'Live Not By Lies' Documentary Is Here
With Special Thanks To The Late Milada Schirger, Who Launched It All
Well, today’s the day. Wherever you are, right now you can stream the first (of four) episode of the Live Not By Lies documentary by becoming a member of the Angel Studios Guild. That’s how Angel pays for film production: through the membership fees of Guild members. You get access to their entire library of films and TV shows, like The Chosen, King of Kings, and Cabrini. Guild member of not, you can order a long-sleeve LNBL t-shirt here. I’m wearing mine right now, in fact — it’s nice and thin, just right for spring.
I think it’s something like $15.99 to join the Guild for just one month, so if that’s what you do, you’ll get access to all four episodes (new one drops each Tuesday in April). But I think you’ll want to stick with it. That gives you the right to consider and vote on new Angel projects. They told me that nothing they have ever done had a higher positive vote from the Guild than Live Not By Lies. That’s quite a vote of confidence.
I don’t have time this morning for a long newsletter. Gonna be a very busy day. I found out that in the audience tonight will be a Franciscan University of Steubenville student named Rosie Schirger. What makes her special? It was her late grandmother, Milada Schirger, who is responsible for this whole thing. Milada was the elderly Czech woman who, in 2015, told her son, Dr. John Schirger, that the things she saw happening in America today reminded her of how her homeland, Czechoslovakia, changed when the Communists came to power there. Milada spent years in a Communist prison for the crime of being a “spy for the Vatican” — meaning that when they ordered her to stop going to church, she refused.
Milada died in 2019. Here is the story of Milada and her late husband Alex, from Aleteia. Excerpt:
Their story can almost seem like a novel, but it was very real. Alex was born in 1925 in Prague. His parents’ business crashed in the Great Depression, so they moved to New York. Alex joined them around 1931 and gained American citizenship. In 1935, both of his parents died, and he returned to Czechoslovakia to be raised by a grandmother and an uncle. By the time World War II ended, he was 20 and had already seen his share of suffering and death, including the entrapment of Reinhard “the Hangman of Europe” Heydrich’s assassins and biking out to the countryside to dig for potatoes to eat. But he survived and eventually went to medical school at Charles University.
Milada Kloubkova was born in 1927 in a Prague suburb. Her father spent two years in prison during World War II for his work with the Czech resistance. She studied mineralogy during the war and then switched to special education and took a doctorate in that field, also at Charles University, after the war was over.
The two met in a Catholic youth group in the late 1940s and came under the influence of Jesuit father Josef Zverina, who stood out in opposition to Communism. So influential was he that when Pope St 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, Alex and Milada’s friendship blossomed into a romance, but because Alex was an American citizen, 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. Alex went to Austria and 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 Pontiff – 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.
In the meantime, Milada continued to meet with Father Zverina’s youth group. 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, interrogated and tortured for 18 months. Finally, she was brought to trial and convicted of being an enemy of the state and a “Vatican spy.” She was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, but her father died after four years, and she was released.
Alex ended up in Lincoln, Neb., a full-fledged physician working as a hospital orderly since officials didn’t trust communist medical credentials. Then a train crashed in Lincoln and hospitals around town started to receive the injured. Alex tended to them, and doctors around him realized he really did know what he was doing. Soon he was on his way to the prestigious Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he trained in vascular medicine.
Minnesota also happened to be the home state of the influential Senator Hubert Humphrey. Alex started working with his office, first to get Milada released from prison and then out from behind the Iron Curtain. That finally happened in 1965.
It did not take long for them to marry, and they spent the rest of their years in Rochester, Minn., where he worked at Mayo and she raised their two children, John, now also a physician at Mayo, and Anne.
I owe so much to this dear lady, Milada Schirger. So does everybody who benefits from Live Not By Lies — both the book and the movie:
Her son John could not get time off from his job at the Mayo Clinic, where he is a cardiologist, to come tonight, but if he had, he would have given this talk (he sent it to me overnight):
Ladies and gentlemen what a wonderful occasion this is! I'm sorry I cannot be there to share in it. I'm so grateful to Rod for everything that he has done in bringing the message he is sharing to light! What an honor it is for Rod, and for those who shared their stories with him, that Vice President Vance, who has spoken strongly on behalf of freedom, can be here for this opening!
Several years ago I had the privilege of speaking with Rod about a message I’d heard from my parents over the years.
My parents were refugees from central Europe, from what was then Czechoslovakia. My father was a physician, my mother had her doctorate in Education. They both experienced totalitarianism in its fascist form under the Nazis and later, under Soviet communism. Indeed, my mother spent nearly six years in a communist prison for publicly practicing her Catholic faith. She and my father were separated for 14 years due to the political circumstances of their time and place but in the Wisdom and Mercy of Divine Providence were reunited in this wonderful country, the United States of America, that they came to call home.
They were grateful for the freedom that they experienced here, the freedom to be good, the freedom to worship publicly and the freedom to speak their minds. And like Alexander Solzhenitsyn they loved this country for its people. They loved the hard working men and women who serve as the backbone of this country, who fought for this country, and whose children fought for this country. They loved them for their honesty, for their hard work, for their sacrifice and their commitment to truth.
Over the years, they however came to be concerned with what they perceived to be a new form of totalitarianism, a new form of thought control, a new restriction on freedom for good and freedom for excellence in the form of ideologies co-opting the liberal project here in this country. And they became expert at seeing how these new ideologies restricted freedom through administrative bureaucratic apparatuses.
It is this perception that they had, this sense of things changing, reflecting similarities to what they had experienced in Central Europe, that I had a chance to pass on to Rod, who has since extended their experience and brought it together with those of hundreds of others who experienced these ideologies. Of course, it goes without saying, that what they experienced here did not compare in any way to the severity of the worst of what happened under the totalitarianisms of the middle of the 20th century. Still, it is important to remember that there were different periods under those totalitarianisms, in particular under communism, that tended toward a “softer” version of totalitarianism, and the similarities of political correctness and cancel culture to these periods were apparent to them.
It is these concerns that they passed on to me and that I had the good fortune of being able to pass on to Rod, and which he so magnificently explored and developed over the last several years on the Internet and culminating in his book “Live not by Lies”. And how exciting it is now to see it come to screen to be shared with an ever wider audience!
Thank you Rod for taking my parents’ message to this culture, after confirming it with the experience of so many others who had similar experiences to theirs. And thank you to the producers of this documentary series! And thank you all for your interest! And special thanks to Vice President Vance, for his courage in speaking up for our most basic freedoms, the freedom to speak, and the freedom to worship and practice our faith.
Glory to God!
So, I’m going to sign off to get my day started. For all of you who invested early in this film project, thank you. For all of you who read the book, thank you (and if you haven’t, please order it here — there’s a lot more in it that we couldn’t put on film). For all of you who plan to become Angel Guild members to watch the documentary, thank you.
In conversations this past week at various screenings around the US, it has really become clear to me how important it is to educate ourselves, and especially the young, about the reality of Communism. The young might not want to read my book, but they’ll watch this movie, and they will learn from the heroic men and women in it exactly what Communism was, and why it matters so much for us today to understand this.
On Netflix, you can see a hundred docs about Nazism — and that’s great! We should remember what Nazism was, so we can resist it if it ever arises again. But there’s almost nothing about Communism. It’s incredible, if you think about it for two seconds, that this ideology enslaved hundreds of millions, and lead to the deaths of tens of millions in the 20th century. But after the Soviet version collapsed in 1992, we collectively forgot. I know why Hollywood and the media preferred to ignore it (namely, that so many of them sympathize with the aims of Communism), but why do the rest of us go along with it? Now, with the release of this film, we have something we can show to our kids — so many of whom are vulnerable to the idea of Socialism and Communism, because they don’t know.
If this thing is a hit, we are thinking about doing a second season, focusing on non-European victims of Communism and their testimonies — Asians (Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.) and Latin Americans (Cubans, Venezuelans). So, please, sign up for Angel Studios, watch the doc as it rolls out this month, and tell your friends about it if you like it. Join the Angel Guild here.
One reason why little in the media is devoted to the crimes of Communism but the crimes of the Nazis are so commonplace in the media is that for much of the left the Communists weren't such bad people. They were trying to right the wrongs of Capitalism but some Communists went a little too far. Nikita Khrushchev and Hubert Humphrey and Clement Attlee had a lot of things to agree on. If it wasn't for those meanies on the right like John Wayne and Ronald Reagan, the forces of the left might have prevailed and the world would be a happy and safe place, there would a piece of tofu or bowl of bran on every dinner plate, and the people would ride bikes to work instead of automobiles.
It is so important to keep these stories alive. I was blessed as a child to know Richard Wurmbrand who spent 14 years tortured for Christ in a Romanian prison. He was a dear friend of my dad's, Dave Hunt, and stayed in our home when he came to America to testify before Congress. To have spent time with a true martyr, to look into his eyes, and hear his story and that of his wonderful wife from their own lips changed my life.
In 1967, my family smuggled Bibles into Romania, my dad praying God would blind the eyes of the guards at every checkpoint and he did. I will never forget the tears of joy when we delivered the Bibles.
Wurmbrand said the same as the message if this film, these courageous men and women tried to warn the West and we didn't listen.
I don't think we can stop the tide but we must never stop telling their stories. The day will come when we will have to make such tough choices as they did and I pray we are up to the task.