A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  THE GREATEST THREAT to the survival of Judaism in the Czech lands was intermarriage. Even if someone was determined to find a Jewish mate, unless they left the country the odds were against it. In addition to the one thousand Jews in the Prague community, there may have been another thousand in Prague who did not have a Jewish identity and a few thousand more in all of Bohemia and Moravia. The majority of the Prague community were elderly, and their children had left. The Feuerlichts were still a Jewish family, but their children were in Australia and Israel. Only Viktor Feuer-licht and his wife remained in Czechoslovakia. Some family lines were already ending. Karol Wassermann's wife was a Protestant, and they had no children.

  Zuzana Skalova was skeptical about mixed marriages. Her sister Eva had married a non-Jew and to the distress of their parents was raising their children without any Jewish background. Zuzana was still hoping to find a Jew to marry. She estimated that there were about fifty Jews her age in Prague. The community was very heavily weighted with the war generation. But her world expanded in 1991 when she got a banking job that enabled her to travel frequently for the first time in her life. About mixed marriages she said, “I think that it's not a major problem. But I am sure that it's easier to have a Jewish partner because there are many problems that can arise in a mixed marriage.” Breaking into an earthy laugh, she added, “I have to organize some competitions with foreign participants.”

  AFTER THE VELVET REVOLUTION, the name of Victory Street in Brno was once again changed back to Masaryk. In December 1990, eighty thousand people shoved into the little square at the head of the street to see their new president, Vaclav Havel.

  Martin Mandl for the first time became active in the Brno Jewish Community, which was now down to three hundred people. He wanted to resuscitate Jewish life in his town, the Moravian capital where he would always live and to which he was passionately attached. He was now very happy that his parents had not settled in West Germany after 1968. “I wouldn't want to be a German,” he said.

  He liked showing people around his town. According to Mandl, when in Brno, there are two things that one must see. Next door to the music conservatory was a nineteenth-century house with eagles sculpted on the corners. It had been the home of Brno's great twentieth-century composer, Leos Janacek. But what excited Mandl even more was a certain vacant lot that had been taken over by tall weeds. This was the garden where Gregor Mendel discovered the theory of genetics. The garden had spent years overgrown and forgotten because Trofim Lysenko, who with Stalin's backing had taken over scientific dialogue in the Soviet Union, had declared genetics “a bourgeois science.” Wasn't the notion that innate qualities were coded into genes at birth a contradiction in the egalitarian society? Gregor Mendel was not to be honored in the Soviet era.

  Mandl looked at the forgotten lot and marveled at the absurdity of being a scientist at all in such a system. He had wanted to be a doctor, but he could not get into medical school. His mother had limited his future when she resigned her party membership after the invasion. You had to choose your degree of collaboration. He had studied chemistry and biology in Bratislava, where he met his future wife.

  Their home was filled with good music, the walls were covered with the work of Czech painters, and the shelves were filled with good books. Friends of Martin's sister, Milana, had smuggled Jewish books in German to her. But even several years after the Velvet Revolution there were still few books on Jewish subjects in the C,?;ech language. It was a major event when, in 1989, the first C,?;ech edition of Leon Uris's Exodus was published. The Mandl family read it together.

  The three-hundred-person Jewish Community was held together by the cantor, ArnoSt Neufeld, whose father had also been a cantor. Neufeld's face and thick, gray beard were so classically Semitic that his blue eyes seemed startling. His wife converted to Judaism, and their two daughters were raised to be Jewish, but only inside the home. Both daughters married non-Jews but kept a few customs such as separate meat and dairy dishes.

  As cantor, Neufeld had drawn a salary from the Communist state that was continued after the revolution. But the Community had a double burden: the state had returned all its property but had cut all state subsidies. The theory was that the Community could earn its own money from the property. But the property included forty-six Jewish cemeteries scattered throughout southern Moravia and thirty buildings, most of which had either been abandoned or used for storage. Not only did the property not earn income, most of it would cost money to restore. The only income-earner was a building with a television station, which started paying rent. About thirty new people had become active Jews after the Velvet Revolution. Many of them were people like Milana Mandl —in their forties and educated in the liberal days of Dubcek.

  Brno's discreet synagogue with its plain exterior was still operating on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. On a major holiday it could get thirty people. But this included non-Jews, more and more of whom had been showing up for services since the revolution. Some explained that they were Christians interested in the Jewish roots of their religion. Others seemed to think they were making an anti-Communist statement.

  Neufeld restored the Jewish cemetery, and occasional mourners still turned up on the now well-trimmed tree-lined grounds to place a stone on a grave. The coffins were made from unstained, untreated wood, according to Jewish law. The dead were still buried in the traditional white smocks, with a small sachet of soil from Israel placed under the head. But it was getting increasingly difficult to find Jews for the funerals, and Jewish law states that the body must be prepared by Jews.

  “I worry about what will happen when I am gone,” Neufeld often confided to Martin Mandl. Mandl wondered, too, because neither he nor anyone else in town had the knowledge to take Neufeld's place. Two people from Brno went to study in Israel, and it was hoped they would be back in a few years.

  In 1992, Brno had its first open Community Passover seder since Dubcek. It was the first seder Martin Mandl had ever been to. With the same natural enthusiasm with which he dragged people to the Janacek house, he was trying to learn and teach his two children. Both he and his wife wanted their children to have a Jewish education, although they would have to convert if they wanted to be Jews. When their bright and serious daughter, Ver-onika, was 13, they sent her to Israel for one month. Before she went, she did not think of herself as Jewish, but after one month in summer camp she was not only ready to convert but, like her aunt twenty-four years earlier, was ready to move there. It was almost useless for Martin to talk to her about building Jewish life in Brno because there was only one other Jew of her age in town. “I like being Jewish,” said Veronika, “And in Czechoslovakia there are not a lot of Jews. Jewish holidays are very sad here. In Israel they are a lot of fun.”

  “This is what the Israelis teach,” said Martin with a tone of resignation. “You must leave here. You must go back to Israel. No matter what you are doing, Europe is only tragedy. For two thousand years it has been only tragedy for Jews. You must leave. That is what we keep hearing from Israel.”

  But Mandl did not think that way. Not now. Not after all those years of compromise and patience. “For twenty years a great source of information was the Voice of America in Czech/’ he said. “About fifteen years ago I heard a commentator say, ‘During the next twenty or thirty years, all Jewish life in Czechoslovakia will die/And I thought, yes, that's right. But since ‘89, it's not certain. It's a question. But we must help ourselves.”

  Even without conversions or a high birthrate the Jewish population has kept growing. New Jews seemed to get unearthed in the society. In 1992 there were officially one thousand Jews in Prague. By 1994, without any Jews moving to Prague, the official list had giown to thirteen hundred.

  29

  The

  New Slovak

  Republic

  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 livin
g 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, Zmena reported, 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 nat
ion 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.