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We need to think about where we are now, and compare it to where we have been. The world has seen much worse, but it wont mean anything if we dont use those lessons to conduct us forward.

Heda Margolius Kovaly was for many years a living example of the depth and despair the human spirit is made to endure when societies run amuck.

A Jewish woman of middle-class means in then Czechoslovakia, Kovaly was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, from which she eventually escaped, the only survivor in her immediate family.

Years later, her husband, Rudolf Margolius, was executed during the infamous 1952 Slansky show trial in a Communist Party purge, itself an event of antisemitic overtones where confessions were scripted and forced. Eleven men were put to death for no reason. Films of the trial, rare for the Soviet period, were found in 2018 and are being restored.

Kovaly detailed these events in a classic memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968, a book I read in college and recently reread. It struck me that her story has some useful lessons for us as we make our way through this turbulent time.

It encapsulates a time and a place full of memories that we shouldnt forget. A time when people were turned against one another, when suspicion and fear ruled the day and when loyalty to a party is greater than loyalty to facts and truth.

Truth alone does not prevail, Kovaly wrote. When it clashes with power, truth often loses. It prevails only when people are strong enough to defend it.

We do not speak enough today of this sort of freedom and truth. The big picture freedom and truth.

Blare Davenport, Grade 1, smiled as she received a carnation from members of Rising Tide, a Jersey City-based non-profit, at Sacred Heart School in the wake of the deadly shooting on Dec. 10, 2019. Teacher Delos Reyes helped hand them out to students as well.(Photo: Courtesy of Archdiocese of Newark)

The troubling thing to be avoided is what takes root slowly without even making us aware of its presence. The reliance on the stiff rhetoric of a politician bent on projecting power through biting, divisive words, more than on quiet, confident diplomacy.

Its the thought that our enemy is the neighbor who must be self-evidently insane because of who they vote for. That good, ordinary people must in fact hate their country. That we allow ourselves to be distracted from reality in the name of party loyalty.

Memorial service in Paterson on Saturday, Dec. 14, 2019 for Douglas Miguel Rodriguez Barzola, who was killed in the Jersey City shooting on Tuesday. New Jersey Attorney General, Gurbir Grewal hugs Rodriguez's wife, Martha Freire, center, and daughter, Amy.(Photo: Viorel Florescu / NorthJersey.com)

It seems beyond belief that in Czechoslovakia after the communist coup in 1948, Kovaly wrote, people were once again tortured by the police, that prison camps existed and we did not know, and that if anyone had told us the truth we would have refused to believe it.

Thats a strong quote for us. It does not match our age. Yet can anyone deny that many of these elements are present now? Many of us are suspicious of one another. We have witnessed an increase in crimes of hate, some of them quite high profile, and they have passed on more quietly than we might have imagined not many years ago.

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We live in an era where politicians deem stories they dont like as fake news. But Kovaly knew real fake news. She knew fake justice. She knew real deception, and she knew the desperation that drove a people to find comfort in a place that would offer them none.

I have often thought many of our people turned to communism not so much in revolt against the existing political system, but out of sheer despair over human nature which showed itself at its very worst after the war, she wrote. Since it is impossible for men to give up on mankind, they blame the social order in which they live. They condemn the human condition.

To speak bluntly, we need to think about where we are nowand compare it to where we have been. The world has seen much worse, but it wont mean anything if we dont use those lessons to conduct us forward.

Freedom, as Kovaly fought for it, the right to live ones life according to your conscience and in privacy, is basically about vigilance. It is something that we must not only guard for ourselves but for each other. And it is important to realize that freedom cannot be granted by what governments do but what they dont do.

This is not a high-minded call to abstain or somehow rise above the political questions of the day. But as we approach this troubled Christmas and a new year promising impeachment and much political turmoil, we need to keep our eye on that classical concept of freedom at the heart of Heda Margolius Kovalys story. A freedom that is neither Republican nor Democrat, liberal nor conservative, but universal.

If we are fighting more with each other, and not giving each other some benefit of the doubt, we will lose our vigilance for the foundation that fastens our society together: freedom, the right to privacy and due process, all the parts of our Constitution that all of us need whether weve ever thought about it or not. These are the things that eventually lead Heda Margolius Kovaly to seek refuge in the United States. As we spend this time turned inward, examining what we are really about and what we think we stand for, we should always aim to be that beacon for the world.

In the end, Kovalys story was about hope and survival and a force for good that she compared to a shy little bird within her.

Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wings in rapture, she wrote. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.

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Alex Hubbard is a USA TODAY NETWORK Tennessee columnist. Email him at dhubbard@tennessean.com or tweet to him at @alexhubbard7.

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Anti-communist writer Heda Kovaly warned us we must speak and defend the truth in the worst of times | Opinion - Tennessean