Mine was wearing that communist “party” shirt with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro* all partying to high school
Edited- Castro for Kim Il-Sung
Mine was wearing that communist “party” shirt with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro* all partying to high school
Edited- Castro for Kim Il-Sung
My babysitter when I was about age 3-5 was an older Russian Jewish woman who had been a scientist back in the USSR. She and her husband left due to a spike in antisemitism after 1991. I figured when I was pretty young that Communism couldn’t be that bad if my “other parents“ came from there. My older sibling actually spoke a bit of Russian by the time we left [redacted].
Funnily enough, she did sometimes forcefeed me, which I attribute to her being old enough to remember the Great Patriotic War.
My grandma often tried to force feed me, and it's pretty much a stereotype for all grandmas, especially the ones who lived through WWII. There's also lots of people who lived through it who got obese because they always tried to eat as much as was available every time they ate because that's what they learned to do during and after the German occupation here. So yeah, it probably does have something to do with that.
My grandma used to tell me about how one of her earliest memories was when Nazis got into their house looking to arrest her dad for striking. She started crying and one of the soldiers started awkwardly patting her head to comfort her. A few years later I was on a school trip in a site where the Nazis used to imprison people that is now a museum and the guide told us "in this room they imprisoned the bus and tram drivers of [x] for striking" and I was like holy shit, that's where they kept my great-grandpa, it was pretty unexpected. Many people had scratched their names on the wall, I didn't have time to look for his but maybe I will some time if I'm passing by.