Life in the Soviet Union (coming soon to a neighborhood near you)

Life under communism

She described her life in a communist nation: Markets were bare, people had no desire to work and the government forced young children into slave labor.

"We'd stop at the store, and the food stores were empty," she said. "I remember we had to stand in lines for hours in the cold. We were in a bus, going home and suddenly we'd see a line. We wouldn't even know what they were selling, but we knew something would be there – some food. We'd stand for two hours to buy maybe a pound of salami or a half a pound of butter."

As a young child, Taitz asked her father why the market shelves were empty.

"In America, they have everything," he would tell her. "The stores are full."

Her father explained that Americans were interested in working and received paychecks based on their productivity. However, in the Soviet Union, farmers were part of a socialist system of collective farming and were compensated equally – regardless of output.

He told her, "If a farmer is bright and hard working, at the end of the month, he will get 100 rubles. And if the farmer is a lazy bum and he does nothing, he gets the same 100 rubles."

Taitz told WND, "People had absolutely no incentive to do anything. They had no incentive to work. The best doctors were getting maybe 150 rubles. That's why the standards for medicine were so low."

Youth camps and slave labor

She said that, much like President Obama's proposed brigade of youth organizers, the Soviet Union used children for slave labor.

"They would put us on trucks, and we would go to the countryside," she said. "We were told to go and pick tomatoes."

Parents were not allowed to homeschool their children. They were forced to enroll them in government schools. From the age of 6, all children were required to become young communists.

"You had to send your child to school, and your child had to be a member of the young communists," Taitz said. "There were no children who were not members. You had to do it. If you were one of the best, you become a member of the Communist Party. It was constant brainwashing."

She continued, "There was no choice, and people resented that. They were scared to speak up."

Most children were sent to communist youth camps, but Taitz' parents wouldn't allow her to go. Instead, they gave her stacks of math, physics and chemistry textbooks to study while her friends were away at camps.

"My parents didn't want me to be in those camps and be subjected to communist brainwashing," she said. "They wanted me to think for myself. I learned to read by myself, and my parents sent me to competitions in math, physics, chemistry and biology. I would sit and work with pages of problems, and I loved to compete."

An empty existence

Practice of religion was restricted in the Soviet Union. Churches were closed and repurposed as museums of art.

"You had to be an atheist," Taitz said. "No one could go and pray. You weren't allowed to mention any religion. A lot of priests, ministers and rabbis were sent to Siberia, so people were scared. They didn't celebrate any religious holidays; they just didn't exist."

She said alcohol abuse was rampant and caused the destruction of many lives.

"One of the reasons they had such a serious problem with alcoholism was because there was nothing in people's lives. There was no God, no religion, no choice. You had to conform and comply."

During her years living in the Soviet Union, Taitz said friends would constantly talk about finding ways to break away from the system.

"They would tell me, 'This person was very inventive and built a hot-air balloon to get out from East Germany to West Germany, or somebody was able to swim across the border,'" she said. "There were always stories about how people escaped the regime."

With only one TV station in Kishinev, Taitz said reporters spewed communist propaganda.

Escaping a totalitarian regime

In 1981, when she was 21, her uncle managed to escape to Israel. He sent her family papers that allowed them to join him there due to their familial relationship.

When Taitz arrived in Israel, she was stunned to discover a free-market society with full stores. In the Soviet Union, there were no fruits or vegetables in the winter. Her family survived on canned foods, bread and pierogis, or dumplings stuffed with various ingredients such as cheese and potatoes.

Read the rest about how Dr. Orly Taitz became the leading attorney in the Obama eligibility issue!