The Handbook of Survival My Mother Gave Me: Fighting Authoritarianism Then and Now
The tools of resilience that carried my family through Romania's darkness are the same ones that will carry us through Trump's America.
We stand at the threshold of 100 days into U.S. President Donald Trump's second term—a milestone that marks not just time passed, but fundamental shifts in what we once thought immovable. Journalists, scholars, and citizens have produced countless analyses dissecting each executive order, each appointment, each tweet—all attempting to calculate what these moves mean for democracy's future. The unthinkable materializes daily, becoming our new normal with terrifying speed.
Yet writers like M. Gessen and Timothy Snyder and many others remind us that this descent into authoritarianism follows recognizable patterns. America has traveled similar roads before—during the paranoia of the Red Scare, through the systematic dismantling of Black liberation during post-Reconstruction, and in the targeting of immigrants throughout our history. Beyond our borders, Hungary, Russia, and other nations reveal the familiar playbook of democratic erosion becoming increasingly visible here.
Still, there is something uniquely harrowing about witnessing our neighbors, friends, and family members rounded up without due process and transported to concentration camps in El Salvador under President Nayib Bukele's authoritarian regime. The images sear themselves into our consciousness: Columbia students abducted during citizenship interviews, their futures evaporated in an instant; decades-long careers "trimmed like fat" by an unelected, unappointed Elon Musk, leaving entire families adrift; small businesses built through generational sacrifice now treated as disposable pawns in a tariff power game.
Community isn't just comfort—it's tactical necessity. Art isn't luxury—it's preservation of truth. Memory isn't nostalgia—it's navigational equipment. Solidarity isn't idealism—it's survival infrastructure.
When Trump won in November, I immediately sat down to write warnings for fellow educators. I wrote from the memories inscribed in my body—memories of growing up ethnic Hungarian in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania, where terror wasn't theoretical but woven into our daily existence. Under his rule, we were systematically starved, our language and culture criminalized, our neighbors and family members disappeared. My body recognized the warning signs before my mind could fully articulate them. Yet when I submitted this piece, editors dismissed my concerns as overreaction, as hyperbole.
I now understand that my body carries an archive of survival—strategies and wisdom passed down from my mother who preserved our culture through her activism, from my father who defaced propaganda at great personal risk, from grandparents who found a way to feed us when the state wanted us to starve. There is a knowledge that lives in the muscles and bones of those who have navigated authoritarian regimes before. This embodied wisdom isn't just my story—it belongs to many who have survived state violence across different contexts and generations.
This is what I offer now: survival strategies forged in Romania's darkness that may light our path through America's authoritarian turn. Not as abstract theory, but as lived practice—the very tactics that kept my family's humanity intact when everything around us was designed to crush it.
Community as Resistance: When Trust Becomes Radical
The first weapon of every authoritarian regime is isolation. Ceaușescu mastered this in Romania, as Trump now attempts in America. They understand that lone individuals are easily controlled, while connected communities possess dangerous power.
In my Hungarian village, Ceaușescu implemented a calculated strategy of division. He systematically starved our community while simultaneously rewarding informants with extra rations—creating a poisonous ecosystem where survival came at the cost of betrayal. Neighbors who had shared meals for generations suddenly regarded each other with suspicion. Who received extra bread this week? Whose children weren't as thin? The regime turned ordinary human connection into something dangerous, weaponizing our need for sustenance against our equally vital need for community.
This precise strategy unfolds now across America. Websites solicit anonymous reports on professors teaching "divisive concepts." Students are encouraged to secretly record teachers who acknowledge LGBTQ+ identities or discuss racism beyond sanitized narratives. The Department of Education has established hotlines for parents to report teachers who mention forbidden histories. What appears as "educational reform" is actually the ancient authoritarian tactic of severing trust at its roots—making us suspicious of the very neighbors and colleagues we need most.
The antidote feels deceptively simple but requires revolutionary commitment: know your neighbors. Not as casual acquaintances, but as essential extensions of your survival network.
For six years, my Brooklyn neighborhood has gathered during weekends on summer months to collect trash from our streets. This might seem trivial—plastic bags and pizza boxes hardly constitute political resistance. Yet in these mundane moments, something profound emerges. As we fill garbage bags and share slices of celebratory pizza afterward, we establish an invisible but unbreakable fabric of mutual recognition. My neighborhood is no longer filled with anonymous strangers but with Mike whose mom bakes the best brownies; with Danelle who makes sure the community is informed about any policies that may impact us; with Tom in the music industry who now on his own, whether we are out or not, picks up trash because he just can’t stop. I feel held. I feel known. I would place my safety in their hands without hesitation—and they in mine.
This is precisely what happened in upstate New York, when Tom Homan, Trump's "border czar," discovered that power cannot sever communities that refuse to be divided. When ICE abducted a mother and her three children, their neighbors didn't retreat into private fear. They marched directly to Homan's door—not as activists performing resistance, but as a community that simply refused to accept the theft of their own. They stood firm in the insistence that every resident of their town matters, regardless of documentation.
Know your neighbors by name. Share meals. Exchange phone numbers not just as social pleasantry but as survival infrastructure. Create signal groups. Build networks that transcend the algorithm's desire to sort us into isolated political identities.
When they come for one, they come for all. The regime knows this—it's why they work so hard to keep us separated, suspicious, and alone. Our most powerful resistance begins with the radical act of trusting one another.
The Underground Preservation of Truth Through Art
Under Ceaușescu's regime, official history was weaponized—our past rewritten, our cultural heroes erased, our language criminalized. My mother, a rural schoolteacher with no political power, responded with quiet insurgency. She led her students through village cemeteries where our poets and thinkers lay buried, turning gravestones into forbidden textbooks. We cleaned moss from inscriptions, left wildflowers on forgotten graves, and through this ritual, preserved what the state tried to erase.
At night, she transformed our village's cultural center into what we called "Bear Cub Club"—a humble resistance workshop where children learned traditional dances and crafts. She smuggled us to underground theater performances where dissent lived in metaphor and symbolism, slipping homemade chocolate into our pockets to pass secretly during intermission. Even now, decades later in the U.S. theaters, I cannot watch a play without craving something sweet.
The wisdom for surviving what comes exists in communities that never enjoyed the luxury of taking democracy for granted.
Today in America, we witness similar erasures accelerating. NASA's female pioneers vanish from government websites overnight. Harriet Tubman's history requires public outcry to maintain its place in our national story. Curriculum laws in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere criminalize teachers who acknowledge the full tapestry of American experience. The official narrative narrows daily to a procession of white male achievement while alternative stories are systematically dismantled.
While the Kennedy Center plans to host performances celebrating the "dear leader" and January 6 participants form official choirs, we must recognize art's dual purpose: not just as documentation of truth, but as preservation of our humanity when systems work to dehumanize us. Create art. Support underground theaters. Join community dance groups. Form reading circles for banned books. Attend exhibitions featuring artists from targeted communities.
Seek out art like your survival depends on it—because when authoritarian regimes tighten their grip, it does.
Learning from Those Who've Navigated the Unimaginable
Books saved us under Ceaușescu. Our cramped apartment atop a brutalist tenement block housed little luxury except for my mother's library. While the state manufactured artificial scarcity of food, she created abundance of knowledge, teaching me to read long before I entered school. Together we read banned accounts of slavery in America, Indigenous resistance to colonization, and Jewish survival through pogroms. Through these stories, she offered a revolutionary perspective: "What we face is not new, and others have survived worse. We can too."
This wisdom guides me now as America's democratic guardrails buckle. We need not invent survival strategies from scratch—they exist all around us in communities that have long navigated hostile systems. The disability justice movement pioneered "care pods" decades before pandemic isolation, creating mutual aid networks when medical establishments dismissed their experiences. Their mantra—"no one is disposable"—offers a direct counternarrative to authoritarian logic.
Black educators in the Jim Crow South built Freedom Schools that taught not just literacy but liberation, helping young people imagine futures beyond the segregated present. These schools operated in church basements and living rooms, often using donated books and volunteer teachers—creating parallel educational systems when official institutions became tools of oppression.
Perhaps our most vital teachers today are those navigating the modern American gulag—the incarcerated organizers who, despite every attempt to dehumanize them, maintain dignity through solidarity. Our incarcerated brothers and sisters hold crucial knowledge about maintaining humanity when systems are designed to strip it away.
Study these movements not as history but as tactical manuals. Their strategies—mutual aid networks, underground education, community defense, collective care—provide templates adaptable to our current moment. The wisdom for surviving what comes exists in communities that never enjoyed the luxury of taking democracy for granted.
The Messy, Essential Work of Standing Together
Authoritarian regimes perfect the art of division. They thrive when populations fracture into irreconcilable camps—when your suffering becomes disconnected from mine, when my liberation seems to threaten yours. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement through outrage, become unwitting accomplices in this fragmentation, serving us increasingly extreme versions of "us versus them" narratives with each scroll.
The antidote lies not in perfect unity, but in messy, imperfect solidarity. When Ceaușescu targeted Hungarians in Romania, he exploited centuries-old ethnic tensions, encouraging Romanians to see us as the source of their suffering rather than his extractive policies. The regime's collapse began only when both groups recognized our common exploitation. Despite language barriers and historical grievances, Romanian and Hungarian workers stood together in Timișoara's square in December 1989—not because we suddenly loved each other, but because we finally understood a profound truth: Our liberation was bound together.
Start where you are. Show up as you are. The work ahead requires all of us—imperfect, scared, determined.
Today, as Musk and Trump consolidate unprecedented wealth and power, they depend on the same strategy—convincing Nebraska farmers that Brooklyn activists threaten their way of life, persuading urban workers that rural Americans oppose their interests. Meanwhile, both communities struggle under identical systems of extraction. This Tax Day, the wealthiest 1% paid effective tax rates lower than teachers and nurses, while corporate profits reached record highs alongside unprecedented poverty.
True solidarity doesn't require sameness or even agreement on every issue. It requires only the recognition that oligarchic power maintains itself by convincing us to fear each other more than we fear them. Solidarity means Appalachian coal miners supporting urban climate activists despite apparent contradictions, recognizing that both deserve sustainable futures. It means suburban middle-class families standing alongside immigrant communities despite xenophobic propaganda, understanding that borders primarily serve capital, not people.
Liberation won't arrive through algorithmic echo chambers or perfectly aligned political purity. It emerges through the uncomfortable, challenging work of holding space for difference while recognizing our interdependence. Imperfect solidarity defeated Ceaușescu. It remains our most powerful weapon now.
The Long Road Ahead: Finding Your Revolutionary Role
My father was a revolutionary—a raucous, rebellious figure. He defaced communist propaganda and statues and was tortured for his resistance. My mother was a revolutionary too. She taught criminalized histories and ensured our ethnic community grew up knowing our strength, power, potential, and could envision a future.
There is no single face of resistance. The charismatic protest leader shouting through megaphones and the quiet grandmother knitting hats for those without homes are equally vital. The lawyer challenging unconstitutional policies and the cook ensuring no community member goes hungry during ICE raids are both essential. Some will document through journalism and art what others accomplish through direct action. Some will teach when others heal. Some will challenge publicly while others build underground networks.
The coming years demand we abandon the fantasy of the perfect revolutionary—that cinematic figure with the perfect slogan and unwavering certainty. Instead, assess your skills, your position, your capacity. Are you connected to resources that could shelter the vulnerable? Can your professional credentials be leveraged to bear witness when rights are violated? Does your kitchen have capacity to feed extra mouths when communities are targeted?
Start where you are. Show up as you are. The work ahead requires all of us—imperfect, scared, determined. It's going to be a long three years and nine months. Find your revolutionary role and inhabit it fully, not just for dramatic moments of crisis, but for the quiet Tuesday afternoons when the slow work of resistance continues without applause or audience.
The Velvet and Gold Illusion: Seeing Through Dictators' Theater
As a child, I accompanied my grandmother on nights she cleaned the Communist Party headquarters in our village. Every settlement, no matter how tiny, housed these ornate shrines to power where uniformed men monitored our movements by day. By night, my grandmother—whose ancestral fields had been seized to grow export crops while we subsisted on cornmeal—scrubbed their floors and emptied their ashtrays.
I remember the jarring contrast between these offices and our daily reality. While our fingers were encrusted with the soil we worked for the government, party headquarters gleamed with gold fixtures and blood-red velvet draperies. Crystal decanters of cognac sat on desks while we boiled potatoes and onions for soup. The vulgar opulence wasn't accidental—it was calculated theater, designed to awe and intimidate.
Nature offers us wisdom these hollow men will never grasp: that true strength lies in nurturing life, not destroying it for profit or spectacle.
When I saw the recent White House photos of Trump and Bukele smirking beneath gaudy golden decorations, my body recognized this performance instantly. The same garish decorations, the same wall of self-satisfied white men, the same pompous spectacle—as they casually discussed trading $6 million dollars for 238 human lives. I watched them laugh about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father disappeared despite a Supreme Court order for his return. Without due process. Abducted. Their golden backdrop making mockery of justice.
This ostentatious display is not true power but its desperate imitation. My grandmother, who could coax eggs from chickens during bitter winters and knew which wild herbs would heal a fever, embodied genuine strength. She taught me power resides not in gilded rooms but in the hands that feed communities, in bodies that resist breaking, in knowledge that sustains life when systems fail.
When bombarded with these theatrical performances by weak men who trade human lives like commodities, remember where authentic power dwells—not in marble halls but in soil and seed, not in executive orders but in neighbor protecting neighbor. Nature offers us wisdom these hollow men will never grasp: that true strength lies in nurturing life, not destroying it for profit or spectacle.
The Higher Law of Conscience During Authoritarian Rule
Hunger was my earliest teacher about the difference between law and justice. In Ceaușescu's Romania, food scarcity wasn't accidental but weaponized—a deliberate policy to keep us weak and compliant. My sister, just nine years old, would rise before dawn to stand in bread lines, her small body pushed aside by desperate adults as she fought to bring something—anything—home for us to eat. The state declared private food production illegal while systematically starving us.
I remember one moonless night when desperation overcame fear. My mother grabbed my hand, as we crouched at the edge of a state-controlled cornfield. "Hurry," she whispered, as we ran into two rows to snap just one ear of corn—officially the property of a government exporting food while its citizens withered. Breaking this law wasn't criminal, obeying it would have been. That was one of the first times I learned that sometimes survival itself becomes an act of resistance.
When they insist on a world of walls and borders, we must insist on one of bridges and belonging.
In the coming years, America will see laws proliferate that criminalize basic human decency: laws making it illegal to shelter migrants fleeing violence, laws criminalizing teachers who acknowledge our full history, laws forbidding healthcare workers from providing life-saving care to transgender youth. Remember this: No government decree can override the higher law of conscience. The same legal system that once upheld slavery, criminalized interracial marriage, and imprisoned Japanese Americans in concentration camps now enables new mechanisms of cruelty.
We each must decide where our moral boundaries lie—what actions we cannot take regardless of their legal status. Live not by what is legally permissible but by what allows you to meet your own eyes in the mirror each morning. As we face this authoritarian turn, our moral compass—not their proclamations—must guide us through the darkness ahead.
Carrying Memory Forward: Our Collective Resistance
As we near the end of the first 100 days, we have already seen the playbook of authoritarianism unfold with terrifying precision. But we have also seen what resistance looks like—in packed rallies where Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) speak truth in red states, in communities gathering to protect neighbors from ICE raids, in artists creating powerful works when official narratives fail us, in the knowledge preserved and passed down by those who have navigated state violence before.
The memory of my mother teaching forbidden histories in cemeteries, my father defacing propaganda despite the consequences, my grandmother finding ways to feed us when the state wanted us to starve—these are not just stories from a distant country. They are blueprints for survival that echo across time and borders. The tools of resilience that carried my family through Romania's darkness are the same ones that will carry us through America's authoritarian turn.
The regime calculates its success on our isolation. Every authoritarian system depends on convincing its targets that resistance is futile, that neighbors cannot be trusted, that alternative futures are impossible. Our most revolutionary act becomes refusing this imposed solitude—finding one another despite their barriers, remembering our histories despite their erasures, maintaining joy despite their manufactured crises.
As we face the long journey through these next years, carry these strategies not as distant historical curiosities but as practical inheritance. Community isn't just comfort—it's tactical necessity. Art isn't luxury—it's preservation of truth. Memory isn't nostalgia—it's navigational equipment. Solidarity isn't idealism—it's survival infrastructure.
They want us fragmented, fearful, and forgetful. Our response must be connection, courage, and radical remembering. When they insist on a world of walls and borders, we must insist on one of bridges and belonging. This is how we not only endure their calculated cruelty but transcend it—by remembering that on the other side of survival lies the world we are already building together.
