Just 3% of U.S. voters view Russian President Vladimir utin positively, while 84% view him negatively. Just 6% view Russia positively and 68% view it negatively (NBC March 2005 poll). Yet, nearly half of American voters think Trump prefers Russia.

I also think, if Trump could figure out how to do it, which is what he’s probably doing right now, he’d give Ukraine to Putin in a nanosecond. After all, Trump wants to be Putin. After all, Trump wants all of us deprived of our freedom and rights. No doubt about it.

In March 1963, when I was 9 years old, my family — though French-Canadian — moved into a neighborhood here in Massachusetts where most of the people were of Polish heritage. I remember how the kitchen of our neighbors across the street always smelled of cabbage and how, on the wall, by the back door, they had a portrait of President John F. Kennedy. The first Easter, after he was assassinated, they placed a palm frond behind the frame of his picture, where it remained for all of the years of my childhood.

I knew we were in the midst of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. The previous October, I had been trained to “duck and cover,” crouching under my desk, covering my head to protect myself against a potential nuclear attack.

I was an inquisitive child who listened to the conversations of the adults around me. I learned that the Kaminskis, though having been here in America for only a few years, owned their house outright, having paid it off in just those couple of years. Cabbage soup for supper every night.

“Can you blame them?” my dad said to my mother. “Of course they need the security of believing that they will never again lose their home.” He added, “I can’t imagine.”

I learned that not all of their family had been able to escape from Poland to the United States.

During the Cold War, Poland was considered to be behind the Iron Curtain, part of the bloc of Eastern European nations under the influence of the Soviet Union. Though a metaphor, the Iron Curtain, in my mind, was real — a dense and massive, heavy metal wall slammed down between communist and democratic countries, separating families. No open contact between those who broke free and those who were unable to get away before it was locked into place.

Upstairs, at the Kaminskis, there were four bedrooms. The first room was for the parents. It was separate from the other three. Those three rooms were connected one after the other after the other. You opened a door to enter the first one, then another door to the next, then a door to the last one. Two daughters both in their late teens had the first one; Patty, closer to my age, had the next.

The very last bedroom, in the back of the house, was for storage. It also was used for sorting donations of clothes. In the cardboard boxes that lined the walls, I could see neatly folded items of clothing — for children and adults. Patty told me that the clothes would be sent back home to Poland. “Behind the Iron Curtain,” she said. That’s when I saw it — that formidable wall. In that spare room, surrounded by used clothing, that’s when I learned never to take our freedom for granted. Never.

Barbara A. Rouillard of Springfield is an award-winning writer with over 100 publishing credits. A public high school teacher for over 32 years, she retired in 2015. Ms. Rouillard is fluent in French and a politically active member of her community.