So my first day in Europe in January of 1983, my Swedish/Jewish friend Ingemar meets me in Copenhagen. We’re walking downtown and I noticed many busted windows. He told me there was a “No Nukes” in Europe protest the day before that had gotten out of hand. Being a young naive American, I express my sympathies. He immediately chided me, stating that the whole movement was Communist propaganda, completely funded by the Russians. I kind of laughed him off.
After the end of the Cold War, it was revealed that he was 100% right. Ingemar’s parents were both Holocaust survivors, so he abhorred fascism. He joined the Communist Youth Party in Sweden, but he quickly became disillusioned when he saw what their ultimate goals were. He actually married a Hungarian Jew just to get her to the West. They were not romantic, and she had her own place in Stockholm, but we had to keep women’s stuff in our apartment in case the Swedish authorities did a check in. She eventually got citizenship and they got divorced.