I’m Sebastian Gorka and I’d like to tell you a story about my father and my family’s history and why I wore a medal that reminds me of what they suffered under the Nazis and under the Communists.

In 1979 my father was awarded a declaration for his resistance to a dictatorship, and although he passed away 14 years ago, I wear that medal in remembrance of what my family went through and what it represents today, to me, as an American.

In 1939 when World War II broke out my father was nine-years-old. And with his family in Budapest they lived through the horrors of World War II. Three out of five houses destroyed, the siege of Budapest, the takeover by the Nazis. At the end of the war he was fifteen-years-old and he thought, “Well maybe now I can have a normal, bright future.” But it wasn’t to be. Three years later, another dictatorship took over, the Communists. And his freedom was curtailed as was all other Hungarians.

But he decided to do something about it.

In college at the age of eighteen, he decided to create an underground organization of pro-Democracy / anti-Communists to work against the Soviet dictatorship. However, they were betrayed, by Kim Philby, one of the deadliest traitors of the Cold War.

As a result, at the age of twenty, he was arrested, tortured in the same house–the House of Terror–that the Nazis had used. Now the Communists took it over, and some of the officers, the secret police officers, had been Nazis.

They tortured my father. I remember as a child, looking at the lines on his wrist and asking him, “What is that, dad?” and eventually he told me, that’s where he’s been hung by his wrists backwards – by wire tied to the pipe on the ceiling of the basement of the House of Terror.

He survived the torture, he was given a life sentence at the age of twenty. Two years in solitary, two years down a prison coal mine, and eventually liberated by the Freedom Fighters in 1956. He escaped to the West with the seventeen-year-old daughter of a fellow prison inmate — who became his wife, and my mother. They made a family in the UK.

I’m a proud American now and I wear that medal now and again. Why?

To remind myself of where I came from, what my parents suffered under both the Nazis and the Communists, and to help me in my work today because as far as I’m concerned, groups like the Islamist State, like Al Qaeda — they’re just another kind of totalitarian. They’re not Communists, they’re not Nazis, but they will enslave or kill you if you disagree with them.

That’s my story.