice, and the fact that he felt compelled to reach out to a journalist he didn’t even know, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me to use his name if I wrote about him, that rattled me. His question became my question: What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?

During the next few years, I spoke with many men and women who had once lived under communism. I asked them what they thought of the old woman’s declaration. Did they also think that life in America is drifting toward some sort of totalitarianism?

They all said yes — often emphatically. They were usually surprised by my question because they consider Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject. In talking at length to some of the emigrants who found refuge in America, I discovered that they are genuinely angry that their fellow Americans don’t recognize what is happening.

And that is why I wrote this book. When I began, the old Czech woman’s son did not want their names out. As I finished the manuscript, I connected with the physician again, just to be sure. Here are two paragraphs from the Acknowledgements in the back of the book:

This book exists because of Dr. John Schirger and his mother, Milada Kloubkova Schirger. It was she, a former Catholic prisoner of conscience in her native Czechoslovakia, who said to her US-born son that she was seeing things happening in America that reminded her of her own homeland under communism. Dr. Schirger passed his mother’s remarks on to me in 2015, but at the time he preferred to keep their identity private. His mother’s story was the genesis of Live Not by Lies. Milada Schirger died in 2019, at the age of ninety-two. In gratitude for her witness, her son gave me permission to identify them both. I hope this book is worthy of her legacy.

My friends Béla and Gabriella Bollobás, who fled Hungary for freedom in Britain in the 1960s, first
confirmed to me that I should take Milada Schirger seriously. This book is theirs too. I am grateful for all I have learned from them over the years.

Today I heard from Catholic writer and broadcaster Tom Szyszkiewicz in Minnesota who, as it turns out, is a friend of Dr. Schirger’s. Tom sent me this 2015 story he wrote for National Catholic Register about Milada and her husband Alex, John’s father. Dr. Schirger had not told me the whole story about his mother and father’s life and struggle for freedom. Tom said to me, “I think they are saints.” Excerpts:

[Alex Schirger’s] life’s story — and his wife’s — can almost seem like a novel, but it was very real. Life for faithful Catholics in mid-20th-century Czechoslovakia was difficult, and the Schirgers’ lives were made more difficult because of a forced 14-year trans-Atlantic separation and even imprisonment and torture.

Alex had been born in Prague but moved to America as a boy. When his parents died in New York, he returned to Prague to be raised by relatives. More:

The two met in a Catholic young people’s group in the late 1940s in Prague and came under the influence of Father Josef Zverina, who stood out in opposition to communism. So influential was he that, when Pope John Paul II visited the Czech Republic in 1995, the Pope recalled that Father Zverina had the “grateful admiration of the whole nation.”

Over time, Alexander and Milada’s friendship blossomed into a romance, but because Alex had become an American citizen when he had previously been in this country, the Czech government would not let them marry.

By 1950, the Cold War had reached the point where American citizens had to get out of communist countries or lose their citizenship. Alexander went to Austria, then Italy, seeking help. The help came in the form of an audience with none other than Pope Pius XII. “What should he do?” he asked the Pope. “Stay in Europe to be as close to his intended as possible? Or go to America?” The Pope’s answer: “Go to America and pray for her.” That counsel would prove providential, in the long run.

Meanwhile, back in Prague:

Milada continued to meet with the group formed by Father Zverina. They were warned numerous times to stop meeting, warnings which went ignored. Along with others in the group, Milada was arrested. She was held in solitary confinement, where she was interrogated and tortured for 18 months. Finally, she was brought to trial and convicted of being an enemy of the state. She was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, but her father died after four years, and she was released.

Read it all to find out how the two were reunited. Dr. Alex Schirger eventually became a physician at the Mayo Clinic, where his son John later worked as a cardiologist. John Schirger served recently as the head of the Catholic Medical Association.

This hero of the faith Milada Schirger is responsible for Live Not By Lies. If my book does any good in the world, it is because of what she endured in that Communist camp, where the regime sent her for practicing her faith — and because her true love, Alex, waited all those years for her to come to him in America, where they had children, including the son who one day called a journalist he didn’t know, because his mother, who had seen so much, believed her adopted homeland was sleepwalking into a living nightmare.

If you buy the book, if you love the book, think of Milada Schirger, and thank God for her life and witness (and that of her faithful husband Alex, who waited). Young Milada could not have known as she shivered in solitary confinement, aching from the communist interrogators’ torture, that one day, seven decades later, God would use her suffering and witness in such a powerful way.