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JURAJ STERN'S EARLIEST MEMORIES WERE FROM underground. When he was four years old he was crowded into a small dark bunker with his parents, his grandmother, and his brother. The opening to their underground hiding place was concealed by a woodpile and a potato bin. He remembered the thwack of bullets being shot into the bunker from above while they huddled below, motionless, and braced themselves not to cry out or move if hit. But no one was ever hit. There were only those sickening dull noises.
Juraj also remembered a time when he was hidden alone, and a Slovak man would come several times a day and bring him food. The man would put an index finger against his lips and say, “Not a word. You have to be very quiet.” After two days Juraj's father came and took him to another hiding place.
Juraj‘s fondest memory was of a Romanian division that came through the town on horseback. A Romanian soldier lifted little Juraj onto his horse and galloped him around a Slovak village. He wasn't hiding anymore. Juraj Stern's childhood had begun.
Jews and Jewish life had vanished from their village during the war. The Sterns went to Bratislava, where Juraj's father resumed his prewar work as an accountant in a factory. The small groups of Jews who remained moved to centers that still had communities. Only a few Orthodox Jewish communities remained in Slovak villages. Most of the surviving Jews went to Bratislava, Brno, or Prague, where there were still Jewish communities.
Less than fifteen miles from the Sterns’ village was Nitra, whose Jewish community, though greatly reduced, had survived. Only about one hundred Jews were left in this town of forty thousand people, yet there was a synagogue, a kosher butcher, and a traditional religious slaughterer. The Jewish community in Nitra dated back to the eleventh century, in a part of town called “Jewish hill.” In 1947, Zuzana Simko was born into a Nitra family whose background was seldom discussed. At the time of her birth her father v/as 44 and her mother 41. They were widow and widower. Her mother had had another family before the war, from which only a daughter survived. In 1946 the daughter, then 18, married and emigrated to Israel. Zuzana would be an adult before she would meet her half-sister and learn what had happened to her mother's other family during the war. Her father had also had another family, all of whom had been sent to Auschwitz. For Zuzana's parents, she was their new life.
Zuzana grew up in a building with six other Jewish families. Their household was kosher, like those of most of their neighbors. Her father remained an Orthodox Jew, clean shaven, but always wearing a hat. He had his own locksmith shop, which he would open up each morning after wrapping tefillin and saying morning prayers in the nearby synagogue. After closing the shop at the end of the day, before the last light was gone, he would go back to the synagogue to say his afternoon prayers. He would return again after dinner for his evening prayers. From Friday sundown to Saturday sundown he permitted no work, electricity, or sparks of any kind. Except for the smaller size of the community, Zuzana was being raised in a world very similar to the one her parents had lived in before the war.
The Slovak region, as always, was poorer and more anti-Semitic than the Czech lands. Aware of this, the government in Prague advised Slovak Jews not to push too hard for restitution of their property. In a number of violent incidents Slovaks resisted the return of Jewish property. But in general, Czechoslovakia was again a favorable place for Jews.
Moravia, a rolling pine-green farm region, once celebrated for its Jewish culture, now had a community only in its capital, Brno. This small town of wide streets, netted with streetcar wiring and sober nineteenth-century architecture, had a thousand surviving Jews. The main street running up to a triangular plaza in the center had been renamed by the Nazis, but it was now once again called Masaryk, after the first president of Czechoslovakia, an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism.
One synagogue in Brno was reopened, a simple concrete structure that gave no hint of Jewishness from the outside. It had been built this way not so that Judaism could be practiced secretly but because of a movement of the 1930s called “functionalist architecture.” After the war, however, the remaining Jews thought this was a very sensible and discreet way to house a synagogue.
Postwar Prague, with its ten thousand Jews and two reopened synagogues, was again becoming a prosperous capital. Alice Kraus, who had survived Theresienstadt and forced labor camps, was back in Prague trying to live a normal life with her journalist husband Frantisek—trying to build a future as though their past had been normal. She never talked about what had happened to her. That unspoken chapter of her life was a mystery to her son Tomas, who was born in 1954. But the subject somehow remained present in his childhood by her weighty and conspicuous silence. Perhaps that was because Alice's behavior contrasted so starkly with that of Frantisek, who could not stop talking about his experiences, writing about them, and lecturing on them. There are, it is said, two kinds of survivors, and Tomas Kraus was raised by one of each—the one who could not speak, and the one who could not stop speaking.
Most Czechs remember the first few years after the war as the best time Czechoslovakia ever had. As in that other happy moment, before the Nazis came, the country had a well-functioning democracy and an industry-based economy that produced a satisfactory standard of living. Frantisek was now a well-known journalist, and both Czechoslovakian radio and the Czech news agency offered him jobs. He started a foreign broadcasting section for the radio station.
Since Frantisek had not been able to have the new tenants evicted from his former apartment on Kozi Street, the Krauses moved into a large and comfortable new home. While again becoming very active in community affairs, like most Jews, they observed their religion selectively. Some went to synagogue once a week. Few observed dietary laws. Some Jews kept no connection at all with the Jewish community in Prague. The unanswerable question—“How could God have allowed the Holocaust?”—kept being asked by people who appeared once or twice at a synagogue or community function and then never showed up again.
Only two synagogues reopened in Prague after the war— Europe's oldest, the Old-New Synagogue, and the Jubilee. The Jubilee was a giant, neo-Moorish art nouveau building from the turn of the century, when the Community had been replacing the synagogues lost in the slum clearance program. The Old-New Synagogue was in the former Jewish ghetto where Frantisek had once lived, but in spite of its presence there, the ghetto was not really Jewish anymore. The ten thousand Jews left in Prague were now spread throughout the city. Although there were far fewer Jews in Prague than before the war, traditional practice actually increased because of the arrival of Slovak Jews from the villages. More Jews had survived in the Slovak region—where they had been able to take to the mountains and fight with partisans—than in the Czech lands. The urban Jews in Prague and Brno, who had not lived the traditional life of villages like Nitra, were being brought practices that had not been seen in the cities in generations.
The Slovak village Jews came not only in search of surviving communities, but in some cases to be able to stay in Czechoslovakia. With the new map drawn by the Allies, many of the eastern Slovak villages from the regions of Carpathia and Ruthenia now lay within Soviet borders. Viktor Feuerlicht, a small Ruthenia Jew who had fought his way into Prague with the Czech Army, did not want to live in the Soviet Union. His home town, Khoust, was now part or the Ukraine. After the war Feuerlicht decided to stay in Prague. He went to a technical school and tried to hold a factory job, but one of his arms had been badly mangled during the war, and a constant series of operations made it impossible for him to keep the job. Feuerlicht had no interest in Prague-style Judaism. Any Saturday, you could see this little man with only one good arm clutching a torah that seemed almost as big as he was, determined to go on practicing the village religion of his father, even in Prague. He became one of a small nucleus of Slovak Orthodox Jews that formed around the Old-New Synagogue.
TO MANY in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets were still the heroes who had saved them and made possible the return of Czech democracy. In 1946 there were more than one million registered Czechoslovakian Communists. It was the one country in Central Europe where the Soviets could truthfully claim that Communism was popular. In 1946 the Communist party got 37.9 percent of the vote, more than any other party, and it entered into a coalition government in which it controlled key ministries. It is also true that the Communist Ministry of Information once released a peculiar statement complaining about the presence in important places of “bearded Solomons.” But in general Jews and non-Jews felt comfortable with the Czech Communist party. In the next two years the party's membership doubled to two million. One out of every five adults in the country was a registered Communist. Czechoslovakia seemed close to becoming a Communist democracy.
But the Communists had a ruling majority only in a coalition with the Social Democrats, and their hold on the coalition was not solid. Perhaps they feared losing their edge in the next election. Perhaps they—or more likely, the Soviets—just grew impatient with the power vagaries of a parliamentary system. In 1948, with the help of what appeared to be threats from Czech-based Soviet troops, the Communists simply ousted their partners and took over the government. There was little resistance, even though the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, son of the national hero, was found dead outside his office building.
The Western Allies had not forgotten their own failure to act the last time Czechoslovakia had been taken over. This time they would respond. Their response was to greatly accelerate what was becoming the cold war by taking a harder line with the Soviets in Germany. But many Czechs took the news calmly.
For Jews, something much more important happened only three months later—the creation of the State of Israel. The new Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, like the democratic leftist coalition before it, was an enthusiastic backer of Israel. It trained pilots, shipped badly needed weapons, and sent volunteers. In addition, Czech and Slovak Jews—including many who had military experience fighting with Slovak partisans during the war—went to fight with the Haganah. One of Viktor Feuerlichf s brothers joined the Haganah and went to Israel. Feuerlichfs other brother, his only other surviving relative, had already emigrated to Israel. But Viktor, with his mangled arm, could not fight, and so he remained in Prague. Brno, where Masaryk Street had now been renamed Victory Street because Masaryk was considered too nationalistic, lost about one hundred of its Jews, which was one in ten. That was a smaller percentage than most communities lost. Whether related to the Communist takeover or not, Jews left by the thousands for Israel.
Those who stayed found themselves living in a very different system. Zuzana Simko's father was told to close his little locksmith shop. Instead, he was placed in a workshop for a state-owned factory. He still could go to synagogue before work and take Saturdays and Jewish holidays off.
For some, it got rougher. About sixty miles from Bratislava was a town of twenty thousand people called Nove Mesto nad Vahom. It had been about one-quarter Jewish before the war, and a small community remained. A Jewish typesetter named Kraus (no relation to the Prague Kraus family) let it be known that he did not want to see his print shop nationalized. Mysteriously, the shop burned down. The town saw in this a Jewish conspiracy. He was arrested for arson and sat in jail for six weeks while the local press ran articles calling for Kraus to be hanged: “Kill the Jewish capitalist,” one article said. But after six weeks an actual arsonist was discovered, and Kraus was released without explanation or apology.
At the time of the Communist takeover, Karol Wassermann, the pharmacist who had been liberated from the hospital at Sachsen-hausen, was married to a Protestant woman, and they were both working in a little pharmacy outside Prague. He had kept his oath to never again live in his native Slovak region. Living outside Prague, he was still close enough to have contact with other religious Slovaks at the Old-New Synagogue. When the new regime closed the pharmacy, Karol's wife went to medical school and became an eye surgeon. The Communists were opening up opportunities. But Karol, although he was not a political man, suspected that he would not do well in the new system. For one thing, it seemed humorless to him. In 1950 he had been sitting in a movie theater watching a Soviet movie about Stalin, and he could not stop laughing. He was told to leave the theater. He tried to explain, sputtered out something about Joe Stalin, and then his body heaved and he was convulsing in laughter once again. This ridiculous heavy-handed artless propaganda seemed so funny—no doubt it was fine for the Russians, but here it seemed so… well, so silly. He broke into more wheezy laughter. Wassermann did not have a jovial laugh; it was angry, and it pulled tight the features in his face, so that he didn't even appear to be really smiling. He was shown to the exit.
Wassermann's wife found him a job in the largest state-run pharmacy in Prague, where he was one of thirty-six pharmacists. Then he had a revelation: He hated pharmacies. He had never wanted to be a pharmacist. It had all been his mother's idea. What he really wanted to do was—he wanted to be an art historian.
NEITHER THE COUP nor the nationalization shook the Jews of Czechoslovakia the way the events of 1952 did. Until then, there had been no association between anti-Semitism and Communism. On the contrary, the Communists had been the great adversaries of fascism and had taken in hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in Poland and Germany, at a time when the United States, France, and Great Britain were not letting them in. Communists had championed the cause of Israel, campaigned for passage of the UN resolution, and armed and trained the Israelis at a desperate moment when the United States and Great Britain were refusing them weapons. But there were other things going on in the Soviet Union that Czech Jews had not been watching. Stalin had always shown anti-Semitic tendencies—it was an undercurrent in his hatred of Trotsky. But after World War II, according to many in the Kremlin, including Nikita Khrushchev, anti-Semitism became a growing obsession, a hatred that consumed him. Stalin, who had probably been mentally disturbed from the beginning, was going mad. Those few psychiatrists who were so foolish as to venture a diagnosis—paranoia—were killed on Stalin's own orders.
Czechoslovakia got its first taste of Stalin's lunacy at the end of 1951, when he ordered the head of the Czech government, Klement Gottwald, to arrest the number-two man in his government, Czech Communist party chief Rudolph Slansky. He was accused of being an agent of Israel and Zionists. This was not even plausible, because Slansky had always opposed the Soviet policy of supporting Israel. Indeed, the nascent Israeli government regarded him as their only high-ranking adversary in the Czech government.
Nevertheless, for one week in November 1952, Slansky and thirteen other upper-level Czech Communists were tried for plotting with Zionists, Israelis, and American Jewish organizations to overthrow the Czech government. It was at once the oldest and the newest accusation in anti-Semitism. Throughout the history of Europe, Jews had been accused of plotting against the state—that was the accusation that had been made against Dreyfus. Another charge was that Jews are internationalists and have no loyalty. The phrase that had gained currency under Stalin was “rootless cosmopolitans.”
Of the fourteen accused, eleven were Jews, and their “Jewish origin” was clearly stated in their indictments. During the trial the Czech prosecution made regular references to the Jewish-ness of the defendants. Like many Jewish Communists, most of these defendants were not very Jewish. Bedrich Geminder, who had directed the party's foreign affairs department, never mentioned bis Jewish background and for a long time even tried to conceal it.
But the accused fourteen, forced to play their parts, burlesqued confession and grotesquely contradicted the record of their entire careers. On the first day, Slansky somberly confessed—as though it made sense—that he had plotted with, among others, the Rothschilds, David Ben-Gurion, Bernard Baruch, and the American Joint Distribution Committee to destroy Czechoslovakia and turn Israel into an American military base. Two weeks after the trial began, three of the defendants, including one Jew, Deputy Foreign Minister Arthur London, began to serve their life sentences, while the other eleven, including Slansky, were hanged and cremated, their ashes tossed out the window of a speeding car in the suburbs. Then a second trial started of another three prominent Jews, including Slansky‘s brother. At the same time thousands of lesser-known Jews were arrested and charged with playing minor roles in the conspiracy.
At first, Czech Jews who were not serious political observers paid little attention. To Karol Wassermann, it was just another internecine conflict between Communists. He was not even aware that the defendants were Jews. But as the trial progressed, he started noticing troubling things in the newspapers. Words like Zionists and cosmopolitan were being used in that same vague way that a paranoiac uses the word they—the unnamed enemy. The official press adopted language reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. The defendants had “Judas faces” and “beady eyes.” Graffiti that denounced capitalist Jews or that said “Jews out!” appeared on Prague walls. Anti-Semitism had become official policy.
Its repercussions were felt even after Stalin died. Frantisek Kraus was removed from the radio station and from the Czech news agency, and the Krauses were forced to give up their apartment. They had to squeeze into a small one and live on a meager pension that Frantisek was receiving for his ruined health at the hands of the Nazis. He died from those health problems in 1967 without ever again getting a job.
In Bratislava, at a time when unemployment did not exist, Jews who worked in large factories and offices of big companies were being told that their services were no longer needed. Juraj Stern's father lost his job as accountant. A thoroughly apolitical man, he was the only one dismissed in his factory. He too never again worked.
Even people who didn't know they were Jewish were losing their jobs for their supposed Zionist ties. The first time Bedrich Nosek had ever thought about his link to Jewishness had been when the Nazis examined his family tree and told him he had to leave the civil service and work in a factory. The second time was when the Slansky trial cost him his job. In fact, he wasn't Jewish. He had come of age in the 1920s and 1930s, and typical for that generation, he thought of himself simply as an enlightened modern man, an engineer with a role to play in the modern age. He was a secularist who liked science and progress and was not interested in religion. His parents were Catholic, but Bedrich was not interested in Catholicism. His mother's mother was very Jewish-looking and had in fact been born Jewish. But this was also of no interest to him—nor evidently to her, since she had converted to Catholicism and practiced devoutly. If Bedrich wasn't interested in his Catholic origins, he was even less interested in the fact that one of his grandmothers had been born Jewish.
At the time of the Slansky trial Bedrich Nosek was an engineer in charge of a section of a factory that built engines for the Soviet Union. One day Soviet agents came to his home and took him away. For four days his wife and son did not know what had happened to him. After being questioned about his loyalty and being told that since he had “Jewish blood,” there was some doubt about his willingness to produce for the Soviet Union, he was released. After that he was no longer an engineer but a construction worker. Years later, when the climate softened, he was able to get a job as an instructor in a technical school.