Channy Laux came to America as a teenager. She quickly learned English. She put herself through school. She got a job in Silicon Valley as an engineer and climbed the ladder of success within the aerospace and biotech industries. She fell in love, got married, and started a family. In 2017, she started her own food business, bringing Cambodian ingredients to American kitchens. It is the story of an immigrant who comes to America and achieves the American Dream.
From the outside looking in, Laux has lived the coveted life. But to know Laux and her experience―to know why she had no choice but to come to the United States―is to see her life in a much harsher light. Laux is a survivor of what is known as the Killing Fields of Cambodia, when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took power from 1975 to 1979. Her father and brother were among the 2 million killed, which was approximately a quarter of the population. When she arrived in America, she carried with her the anguish, fear, and sorrow that comes with escaping genocide.
Laux’s story is one of the many millions that could be told about the brutality of communist dictatorships. Her story as an American immigrant provides a perspective of polar opposites between freedom and tyranny. With the help of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, she has been able to tell her story to a much wider audience.
“She tells her story, and each time, she has to relive the losses and the repression and the horribleness of it,” said Elizabeth Spalding, founding director of the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. “But she does it because she knows that by telling her story, she’s reaching more people than you or I could, even though we would be moved by such a story.”
A Real Face to the History
Spalding believes that telling these individual stories breathes life into the history of the tens of millions killed by communist oppression. On the Victims of Communism website, it states that “communism killed over 100 million.” That is a difficult number to grasp. It sounds hyperbolic. But when one considers the deaths via execution, starvation, imprisonment, and hard labor perpetrated by the leaders of China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, and then Russia and all of the nations that fell under its Soviet bloc, it becomes a simple act of addition. Simplicity, however, is not the objective. The objective is to express a complex understanding for what seems mathematically improbable, and societally impossible. To do that, one must look to the individual. Not ironically, it is the individual that communism wishes to ignore.
“We want people to understand these big numbers,” Spalding iterated, “but when you say that, it’s zeros―and people don’t understand. That’s why we set up the Witness Project, so we can focus on the people who escaped communism.” Spalding noted that the Witness Project has a twofold objective: to tell the past and inform the present. She acknowledges that Westerners, Americans in particular, suffer from a lack of historical understanding, especially about the vices of communism.
The efforts of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation can be paralleled with that of Holocaust memorial museums located throughout the country. Given society’s susceptibility to amnesia, collecting and repeating the stories of the past is the surest, although not foolproof, way to keep the evils of history from repeating.
“There were those who wanted to keep alive what the Nazis did so people could understand the Holocaust and World War II,” Spalding said. “They worked together for decades to ensure the stories were collected. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the [Washington, D.C.,] national Holocaust museum. There was also a sense of urgency about how they were going to lose their witnesses because it was a confined period of time.”
Retelling the Stories
Unlike Nazism, communism was a ruling doctrine before and has endured well after the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich, despite its atrocities. Its survival in countries such as China, North Korea, and Cuba―altogether nearly 20 percent of the global population―and its defense by the Western intelligentsia, like journalists, artists, and academics, simply echo the reasons for collecting and retelling these stories.
“Communism didn’t die. It’s still around. It’s still real. And people say since it’s still around, can it really be bad?” Spalding stated. “It’s had different iterations; but when you look at wherever it’s been installed in almost 40 countries over 100 years, it’s never brought equality or the egalitarianism that it promised. It’s not something that brings liberation like it promises. All it’s ever brought is repression, death, and devastation.” And this is what these stories have in common. Those who have escaped communism, whether from the Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe, the Maoist nations of Asia, or those who sailed, floated, or swam from Castro’s Cuba, all have a story to tell. Indeed, they are harrowing stories―stories of survival and resistance always are. The hope is that the stories will not fall on deaf ears. The hope is that today’s generation will heed these warnings from survivors.
“We need these stories so people can understand what that person fled from, and to know that we don’t want what they fled from here. It’s so important to get those stories across to people of all ages, especially to young people,” Spalding said. “You have to shine light. You have to work extra hard because you have entrenched beliefs. We can’t give up. We have to keep going.”
Shining this light is the very heart of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Thirty years ago, the foundation was authorized unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. In 2007, President George W. Bush dedicated the Victims of Communism Memorial statue―a shining light of liberty―“to the more than one hundred million victims of communism and to those who love liberty.” To better understand the totality of that suffering, one must first begin with the individual story.
