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ONE OF THE MOST TRAVELED PATHS IN THE NEW SLOVAK Republic must certainly have been the one between the dining-room table and the coffee table in the Bratislava living room of Zuzana Simko Stern. This was the path she paced on Thursday afternoons after reading that week's edition of Zmena.
Zmena means “change/’ and it was the name of one of the many new Slovak newspapers born in post-Communist liberty. When Juraj Stern came home on Thursdays, his wife had already read the weekly Zmena and was pacing, ready to report that week's assortment of nebulous anti-Semitic innuendo. Zmena was not one of those flagrant neo-Nazi-printed-in-the-U.S.A. hate tabloids. It was respectable in appearance and tone, with a staff of recognized journalists who wrote in Slovak, a linguistic cousin of Czech, in a well-crafted style that appeared to be targeting educated readers.
The Sterns were possibly the handsomest couple in Bratislava. They both crackled with energy. She had obsidian black eyes that glowed a wondrous anger as she told of the latest outrage she had heard or seen in fast-changing Bratislava. Juraj was small, fit, fine-featured and so charged that he could not seem to bear to be motionless, in spite of a painful back ailment
Their home was in an uninspired block of apartment buildings surrounded by similar blocks on the edge of town, where there was room to build and no costly old buildings in the way. But it was a pleasant home, full of paintings and books.
That Thursday, Zmena had published part two of a series called “Vymitene Klamstvo” which means something like “Lie under Duress.” It did not actually say that the Holocaust didn't happen. It simply quoted others saying so. According to some people, Zmenareported, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, only refrigeration units.
Zmena could have been merely reporting on the phenomenon of revisionism. And it could have been merely because Slovak activist Peter Gall had a very classically Jewish face that the cartoonist portrayed him with a face that could have been a poster for the Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude, The Eternal Jew. And what was to be made of an editorial complaining that such a fuss was made over a Jewish cemetery recently vandalized in the Slovak Republic, yet when the Israelis committed violence against Palestinians, nothing was said? Was it significant that when a foreign rabbi settled in the small Jewish community in Kosice, Zmena referred to “internationalism going on there”?
The Sterns were concerned because the new Slovak Republic, the second attempt at Slovak nationhood, was under way. Juraj still remembered the first one, when he had hid in a bunker covered with potatoes. Someone shooting through the potatoes. Little thwacks around him as the bullets missed. All the good Slovaks who had hidden him. All the bad ones who had pursued him. He was thinking more and more about those times. And it seemed as if they had gone through so much —just to arrive back at Slovak nationalism.
AFTER THE INVASION came the “normalization.” The way to live through the “normalization” was to stay out of trouble and concentrate on your career and the opportunities for your children. Children were a great tool for repression. You could risk prison and even feel good about yourself. But how could you destroy your child's future—only in grade school, and already there would be no possibility of a university education because you had opened your mouth once too often.
With Jewish life ended in Nitra in 1964, Zuzana had moved to Bratislava, where she worked as a teacher and met Juraj, who was a prominent economist and an expert on factory productivity—a major, if not the central issue for the government. They married and had two children. She became a research engineer. They built themselves a wooden cottage in the mountains for the weekends, where they could sip the powerful slivovitz made by their neighbors from local plums and recall their childhoods in the Slovak mountains.
Life was going well for them. Both their son and their daughter got into gymnasium, the upper-level secondary school that was the required track for university. Then in 1989, the very year that their son Tomas was about to apply for university, a student group approached Zuzana and asked her to sign a petition demanding academic freedom. She wanted to sign, but did she have the right to do this to Tomas? Whatever Tomas might think, her husband would certainly be furious. She told the students that she had to read the petition carefully and sent them away. She thought and talked with a friend and finally decided to sign. Then she went up to their mountain home to join Juraj for the weekend. He was there, pacing in that energetic way he always had when something was on his mind, and she had to confess immediately.
“Juraj, I know this is going to make you angry, but I signed a student petition—”
“Well, I know this will make you angry,” he said mockingly, “but I signed it too.”
Tomas was able to go on to university and medical school after all because that same year, in November 1989, the Communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia. After the fall both religion and nationalism reemerged. They had been linked before. Josef Tiso, the pro-Nazi nationalist, had been a priest, and most of his government had had Church ties. The supporters of an independent Slovak state had to seesaw between assurances that the new state would be nothing like the last Slovak state, and persistent efforts to rehabilitate Tiso because he was the only leader of a Slovak state they had.
Juraj Stern began to see things that he had not seen since his childhood. Walls in Bratislava occasionally had slogans on them such as “Jews go to Palestine” and “Gas the Jews.” He went to a soccer game—Bratislava against Budapest. People shouted the old Slovak fascist cheer “Net strdz” “Attention!” In the crowd, along with the occasional anti-Semitic sign, he saw two flags of the Guardists, the Slovak SS.
SILVIA KRAUS was still in high school in 1989. “November was the revolution/’ she said. “In January came the religion.” Suddenly, students were required to attend lectures by clergy. When a Catholic priest came to the school and lectured on the greatness of Josef Tiso, Silvia stood up and said, “It's not true. All of my family died in the war because of Tiso, because of the Germans and because of the Slovaks.” Most of the other students were angered by this outburst, and feeling isolated, Silvia walked out of the room.
In spite of such incidents, the Jews in Bratislava were seeing more Jewish life than at any time since 1968. There was a wide range of figures on how many Jews live in Bratislava—between five hundred and one thousand. More seemed to turn up all the time as Jewish activities increased. In 1990 a Jewish Forum started offering regular meetings that drew several hundred participants to hear speakers on subjects of Jewish interest.
The new freedom since the fall of Communism meant different things to different people. To some, it meant that they could say “Na strdz” again. To a few youths, it meant they could shave their heads, hang out near the university under a bridge across the Danube, and occasionally find someone to rough up. To some, it meant having a Jewish Forum and filling the largest hall in Bratislava, some eight hundred seats, for a Hanukkah program.
To Fero Alexander, it meant learning for the first time about his country. His parents were Auschwitz survivors. His grandparents had not survived. His older brother was born in Theresienstadt. But his parents did not talk about any of this very much. As he toured with his Slovak folk group in traditional costume, Fero never thought this was an odd thing for a Jew to be doing until after 1989, when he heard a historian speak on the history of the Slovak state at the Jewish Forum. Fero was shaken. “I didn't know. I didn't ask. Now the situation is that I know what happened during the Slovak state, and still I'm here.”
He asked—and repeated the question as though speaking to himself—“Why am I here and playing folk music?”
The cry for Slovak independence was born out of post-Communist liberty. In the old days just talk of such a thing could have sent Soviet tank columns in from the Ukraine. But when the Slovak leadership that had come to power in fair elections began demanding independence, the democratically elected Czechoslovakian legislature had no democratic alternative but to dissolve the nation. The agreement in principle came in the spring of 1992, but it took three tries to get the breakup bill passed—not because of Czech opposition but because of Slovak hesitation. Finally, in January 1993, a new nation was born, as Czechoslovakia shed its poorest region. The new emblem of the Slovak Republic was a cross, and its new coins bore a crucifix.
The Slovak region had never produced enough to support its population and had been living like a poor relation off the earnings of the Czech lands. This was the root of the resentment Slovaks felt toward Czechoslovakia. It had been tempting to conclude that the Czechs were “holding the Slovaks down.” But the new Slovak state instantly became an orphan in a hostile world. Not yet independent, it had already gotten into a major dispute with neighboring Hungary over a proposed dam on the Slovak Danube, a debate that played into the hands of Hungarian nationalists.
The elements of the situation were too familiar for any Jew to miss. Slovaks no longer had Czechs to blame. If their economy was a failure—and according to most economists, including Juraj Stern, it had little hope of success—who would they blame? The level of anti-Semitism that had driven Slovak Jews such as Karol Wasser-mann to Prague had remained. Before Czechoslovakia split, one survey of Central Europe showed the Czechs to be the least anti-Semitic people in the region and the Slovaks to be among the most. In May 1991 a poll by the Independent Institute of Social Analyses recorded only five percent of Czechs but 25 percent of Slovaks believing Jews had too much influence on society. Fifteen percent of Czechs and 30 percent of Slovaks said they did not like the idea of having Jews as neighbors, and four percent of Czechs and 20 percent of Slovaks thought Jews endangered political development.
In the early days of the new Slovak Republic, the anti-Semites, as these polls forecasted, were a minority, but a significant one. “We are worried about it, because the new government is doing nothing against them. They [the government] are occupied with the problems of building an independent state,” said Juraj Stern. In fact, the government could not really afford to attack anti-Semites, since they also happened to be the ultranationalists who were the state's greatest enthusiasts. In the fall of 1993, with the government lacking enough votes to pass major legislation, including the 1994 budget, the extremist Slovak National party—which celebrated the memory of Tiso—was invited to join the ruling coalition. That coalition also failed. It was hard to build consensus with extreme nationalists.
The Slovaks began to swing to the left, and the nationalists were forced out of government. Throughout Central Europe nationalists and anti-Communists were being voted out and replaced by former Communists. Communists became the largest party in Poland and made gains in both the Slovak Republic and the eastern part of reunited Germany. In Hungary, Antall died in 1994 and a former Communist official, Gyula Horn, was elected Prime Minister. It was not so much nationalism that was alienating voters. Everywhere in Central Europe except the Czech Republic, a large part of the electorate was already disillusioned with capitalism.
But Slovak nationalists also had a public relations dilemma. If Slovaks started looking at the history of the last Slovak state, they would be afraid of the new one. So a little revisionism was needed to assuage public fear. But the new revisionism instead reinforced that fear.
Zuzana was at an office party talking to someone whose husband was involved in planning the new Slovak state. The woman assured Zuzana that there was no reason to be worried.
“I am afraid for my children,” Zuzana explained.
The woman smiled and said, “Why are you afraid? Tm not afraid. Why are you afraid for your children?”
Zuzana said, “You are not worrying because your children are not Jews.”
Without a moment's hesitation the woman answered, “It is not true about the Second World War. It's not true about the Holocaust. Why are you so afraid?”
This, of course, was exactly why Zuzana Stern was afraid.
For many Jews the issue was less what they would do than the future of their children. Silvia Kraus's father, Tomas Kraus, son of the Slovak Jew accused of burning his own shop to avoid nationalization in the late 1940s, thought both his daughters should leave. But he intended to stay. After the fall of Communism he dropped his career as a sports journalist to start an import-export business. He believed capitalism had a future in the Slovak Republic. He resigned as president of the Bratislava Jewish Community to give more time to his new business. But he was determined that his daughters leave as soon as they finished school. Silvia said that she would at least like to do some specialty work in Vienna. “Then I will see,” she said. Vienna, which had been an impossible world away under Communism, turned out to be a half-hour commute from Bratislava. But no one on a Slovak salary could afford to go there. Economics replaced police controls as the isolating factor for Slovaks.
Still, travel did become a possibility. Summer trips to Israel were organized every year, and some fifteen Slovak Jews moved there permanently in the first three years after the Velvet Revolution. To Fero Alexander, the new possibilities became almost an obsession. He had always traveled with his folk group. Now, instead of finding his way through the labyrinth of Communist bureaucracy, there were airfares to be researched, compared, and quoted at length. He, his wife, and his three sons went to Israel. “I got a wonderful fare,” he said, “$250 round trip. But here that is two months’ salary.”
So many Slovak Jews were visiting Israel that the community attempted to persuade El Al to offer twice-weekly flights from Bratislava to Tel Aviv. In Israel, Fero's second son, who had wanted to be bar mitzvahed several years earlier but could find no one in Bratislava to teach him, belatedly had the ceremony. His youngest son was bar mitzvahed in Bratislava in January 1993, the first Bratislava bar mitzvah in almost twenty years.
The Bratislava community searched world Jewry for a rabbi who would move to the new republic. Fero wanted to find someone in the American Conservative tradition, but no such rabbi could be found. Instead, they found a twenty-nine-year-old American Lubavitcher, Baruch Myer. To most Bratislava Jews, the Hasidic practices of Lubavitchers seemed extreme, but one of the things that made Lubavitchers different was the fact that they were willing to come. “They come. They settle anywhere,” said Fero Alexander. If Baruch Myer did not exactly fit in with his dark clothes, beard, and hat, he made up for that difference by learning fluent Slovak before arriving. He immediately began a wide range of projects. He eagerly established a kosher chicken operation. He slaughtered the birds and trained women to clean them by hand under strictly observed religious law. But when Bratislava Jews discovered that kosher chickens were three times as expensive as regular chickens, they were not willing to buy them. Myer's kosher chickens were simply unaffordable.
A Jewish hotel was built next to a weedy lot, below the ramparts of the castle that once overlooked the old city and that now overlooked a highway. A kosher restaurant was established in the hotel, and a mikveh was built in the basement. But few people came. A lonely, hopeful desk clerk waited in the new pristine-white lobby underneath three clocks that gave the time in New York, Bratislava, and Tel Aviv.
The new Slovak Republic was frantically rebuilding hotels and fixing up monuments, preparing for a tourism boom that did not come. In fact, tourism, never an important industry, was now declining. The restless few from the crowds that pressed into Prague no longer drifted into Bratislava, because it was no longer in the same country. The new Slovak currency—much of it simply old Chechoslovakian bills with new Slovak stamps glued to them—did not immediately collapse as feared. Fero Alexander bought a new sound system before the new money was issued, because he feared that foreign products would be unaffordable once Slovak money hit the currency market and promptly sank. The money dropped a little, but it did not sink. The impending crisis of cutting loose state industry was put off. The chemical industry might struggle and survive, but the obsolete steel and textile mills were certain to fail, and the factories that had made heavy armaments such as tanks for the now-defunct Warsaw Pact would have to find a new product or die.
The Czech Republic was selling off its state industries by offering shares to the public. But the new Slovak state was deferring such decisions, because it was keeping the economy at least limping for the time being and besides, it was hard to imagine anyone buying into a Slovak steel mill. Life was, if not prosperous, at least peaceful in the new republic. The inevitable economic crisis had not yet hit, and while the government took a strident tone toward Czechs and gypsies, there were few problems for Jews. There were occasional incidents. In September 1993 the skinheads who based themselves by the bridge cornered Baruch Myer on a quiet street at midday and beat him. But most Slovaks were still honoring Jews, si ill thinking of this as an anti-Communist act.
In the flat plains east of Bratislava, where massive sugar-beet cooperatives were struggling to restructure, the town of Veca celebrated its 880th anniversary. It hadn't celebrated any previous anniversaries, and in fact, it had not even existed for about two decades. A chemical plant had been built in the newer, less historic town of Sala. Soon both towns looked the same, because their centers were torn up to build rows of block housing for the workers who relocated for the chemical plant. Then the town of Veca was eliminated, simply absorbed into Sala. There were many Slovak towns like this. Sala was more fortunate than many, because the factory for which the town had been destroyed had a chance at survival. Other towns were destroyed for steel and arms factories that might soon be closed.
In late 1993 the town government of Sala, to celebrate the new Slovak independence and defy the old Communist order, decided to observe the anniversary of the defunct town of Veca with a four-day celebration, including goulash stands, Slovak folk dancing, speeches, and brass bands. To kick off the event, a plaque was dedicated in the Jewish cemetery to 110 Veca families who had been deported to Auschwitz. Honoring the deported Jews would be a perfect rejection of the old regime. But the cemetery looked like a vacant lot in the center of a gargantuan housing project, and nothing was even done to groom the shaggy little spot for the ceremony. As the mayor finished his speech, a strong bony hand gripped the shoulder of a visitor, He was an elderly man, one of seven remaining Jews in the town. “Look at this place,” he said, waving his hand at the akimbo tombstones obscured by tall weeds, the encroaching blocks of housing units that looked poised to swallow the little space. “After everything they have done to this place, do you think this ceremony makes a difference?”
Of all the towns in this region, the largest Jewish community was the seventy Jews, Orthodox and observant, in Galanta. Compared to Veca or even Nitra, this was a thriving community. In fact, these few Jews had preserved considerably more Jewish life than the hundreds of Jews in Bratislava. Before the war there had been fifteen hundred Jews in Galanta, but fourteen hundred had been deported to Auschwitz. The surviving population had stayed almost stable since the war.
Along with most of the town, the synagogue had been torn down to build workers’ housing, but the community prayed in a fifteen-by-thirty-foot room with prewar Torahs. There were minyans every Friday night and Saturday morning. In the absence of any trained religious leader, Adolf Schultz, in his early seventies, kept the community functioning. He and most of the other Galanta Jews observed the kosher laws. Like Arnost Neufeld in Brno, Schultz almost obsessively maintained the Jewish cemetery.
FERO ALEXANDER and his wife, an orthodontist, were still committed to Bratislava. The five-story building where they had an apartment, on the slope of the castle-topped hill, had been owned by his wife's family, who had built it in 1932. In the last Slovak state Jewish property had been “Aryanized.” The “Aryans” who had been given this building were forced to turn it over to the Communist state in 1961. Now both the Alexanders and this “Aryan” family were trying to get their property back. It was one of hundreds of such cases.
The Sterns resisted emigration. Zuzana, who had visited her relatives in Israel in the 1960s and returned feeling that Czechoslovakia was her home, felt a little less certain about the Slovak Republic. But she said, “I think that it is very necessary that there are some communities in other countries.” The Sterns have always been proud of the ancient Jewish history of Slovak towns, and even if they v/ere among the few Jews left, they still felt they lived in a place with Jewish roots. They celebrated the major Jewish holidays with their closest friends, who happened to be Protestants. “It is a good thing to have some very good friends who have nothing against Jews and who are able to celebrate Jewish holidays too,” she said.
Zuzana Stern believed that by deciding against emigration in 1968, when all of their Jewish friends had left, “we just deferred the decision to another generation.” Soon their son and daughter would have to decide. To well-educated young Bratislava Jews, Israel was not nearly as tempting as such places as Vienna and Piague, which were culturally similar and close by.
Tomas Stern's father, the economics professor, was encouraging him to leave, predicting a dismal future for the new republic. But Juraj and Zuzana had no intention of leaving themselves. “This is an important place for Judaism. It had one of the great yeshivas of the 19th century,” Juraj said.
“The greatest,” argued Tomas. “But you can't have that now.”
Juraj didn't hear his son and continued, “You can't let that disappear. Bratislava is a Jewish place.”
“So you are going to sacrifice yourself for that?” Tomas asked.
Juraj did not answer.