When incumbent east central European ethnopopulist politicians attack liberal democratic institutions, how does the experience of living through Communism motivate people to protest in defense of liberal democracy? I argue that a critical subset of people in the generation who lived through Communism is extremely active in protests in defense of liberal democratic institutions. A memory of living with authoritarianism and struggling to establish democracy seems to motivate the older generation to actively safeguard these institutions by generating fear of a return to the past. I expect the older generation to be particularly active at protests in defense of democracy when incumbent ethnopopulists engage in democratic backsliding. I explicitly test these hypotheses by analyzing 82 interviews I conducted with people who protested in defense of liberal democratic institutions in nine different Polish towns and cities in 2019, 2021, and 2022. I couple these interviews with data from an original online protester survey and from the European Social Survey.