A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  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.

  12

  From Moscow

  to Warsaw

  NINEL KAMERAZ LEARNED ABOUT STALIN AND JEWS AT an early age. Her name, fashionable among her parents’ generation of Communists, is Lenin spelled backward. Ninel always called her name “a hunchback Fve carried through life.” She was born in Moscow in 1937, and that same day, after her parents gave her this name, her father was arrested. The next time she saw him, she was 11. Ninel calculated that between her father's eleven-year term, his sister's eighteen, and the terms of various others, her immediate family had spent sixty-four years in Stalinist labor camps.

  The Kamerazes were rebels, or perhaps even true revolutionaries. Ninel's grandfather was an illiterate wagon driver from a Lithuanian shtetl who became involved in the anticzarist underground. An army deserter, he bought the family name along with Lithuanian papers from a man named Kamerazov. Her grandmother came from a rabbinical family that disowned her because she went to a university. When she first left to attend her classes, they announced, “You are no longer our daughter.”

  Under the czarist system the child of a small-town wagon driver had no opportunities except to also become a wagon driver in the same Lithuanian village. But once the Communists came to power, Ninel's father was able to study and after seven years to become a philosophy professor. His brother became the conductor of Moscow radio in the 1930s. Ninel's mother was in the music conservatory.

  Thinking back on her parents decades later, Ninel said, “They had no chances in life. The Communists gave them a chance to be normal people. They could do whatever they wanted. They could do this, they could do that. They were talented people. They believed in this. They wanted to be normal people. They didn't only want to be Jews. They wanted to be people. This was the new religion. They threw everything aside, and they believed in this. And they paid the highest price for it. I understand them. I really do understand them. It was such a chance to take. To live. To be. But the price was—they didn't know. It seemed so pure, so right. It was—diabolical evil.”

  In 1948 her father was released but was told that he could spend no more than twenty-four hours in the European section of the Soviet Union. He moved with his family to a Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw, in the 20 percent of the city that was still standing. They found a prewar Jewish apartment building—an odd combination of baroque ornamentation and the streamlined curves of early art deco that had been built in 1914 by a leading architect of the day. Next to the building was a synagogue, and behind the synagogue was a mikveh, a ritual bath. Next door was a Jewish school.

  Jews in Warsaw at the time were trying to live near other Jews for safety. When the Kameraz family moved to Warsaw other Jews warned them, “A Jew alone is a dead Jew.” Though her father had never been a practicing Jew, he was so Jewish-looking that everyone in the building urged him to stay in the neighborhood at all times. The trams were not safe for people who looked Jewish. Bullies would throw them off. Trains, especially on the run between Warsaw and Lodz, were even more dangerous.

  The Kamerazes felt safe in their Jewish building, even though from time to time, during periods when anti-Semitism was particularly active, someone would rub excrement on their door. Ninel's parents didn't know how to live a Jewish life—it was the Poles cursing “Zyd” on the street and shoving people o
ut of trams that forced them into the safety of Jewish company. Ninel's mother and many of the other people in the building spoke Yiddish, but Ninel concentrated on learning Polish. Yiddish was only used to talk of terrible things, of camps and who was saved and how, and who wasn't and why. Ninel did not want to hear all this. It frightened her.

  There was something temporary about life in their cozy apartment of little rooms and hallways, and stacks of dusty books, and the table they sat around with the electric samovar always heating water for tea. All around them Jews were leaving. Ninel's family didn't leave but only said good-bye to friends. Other Jews from Moscow would arrive. But then they wouldn't stay. So the Kamer-azes made their life between things—between hellos and goodbyes, between Russia and the West, between the Judaism they had abandoned and the Communism that had abandoned them.

  In Warsaw, as in other Polish cities, new Jewish institutions started up after the war—schools, cooperatives, theaters, newspapers in both Polish and Yiddish, the Union of Jewish Writers, and even a publishing house. As long as there was still a sizable survivor population in Poland, foreign funds were available for such things. But with each pogrom and train murder the Jewish population shrank and the remaining Jewish community began turning its institutions over to the state because it could no longer operate them. The Jewish school that Ninel attended in the neighborhood became a state school, even though it still had a largely Jewish student body.

  As in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else where Stalin's influence was felt, the Polish regime hardened in tone and substance after 1948. Wkdysfew Gomulka, with his Polish-nationalist brand of Communism, was removed from power, even imprisoned, and a government that followed every hand-gesture in the Kremlin was installed. But once again as things worsened for Poles, Jews saw an improvement in their lives. As the police state cracked down on the population, fascist and anti-Semitic activities were no longer tolerated. A Pole caught throwing Jews off trains or scribbling anti-Semitic graffiti—or, for that matter, any kind of graffiti—was quickly arrested. Also, Jews profited from the anti-Semitic stereotype of the zydokomuna (Jewish Communist). Polish anti-Semites became afraid of Jews because their own hate propaganda had convinced them that all Jews had connections to top-ranking state security people.

  In 1949, when Marian Turski moved to Warsaw, the reconstruction process was only beginning. The old center of town was being rebuilt, stone by stone, reproducing the pastel historic buildings. The heaps of refuse where the ghetto had been were starting to be cleared away and replaced with modern apartment buildings with huge gates and massive entranceways, as well as a relatively restrained touch of the neoclassic ornamentation that seemed to obsess architects in the last years of Stalin. Soon the area that had previously been a downtown district, then a Jewish death camp, then an ash heap, had become a desirable new housing project. Turski moved into one of these new buildings in 1951, in an apartment with a view of the new Old Town, and began his career as a journalist.

  Most of the young men in Turski's circle of friends were pursuing the same young woman. He too thought her extremely beautiful, and he was amazed that she seemed to prefer him, then finally chose him. Turski, a small, dark-haired, awkward man with a slight speech defect, often pondered why she had chosen him. Even months after they started living together, he still shook his head in astonishment. One day after they had been living together for six months, he was talking to her about his Jewish background, and she told him that she too was Jewish. Her family had hidden in Warsaw and been caught and were all killed, but the Nazis had never caught her. She had lived openly as a Polish Catholic. After the war she continued living that way.

  Her choice of him now made sense to Turski. Now he understood that she had chosen him because she wanted to find a Jew. After they had lived together for thirty-five years and raised a daughter together, Turski was still convinced of this. When it was suggested to him that perhaps she simply fell in love with him, he persisted, “Well, I hope so. But there were so many handsome young men surrounding her, and she chose me! I understood that this was because she wanted to have a Jewish boy.”

  IN THE EARLY 1950s both Jakub Gutenbaum and Barbara Gora were studying in Moscow on Soviet scholarships. Foreign students were given much higher living allowances than the Soviet students, and their lives were relatively comfortable. They could buy the food in the shops that Soviets could not afford, and attend museums, the opera, and the ballet. Student life in Moscow was pleasant, except for occasional signs that all was not well in the Soviet Union. A Soviet student was taken away from Gutenbaum's class and never again seen.

  Gutenbaum and Gora knew each other because he was dating one of her roommates. But they had very different experiences. Gutenbaum never changed his name. He had already learned that a face like his would identify him faster than a piece of paper. So he filled out his papers correctly, writing “Polish citizen, Jewish nationality.”

  But Barbara Gora, the former Irene Hochberg, had learned to pass as a Pole. If things turned, no one even knew she was Jewish. Why should anyone think Barbara Gora was Jewish? It was rumored that some in her group were clandestine Jews. Barbara even knew of one, a friend from the Ukraine. Once Barbara was even asked how she had survived the war, so she knew that some of her fellow students suspected her. But she had been playing this game well for a decade, and she was confident.

  On November 7, 1952, like thousands of Muscovites, she walked to Red Square and saw Stalin on the reviewing stand. Teams of experts around the world examined photos of that event, not only to see who was standing close and who was kept far away, but to search Stalin's face for signs of rumored illness, both physical and mental. But Barbara Gora simply went and saw Stalin. It was the last time he was seen in public.

  On January 13, 1953, it was announced that nine top doctors from the elite Kremlin staff had misused their professional skills to murder two of Stalin's top aides. Although it was not mentioned that six of the nine doctors were Jewish, it was pointed out that these six had connections with that great bourgeois Jewish conspiracy, the American Joint Distribution Committee. The doctors, it was discovered, were part of a Zionist spy network that was plotting against the Soviet state. The Soviet press ran regular articles warning the citizenry against Zionist connivers and especially Jewish doctors. The people were advised to be on the lookout for these doctor-poisoners, who were allegedly committing ever more fantastic crimes, including changing children into animals. There was nothing more dangerous than contact with a Jew. Gentiles with Jewish spouses were encouraged to get divorces. Some did; others simply staged divorces for appearances.

  Suddenly, Jakub Gutenbaum felt as though the air around him had lost its oxygen. No one wanted to come near him, talk to him, or be seen in his company. In addition to the distrust of Jews, there was a general distrust of anyone who had been in contact with Germans during the war or with any other foreigners. If you had had contact with foreigners, that meant you might have been recruited by foreign agents. One of Jakub's friends had lived in Rostov, north of Moscow, for three days while it was under German occupation. She had never mentioned it, knowing it would disqualify her from a university education, but now the authorities discovered the truth and she was thrown out of the university. And then there was Gutenbaum—not only a Jew, but a Jew who had spent the entire war under Germans. Those terrible years of survival in the Warsaw ghetto and the camps were now classified as “contact with the West.”

  One hundred students were gathered together and handed a sixteen-page questionnaire, on which they had to answer questions about their birthdate, parents, grandparents, military record, and parents’ occupation. Do you know any foreigners? the questionnaire asked, and: Have you ever exchanged letters with a foreigner? Gutenbaum and a girl from Bulgaria were the only two foreign students in this particular group summoned for the questionnaire. There was one official present to answer the students’ own questions, and Jakub and the Bulgarian girl very quietly asked what they sho
uld do about the question of knowing foreigners. “Since we are foreigners and grew up somewhere else, we have always known foreigners, but not in the same sense.” The room grew quiet and tense. Everyone knew that the two students could not have it on their papers that they knew foreigners, no matter what the reason. And it would also probably be remembered that the other ninety-eight students in the group had been with the two who were caught knowing foreigners. The official left the room and did not come back for fifteen minutes. When he did return, he gave the ruling: “Since everybody knows it, it is not necessary to write it.” Everyone in the room seemed to exhale as one, like a single organ. Reprieve.

  Then, with the country's leading doctors in prison, being tortured and waiting to die, thousands of others awaiting a similar fate, and Soviet Jewry bracing for what might be a second Holocaust, the problem was solved in the manner of a badly written nineteenth-century melodrama: The villain, possessed with his own mad hatred, rolled his eyes up in his head and fell over dead. There are a number of different accounts of Stalin's death—even the date varies. All that is certain is that he had a stroke and that no first-rate specialists were available to treat him. One distinguished doctor later said that he had been consulted from his prison cell.

  Once Stalin had died, things changed almost instantly. People were released from prison without explanation. The press discontinued its anti-Semitic campaign. Jakub Gutenbaum no longer felt isolated. People were friendly to him again. “The Russians are friendly people,” he said.