One night earlier this month at the Czech Embassy in Washington a modest event was held to help raise money for the Victims of Communism Memorial Fund and to give three Truman-Reagan freedom awards to people or institutions that were instrumental in the fight against communism. Former award winners include Vaclav Havel and the National Endowment for Democracy.

The memorial, if the $500,000 needed to complete the project is raised, will place a small pavilion and a replica of the Tiananmen Square freedom statue in a small park behind the Supreme Court.

The guests – like the award winners – were primarily individuals who had been active in the fight against communism. Prominent among them were John Earl Haynes, who was among the first and still one of the few scholars given unfettered access to the KGB archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. Also, there was the Czech ambassador himself, a former dissident and one of the first signatories of Charter 77.

The fund has been active for many years now and it has given up its original plan to build a museum similar to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Yet it still is struggling to find a half million dollars to complete its now quite modest project.

Perhaps the reason the fund has found so little support – and why the guests were predominantly cold warriors and not victims of communism themselves, lies in the way communism made so many of those who lived under it both victims and perpetrators. The ambassador must have been thinking of this problem last night when he quoted Vaclav Havel writing that: “we even don’t know how to talk about it because the traditional roles of storytellers fails us – we don’t know even yet who is the main villain of the story.” The general pattern here is therefore strangely reversed. It has been left to those who fought communism to build a memorial to its victims.