My father remembers communists as a very real threat to his life, the Stasi of the DDR could have killed him as he made multiple illegal crossings of the iron curtain.
I was born after the german reunification so that stuff was "just" history to me growing up, but as I got older I got to learn more of how miserable life was under Honecker from history books and first hand accounts and why people would even risk their lives to cross the border to get into non-communist nations in the first place.