‘Live Not By Lies’ Highlights Forgotten Anti-Communist Heroes

For Silvester Krcmery, each morning began with what he called an “inventory check.”

Krcmery, a doctor who described his prison cell as so small he could not sit, recalls waking up in the bitterly cold atmosphere.

“Do I still have my nose? Because it was as cold as a frozen stone. So I check: all right, I still have my nose,” he recalls in a clip from the new docuseries, “Live Not by Lies.”

“Then the right ear—I have it. Then the left ear—I have it. Because I couldn’t feel them at all. Nor did I feel some of my fingers sometimes. And so on.”

Krcmery, a devout Catholic living in what was then Czechoslovakia, was arrested in 1951. “In 1954, the young Christian doctor told the Communist judges, who were about to sentence him for high treason: ‘You have power in your hands, but we have truth!’” writes Rod Dreher, the author of “Live Not By Lies,” the book that inspired the new series produced by Angel Studios.

He was not released until 1964.

Silvester Krcmery is not a name I—or most Americans, I’d wager—had ever heard of before watching “Live Not By Lies.”

But his wasn’t the only powerful story shared in the first episode of the four-part series. (Subsequent episodes will be released on a weekly basis in April.)

Krcmercy’s sister, Gabriella, shares how the family struggled to survive in Communist days, relying on soup from nuns and the one kilogram of bread a family member received for each day’s work in a military hospital.

We hear from Patrik Benda, one of six children of Vaclav and Kamila Benda, Catholics involved in resisting communism in Prague. Patrik Benda recalls he and his siblings being tasked by his parents to find a phone booth on the way to school and call Vaclav Havel about the Communists searching the home of an acquaintance.

Benda recalls being surprised that Havel, an ardent fighter against the Communists and later the president of the Czech Republic, merely said “yes” over and over as he heard about the search.

“Later we learned there was a policeman behind him and he was listening to everything he said,” Benda adds.

Nor was that the only unique element of the Benda kids’ lives: they also learned to swallow paper messages.

In remarks made before the documentary’s premiere April 1 at The Heritage Foundation, Dreher, who also is executive producer, noted how little stories of heroic Communist dissenters had been covered by Hollywood.

“The Cold War, when it ended, we put it all down the memory hole. You can go on Netflix now, 100 films about Nazism—and that’s good, we need to remember that—almost nothing about communism,” Dreher said.

The lack of stories about these heroes affects our present. A 2020 poll released by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation showed that nearly one out of five Gen Zers thought “communism is a fairer system than capitalism and deserves consideration in America.” Furthermore, almost two-thirds of Americans weren’t aware that the Chinese Communist Party had killed more people than the Nazis.

Interspersed in the docuseries between the personal stories are interviews with historian and Daily Signal contributor Victor Davis Hanson; author Douglas Murray; and other experts. Their commentary, paired with the narration of filmmaker Isaiah Smallman, helps relate the experiences of the Communist dissenters to today’s political troubles in the West.

Vice President JD Vance, who spoke ahead of the documentary’s premiere, said the most important lesson was “not to conform.”

“One of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned from a dear friend of mine who helped me return to my own faith, was that despair is a sin,” said Vance, who also spoke about his friendship with Dreher, which began when Dreher interviewed him about his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“And I think that the way to survive, the way to thrive when many of these ideas are attacked, when many of our most important values are criticized or even become justification for being thrown in prison—the way to respond to it is not to conform. And that’s the most important lesson of Rod’s book,” Vance added.

The vice president continued:

The way to deal with this, the way to deal with being attacked by the ruling elites of a given society is to speak the truth, is to live not by lies.

The incentives, the financial rewards, the social benefits of living by lies [are] too often very great, but Rod’s lesson is important: that you’re going to sacrifice your soul, you’re going to sacrifice your civilization, you’re going to sacrifice your family, you’re going to sacrifice your country if you give into the easy pathway.

The first episode begins with the story of Isabel Vaughn-Spruce, a British woman who was arrested in 2022 after acknowledging, while standing outside an abortion clinic, that she may have been silently praying. Vaughn-Spruce, represented by the legal powerhouse organization Alliance Defending Freedom, ultimately won a not guilty verdict—although she was arrested again later (that time, the charges were dropped).

But the fact that she could be arrested for essentially a thought crime in a Western country is chilling and a stark reminder that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mean such tyranny would be absent forever from the West.

As Dreher said, “If we forget the past, we are condemned to repeat it.”  This new docuseries is a chance to ensure that we don’t forget—and in remembering, do not repeat.

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