A Chosen Few (24 page)

At the time of the Communist takeover, Karol Wassermann, the pharmacist who had been liberated from the hospital at Sachsenhausen, 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.

N
EITHER 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 Jewishness of the defendants. Like many Jewish Communists, most of these defendants were not very Jewish. Bedrǐch Geminder, who had directed the party’s foreign affairs department, never mentioned his 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. František 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 František 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 Bedrǐch 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 Bedrǐch 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 Bedrǐch 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 Bedrǐch 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.

N
inel 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 I’ve 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 Łódź, 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 “Żyd” on the street and shoving people out 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 Kamerazes 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.