The ground attack was pressed at dawn. All the hills were taken. Pushing down from just beneath the Garden of Gethsemane, the Israelis broke through the Old City wall at St. Stephen’s Gate, called the Lions’ Gate by the Israelis. They used tanks and mortars in support, but mainly the job had to be done by the infantry. The stones ahead were sacred to three religions. Normally, the Israeli Army is extremely stingy with the lives of its men and spendthrift with covering fire. This time, men were offered in order to spare the buildings. Nearly a third of Israel’s battle dead, in a war that included a single engagement of a thousand tanks, were lost at the entrances to Jerusalem.
A few minutes after eleven on Wednesday morning, I saw a white flag flutter above the Old City wall where it makes a right-angle turn on Mount Zion. The heavy guns spoke rarely now, but the small-arms fire kept up in all directions. It was then, I learned later, that the first Israelis reached the Wailing Wall, which had belonged to Jordan since the Arab Legion took the Old City in 1948. I was told that it was a colonel who first broke through the narrow gate off Mount Temple, ran down the two flights of steep stone stairs, and threw himself at the foot of the Wall in tears. A corporal following him was shot to death by a sniper as he leaped down the last steps. The sun had dried his spilled blood into dark blotches by the time I got there.
· · ·
On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 7th, I entered the Old City through the Jaffa Gate, open by then, and walked up the Via Dolorosa. All the houses were tightly shuttered. One thin and faded Jordanian woman, dressed in dust-caked black but equipped with a child’s undershirt tied to a long stick as her sign of peaceful intent, came boldly up to speak to all newcomers. She was looking for her baby, she said. Had anyone seen it? She hurried off, knowing the answer before it could be translated.
There were mounds of dirt, spoiled food, scraps of burned clothing, lumps of mattress stuffing, and jumbles of wire and stone scattered in the narrow streets. The city was without water, electricity, or sanitation of any kind, and it seemed at that point to be almost without Arabs….In the few hours before Israeli soldiers had been ordered to seal off all Holy Places to insure their safety, I met one Jew who, entering the Old City for the first time, had just visited the Wailing Wall. Though he was not pious, he was moved to perform the old custom of writing the name of his son on a slip of paper to push between the crevices of the ancient stones, because, he told me, “It was what my father wished to do for me, and my grandfather for him, and all the generations of my ancestors for two thousand years, and I am the one who has come.” At the door of the Dome of the Rock, he took off his shoes, saying, “This, too, is a Holy Place, to be respected in its own way.”
Israel’s President, Zalman Shazar, its founder, David Ben-Gurion, its Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, and its Minister of Defense, Moshe Dayan, all made trips to the Wall. Then the chief rabbinate of Israel met and studied the old texts and proclaimed that no Jew should set foot on Temple Mount until the Messiah arrived to begin the promised building. No one was much troubled by the proclamation. An exaltation swept Israel at the thought that the Wall belonged to Jews once more. As Ben-Gurion reached the Wall, he said, “It is the second-greatest day of my life.” The first, he added, was the day his foot touched the soil of Zion in 1906; he ignored the day in 1948 when he proclaimed the rebirth of the Jewish state. Dayan said that Israel would never give up the Wall again. A lesser government official, who could not resist sneaking away from his work for an hour on such a day, said sheepishly, on the way back, “I was so overwhelmed I didn’t know what to pray. So I prayed that the Wall would remain with us forever and we could come back again and again to give the right prayers quietly.”
The Army had strictly forbidden anyone without special authorization to cross from Jewish Jerusalem. Otherwise, all of Israel would have tried to crush into the stricken Old City on the day the Wall was taken. As it was, thousands straggled through, though intermittent sniping continued and some people stepped on mines in an attempt to scamper across unguarded points in no man’s land. The result of all these dangerous pilgrimages was an extraordinary collection of the children of Israel before the Wall—husky, sun-tanned blondes in torn khakis; dark-skinned, smooth-cheeked young men who spoke Spanish; dignitaries with puffy pink faces; a girl with flowing red hair in an elegant beige pants suit; soldiers who were orthodox, but not to the extreme, their shoulder-length side curls hanging incongruously below Army helmets that were tilted back to leave room to strap a phylactery on their foreheads; and General Shlomo Goren, Chief Rabbi of the Army, carrying a small blue-sheathed Torah that he had taken into battle in 1948, 1956, and again in 1967. Though Israel is by proclamation a Jewish state, the bulk of its people are not customarily pious. Many are openly irritated at the theocratic rules imposed because the country has always had to have coalition governments that give the religious parties extra leverage. But the most determinedly agnostic and the most devout stood with visibly equal joy before the Wailing Wall….
· · ·
The war ended Saturday night in Galilee and on the Syrian front. From the Mount of Beatitudes, a plateau on a low slope north of the Sea of Galilee, you can look across to the mountain ridges where the most ferocious combat took place. Most of the Syrian emplacements were constructed of the rocks and soil of those hills, making for a perfect camouflage, and the new ruins I saw there were almost indistinguishable from the ancient ones. There are remains of British police posts, Turkish forts, Crusaders’ towers, and Roman strongholds, and there are memories of conquests stretching much further back toward the origins of civilized life. The surface of the sea was tranquil, glazed a dull silver by the sun. All around it were the landmarks of ancient and modern human violence.
Near a post where there had been an artillery emplacement, I found a notebook and some letters scattered on the ground beside a burned tank, among boots, shreds of clothing, and half-eaten rations. I could not tell whether the men to whom these things had belonged had fled or were lying underground nearby; the advancing Israelis buried most of the dead very quickly—the enemy’s as well as their own—to avoid epidemic diseases.
Inside the cover of the notebook, a soldier had written the names and Army post numbers of half a dozen friends. On the single sheet left in it, he had jotted—if the graceful curves of Arabic are susceptible to jotting—some notes that were apparently intended for an essay. I had a friend translate them for me, and they read:
MY LIFE
1. The world is a playground.
2. I will not feel happy until after the fight.
3. We want to be free, not slaves.
4. Fear and fear make stronger fighting.
5. We meet events as they come.
6. I wouldn’t fight if I was afraid.
7. To make a distinction between truth and falsehood.
The date set down was February 2, 1967. The letters were much older, going back to August, 1964. The shortest letter, which was undated, read:
From conscripted soldier Rashed Ghayal 3373 A.P. 886.
To conscripted soldier Midhat Khadir 3217 A.P. 893.
All the Arabs are united.
Free and united and together.
To dear brother and good friend. I hope you are in the best of health. Amen. My brother Midhat, my first question is of you and your health and I ask God to treat you well. Amen. We, too, are all right. Amen. I miss your shining face. First my regards and a thousand regards. Regards to my brother Ali Rahbi if he is near to you. Best regards to any who ask about me.
And Peace.
The letter was not signed. The longer letters—one from a father to his son written by a professional scribe, others from sons to fathers—differed only in listing very many more names to whom “a thousand regards” should be sent or from whom they should be received. There were no descriptions of life, no personal comment, but there emerged both piety and an intense feeling for family and friendship. And many of them ended, as that short one did, with a
formal wish that the recipient should enjoy the blessings of peace. The envelopes had been dropped on the sixth day of the war, along with the bullets, shells, and bombs that rained on the ground. On the seventh day, there was no more fighting. But neither was there peace.
Joseph Wechsberg
APRIL 27, 1968
APRIL 15
ONE MORNING ABOUT a week ago, I noticed a small crowd in front of a bookstore on the Příkopy, a broad avenue leading toward Wenceslaus Square. Stepping closer, I saw in the window of the store an old photograph of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk—Czechoslovakia’s President-Liberator, as he was known until the Communists took over, in 1948. Above the picture was a sentence from one of Masaryk’s books: “Our renascence must be a renascence of the soul—we must again look for the truth, listen to the truth, study the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, defend the truth until death.” The hush among the people at the window seemed to shut out the noise of the street. Men and women bowed their heads; some had tears in their eyes. An elderly woman said, to no one in particular, “Thank God! I had lost hope that I would ever see him again.” She was not exaggerating. For the past twenty years, Masaryk had officially been an un-person. It was dangerous to mention his name. Ten weeks ago, anyone publicly displaying his picture might have been arrested. When I passed the bookstore again, in the afternoon, two small water glasses had been placed below the picture, one filled with violets and one with snowdrops.
After a quarter of a century of fear, police brutality, and enforced ignorance—“first under the Nazi protectorate and then under the Stalinist protectorate,” an acquaintance of mine said—many people here are having difficulty adjusting themselves to the new situation. They wake up in the morning with a sense of unreality. “When I listen to objective news reports on our radio and hear heretical questions asked on television, I feel I’m still dreaming,” one man told me. An account in Rudé Právo, the Communist Party paper, of how eight hundred workers in an electrical-appliance factory in Pisek were led in a protest strike by the chairman of the factory’s branch of the Communist Party caused people to exclaim in wonder. Only a few weeks ago, the same paper was printing ominous warnings against strikes, written by Stalinist editors. (The editors are gone, but they will get their full salaries for a few months.) For the time being, anything goes. A report in Lidová Demokracic, the official organ of the Catholic People’s Party, read, “Young soldiers held a meeting in Pardubice and came to the conclusion that General Lomský, the Minister of National Defense, should resign and thus set an example for other Army leaders.” Even in many Western countries, this would be unusual behavior. The satirical magazine Dikobraz (“Porcupine”) captioned a cartoon of Lomský “The Minister of Self-Defense.” Another paper has been running an account of former President Antonín Novotný’s misdeeds, in daily installments.
Novotný’s name has become the symbol of an era that is past—the Czechoslovaks hope. “I am afraid to be as happy as I would like to be,” I was told by a man I have known since the thirties, when I lived in Prague. “It’s almost too good to be true. After all, the police are still around, though they look the other way now, and the Stalinists haven’t disappeared, though they keep quiet.” On walls here and there, in fresh white paint, one sees the words “LIDÉ BDĚTE!” (“People, Be Watchful!”). This was the last message that the Czech Communist writer Julius Fučik, a national hero, smuggled out of prison before he was executed by the Germans in 1943. The people of this country have always tended to be realists, and their history has given them ample reason to be watchful. After losing the Battle of White Mountain, in 1620, they had three centuries under the Hapsburg yoke, until modern Czechoslovakia was established in 1918. Then came the Nazis, in 1938, and the Communists, in 1948. Many people here are wondering whether this exhilarating “Pražské Jaro” (“Prague Spring,” the name of a world-famous music festival) will one day be known as nothing more than “an anarchist interval” in the history of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (as Hungary’s Party theoretician Zoltán Komócsin has predicted) or whether it may be the beginning of a development that could shake the Communist world to its foundations.
· · ·
People suddenly realize that unbelievable things have been happening before their very eyes, and they still don’t know exactly how it all came about. “Sometime around Christmas, the Communist Party simply fell to pieces,” one of the most astute Western observers here told me. “It wasn’t just one event or another but a confluence of many powerful streams of thought.” The beginnings of what the non-Communists here call “revolution” and the Communists call “reform” go back to the Twelfth Czechoslovak Communist Party Congress, in December of 1962, which decided to “investigate and correct” the “excesses” committed during the Stalinist era. But the investigation and correction were pretty well sabotaged by the arch-Stalinist Novotný and the people around him until last June, when the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, held in Prague, started a public revolt against all the “doctrine and dogma” that had been the stock in trade of Novotný’s leadership. “The writer’s fight to express himself will continue as long as a writer, a ruler, and a reader are left on earth,” said Jan Procházka, editor of Literární Noviny, the Writers’ Union weekly. Procházka was also a candidate-member of the Party’s Central Committee. Indeed, all the writers who talked openly about freedom, tolerance, and humanity were faithful Communists, and so were the members of other groups who began to express “heretical” thoughts: the students of Prague, suddenly displaying an unusual sense of political responsibility; the young economists, dismayed at the prospect of the country’s going bankrupt; the intellectuals, tired of being treated like dirt while the Novotný government gave every preference to “workers and peasants”; and the Slovaks, insisting on the full equality that the Czechs had been promising them for years. After the Writers’ Union Congress, criticism of the Novotný government could be heard everywhere, but the explosions that effected the breakup of the Stalinist regime occurred at the very center of power—in the Presidium and the Central Committee of the Party. The men who lit the fuses were relatively young Communists (most of them in their forties) who wanted not to overthrow Communism but to liberalize it….
· · ·
“Freedom” and “democracy” are the two big words of the moment, but what do those words mean in Czechoslovakia? A few days ago, a Western journalist asked several people at random what “freedom” meant to them. The answers differed widely: “The police don’t beat you up anymore, and they have to wear shield numbers and can be identified.” “At last our radio has told Ulbricht what we think of him.” “Now we will be able to see the movie of Doctor Zhivago.” “My children will have religious instruction in school.” “The censors themselves have asked for the complete abolition of censorship.” (Kafka, who has recently been coming back into vogue in his native country, would have enjoyed the request issued by the members of the Central Publication Administration—better known as the censorship office—that “preventive political censorship be abolished at the present state of development,” and he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to hear that the censors were still sitting in their offices, doing no censoring.) Perhaps the clearest definition of “freedom” was “We can now openly say what before we didn’t even dare think.”
A third big word of the moment is “rehabilitation,” and as it is defined here it often seems to involve retribution. Although Dubček has said that “no heads must roll,” the new reforms have sent shock waves through the nation. “We are witnessing a terrifying study of human nature,” a friend told me. “Don’t forget that in this country tens of thousands of people have suffered terribly, and now they want to square accounts with those who made them suffer. And if those who suffered are dead, their widows and children and friends demand rehabilitation of the dead men’s reputations and punishment of those who made them suffer.” At a large public meeting, the noted writer Pavel Kohout said, “With the
exception of West Germany, Czechoslovakia is the only country where a state prosecutor who murdered eleven people is walking around free.” He was referring to the state prosecutor who demanded, and obtained, eleven death sentences during a political trial in 1952 in which the chief defendant was Rudolf Slánský, former First Secretary of the Party. The widow of another victim—former Foreign Minister Vlado Clementis—recently told the newspaper Student that she had been arrested, too, and that after her release she had asked for her husband’s ashes and had been told that “they were dropped into a drain at Pankrác Prison.” Mrs. Clementis has asked that “the main culprits”—former Ministers Vilém Široký and Karol Bacílek—be punished. Former President Novotný, who also had a hand in trials that are now being reviewed, declared in May, 1963, that “Clementis was not guilty of the acts with which he was charged.” There have been many demands for an investigation of the mysterious death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk in 1948. Up to a few weeks ago, no one dared visit the small cemetery in Lány, near Prague, where the President-Liberator and his son Jan are both buried, but it has now become a place of pilgrimage for thousands of people every day. Many judges have promised to “rehabilitate people who were innocent.” Dr. Jozef Břeštanský, Vice-President of the Supreme Court, who was a “working-class cadre student” and rose to his eminent position in a remarkably short time, after studying law “extra-murally,” is one judge who will not be able to rehabilitate anybody. He was recently found dead, his body hanging from a tree in a forest south of Prague, and the announcement that he committed suicide has led to public speculation about the sort of verdicts he may have handed down in past years. Terrible instances have become known of Czechs torturing Czechs during the Stalinist era, and there is a widespread belief that, as one man put it, “our people were sometimes more brutal than the German Gestapo.”
The 60s Page 38
