The week that my parents were set to leave the USSR for America, their families threw a massive party. My father’s best friend, Misha, said to him, “You’re proof that if you put in enough effort, you can get out of any situation.” He was, of course, referencing putting in the effort to escape communism.
Another friend’s father steps towards them and gives a counter example. “Tell me how to get out of this situation,” he said. “You’re in a german camp, and the officer tells all the men to take off their pants. Everyone with a circumcision gets a bullet to the head.”
It was a story from his childhood in the Ukraine. He survived because his parents had been too poor to pay for a circumcision.
My parents always laugh when Americans revel in how hard life must have been for them under communism because of how much more difficult their parents' life was.