“Don’t you feel like joining the fight?” read the text from an old friend.

       Like me, she’s the daughter of a Czech immigrant. I’ve heard from most of my first-generation friends this week. Because watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine feels like we’re watching our parents’ histories. And understanding them better.

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       “I feel this profoundly,” said the friend, a 50-year-old lawyer and vegetarian leftie who told me she imagined herself grabbing a gun and joining the Ukrainians. “It is in our roots.”

       History is being repeated at a breakneck pace as Russia attempts to take Ukraine. And the Europeans like my parents who fled a Soviet invasion and the horror of that Communist regime are being deeply retraumatized.

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       “I was running for my life,” said tennis legend and political dissident Martina Navratilova. “My emotional life, my spiritual life. It’s just so sad to see this again.”

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       Navratilova posted a tweet showing the masses of Czechs demonstrating in support of Ukrainians on Vaclavske Namesti — the place where dissident Czechs protested Soviet aggression in 1968 and Russian troops rolled in, shooting dozens of citizens.

       She was 12 when this happened, a talented and determined young tennis player who watched her country close in on itself as she was headed to the world stage. She defected when she was just 18 and still chokes up when she talks about it.

       “Who the hell really wants to leave their country?” she said.

       It’s easy to forget how terrifying and oppressive Communist rule was in the Eastern Bloc. Navratilova speaks often about this, but sometimes it’s hard to imagine that people like her or Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova or Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci fled oppression. We imagine refugees emerging from the dust and rubble of war — hungry, bruised and bloodied.

       My parents were welcomed as refugees. That was the America of 1968, not today.

       “I only realized we were refugees when I saw the Syria crisis at 40 and took the moniker on,” said Tereza Nemessanyi, a tech company executive in New York and one of the first child of immigrants I related to when we met decades ago.

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       Her parents fled in 1967, just before the invasion. They saw trouble coming. Dad was an engineer who defected during a business trip to Greece. Mom defected while working the Czechoslovak pavilion at the World Expo in Montreal. Theirs was a bloodless escape, but traumatizing because they couldn’t return for decades. The Soviets were good at disinformation, and it wasn’t easy for the world to understand why they fled.

       “It’s like all their anxieties and exaggerations have come true,” Nemessanyi said.

       Because it’s easy to go back and visit these places now. Prague is beautiful and the beer is cheap! Poland has castles! Budapest has spas! In our lifetime, they’ve recovered from the Soviet chokehold and the Russians weren’t that bad, were they?

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       “How could you?” my mother asked, when I announced that I’d be taking Russian in college. It was a language she was forced to learn and couldn’t understand why I’d willingly study it.

       I imagined I’d use it in my career. And reading Cyrillic did help when I had the chance to cover some of the war in the Balkans. But in my trips to Russia and the ironic gifts of Russian nesting dolls and military hats that I brought back to my parents, I wasn’t grasping how chilling these totems were.

       “We have a tendency to try to remember the good,” Navratilova explained to me. She is active in Democratic politics and speaks passionately about the dangers of flirting with communism.

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       “People might say there was free health care and free education,” she said. “But the rest of it sucked.”

       Karin Fuchs, a clinical psychologist in the United Kingdom has also been hearing her immigrant parents kvell at the history they see being revisited. Her father, an engineer, fled the communists, too.

       “I was wrong to believe that Mother Russia has changed from the communist days,” Milan Fuchs said.

       The aggression and suppression of freedom in this invasion feel the same. What’s different this time? The world’s seeing it.

       In 1968, when those tanks rolled in and 137 people were killed, President Lyndon B. Johnson promised that America would look into this.

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       “Meanwhile, in the name of mankind’s hope for peace, I call on the Soviet Union and its associates to withdraw their troops from Czechoslovakia,” Johnson said. “I hope responsible spokesmen for governments and people throughout the world will support this appeal. It is never too late for reason to prevail.”

       And that was it.

       Vietnam had America’s attention. Few people could find Czechoslovakia on a map.

       But this time, the world is watching. From demonstrations in support of Ukrainians in capitals across the globe to Virginia Senate President Louise Lucas (D) calling for a ban of Russian vodka in state liquor stores, Russian aggression isn’t being ignored.

       But will it be stopped?