Recently, I received a reminder that there are people in the world that have a much greater appreciation for Independence Day than many Americans do.

While attending a conference at the Acton Institute in Michigan, I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Mart Laar, the former prime minister of the Republic of Estonia. Dr. Laar, who has a Ph.D. in history, spoke about what his country had endured at the hands of the Russian communists until they regained their freedom in 1991.

In June 1940, Russia occupied Estonia and immediately began a campaign of terror. Over 2,200 political and military leaders were executed and thousands more were deported to labor camps in Siberia. On June 14 - 15, 1941, as German forces were bearing down on them, the Russians implemented a mass deportation of over ten thousand Estonians to work in Russian labor camps. The KGB began removing whole families, separating husbands from wives and fathers from their children.

Thousands never returned.

Under Nazi occupation the reign of terror continued, particularly for Estonia's small Jewish population. According to Dr. Laar, during World War II, Estonia lost over 20 percent of its population to the Communists and Nazis, the vast majority of them killed or deported by the Russians. At the end of the war, Estonia was once again under the dominion of the Communists and was made part of the Soviet Union.

Today Estonia is free and one of the most prosperous of the former Soviet bloc countries. But they have not forgotten what it was like to be in subjection to brutal regimes. For Estonians, celebrating independence includes remembering what it was like not to have it. Near the village of Pilistvere there is a memorial to the victims of the Communist purge. Their names are carved in a huge cairn of stones. And every year on June 14th and 15th, Estonians attach black ribbon to their national flag in remembrance of the thousands deported to

Russia on those dates in 1941.

Edouard Renière can also tell you what it is like to lose one's freedom. Mr. Renière, a resident of Brussels, Belgium, e-mailed me to say that he had read a column about the Battle of the Bulge that mentioned my uncle, Olen Palmer, who had served in the 78th Infantry Division, which was engaged in brutal fighting near the German village of Kesternich. In three days of fighting for control of the town, the 78th lost over 1,000 men.

In a short memoir he sent me, Mr. Renière wrote about the hardships and fear of living under Nazi occupation for five years. As in Estonia under the Russians, the Belgians were subjected to a reign of terror with arrests, imprisonments, deportations, and executions.

At the time of the German invasion, Renière and his family lived just outside Brussels, in the community of Saint-Gilles. He wrote that as a young boy the Germans imposed food rationing and strict curfews and, with the cooperation of Belgian collaborators, they took control of the media in order to fully engage their propaganda machine. And he remembered the Nazi flags-red and white and black, with the ominous black swastika in the middle-that hung from every public building as a constant reminder that an iron fisted regime held his little country in its grip.

Mr. Renière remembered the excitement generated by the news of the landings at Normandy and that word quickly spread that the Americans were coming. By the end of the summer, German troops were withdrawing using any means of transport they could find, including stolen bicycles.

He wrote of one particular incident that stands out. A retreating German soldier on a bicycle was pedaling furiously down a street at a high speed. As he made a left turn, his front wheel caught in a streetcar track throwing him headfirst onto the street. Before he could get up, a few residents rushed out and kicked him in the seat of his pants, before quickly dashing off into alleys and side streets.

Mr. Renière would never forget seeing the German soldier " . . . disappearing from sight, a lonely, humiliated, frightened member of the Army of the Thousand Year Reich."

There was a heavy price paid by the Americans and other Allies who drove the Nazis out of Belgium. That is why Mr. Renière called my uncle to thank him for his part in bringing independence back to his country. In an e-mail he sent me, he said that all my uncle would say was, "we were just doing our job."

There are a lot of men and women that have done their jobs and are still doing them today so that we never have to endure what the people of Belgium and Estonia endured. We would all do well on "our" Independence Day to remember that, and it would be even better to do what Edouard Renière did, find a soldier and say thanks.

Gary Palmer is president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a non-partisan, non-profit research and education organization dedicated to the preservation of free markets, limited government and strong families, which are indispensable to a prosperous society.

This column is from the Alabama Policy Institute. Reach Gary Palmer of the Alabama Policy Institute at (205) 870-9900 or via e-mail at mailto:sharone@alabamapolicy.org