A Chosen Few (35 page)

From Ninel’s senior class in high school, which had been three-quarters Jewish, only two Jews remained in Poland—Ninel, and a very disturbed schizophrenic who was under treatment.

H
AVING ALREADY BEEN
to Israel, Barbara Góra was certain that she did not want to live there, even though one of her closest friends emigrated there and two others moved to the United States. Although she decided to stay in Warsaw, her attitude about the city and Poland generally had changed. After seeing the Holocaust and the subsequent waves of survivors driven out every ten years, she finally reached the conclusion that somebody should stay in Poland and say, I am a Jew and I am still here. “If they don’t want me, they have to have me,” she declared. “If they don’t want Jews, then I should be here.”

This idea came to her on a spring afternoon as she sat in her living room with three non-Jewish friends reading in the newspaper about how the student demonstrations had been organized by the Zionists. One of her friends, a longtime Communist party member, said that they had managed to arrest a number of students and had singled out the Jews among them. The newspapers did not give their names, but she had contacts and she knew who was arrested. Many, like Barbara Góra, had Polish names. And yet, her friend had said, they knew. They knew who the Jews were. How did they know?

And Barbara Góra, without a moment’s reflection, said, “Well, I’ll tell you something. I am a Jew.”

Her friends reacted as though she had just said her hair color wasn’t natural. It was of no great importance. But Barbara suddenly realized what she had done. She had just said publicly, “I am a Jew”—and nothing had happened. And she didn’t think anything was about to happen. For the first time in twenty-six years, ever since she had presented a piece of paper bearing her new name to a German guard and walked out of the Warsaw ghetto, Barbara had volunteered to non-Jewish people, “I am a Jew.”

She stayed in Poland. She did not change her name. She did not take up the Jewish religion, but every now and then she would tell someone, “I am a Jew.” Next time Poland had one of its bouts of Jew-hating, she resolved, she would still be there, and she would still say it. “Where they beat Jews, you have to be a little Jewish,” she decided. In Paris, students were demonstrating with signs saying, “We are all German Jews.” Why shouldn’t she say “I am a Polish Jew”? It was time to say that in Poland. Except that nobody ever says “Polish Jew” in Poland. You are either a Pole or a Jew.

Even Barbara Góra’s mother, who had spent her life so afraid of
her Jewishness, finally got angry in 1968. When she went to a newsstand to read the latest anti-Semitic slurs, the woman in the stand looked at her and, just as she had always feared, pointed to her and said, “You are a Jew!”

Góra’s mother glared back and said, “Yes, and you are a Nazi!” and walked away.

The Jews of the university in Warsaw, the ’68 generation, left. Joanna Wiszniewicz was one of the few who remained, lonely without her friends from the momentous university days. But they could never come back to Poland for a visit. She arranged to meet friends who had gone to Israel in places in Hungary and Romania in the next few years, but she had in fact lost her friends. Many Jews discovered that their friends were Jewish only when they saw them all leave.

Joanna stayed, because her field of study was Polish culture and she would have nothing to do if she left Poland. “It’s not patriotism,” she said. “It’s a lack of imagination.”

B
ARBARA
G
RUBERSKA
became a doctor of internal medicine, just as she had learned her mother’s father had been. Though she married a non-Jew, she decided to stop hiding her true identity. Her husband, an electrical engineer, was a third-generation Communist who hated the Catholic Church and had many Jewish friends. Unfortunately, the year she decided to become openly Jewish and even become involved in community affairs in Warsaw was 1968. In that year Jewish life virtually shut down. There were no longer even religious services available, or places to learn about Jewish practices. She decided that she would do what every Jew she knew was doing: she went to the ministry to apply for permission to emigrate to Israel. The government demanded proof of her Jewishness. She had none—neither parents nor ties to the Jewish community. Her application was denied.

Two years later, Kazimiera Kwiatkowska, who had taken 700 złotys a month to care for her, was dying and asked to see Barbara, who came to her bedside. Barbara pleaded with her, “There must be something more you know about my mother.”

Kazimiera Kwiatkowska, lying in her deathbed, admitted that she had met her mother once. She had come to sign the contract with a bribed German policewoman and another woman whose business was brokering such contracts. She had come holding
Barbara on a pillow, saying she had to leave the country and wanted someone to take the baby for a time.

“What did she look like?” Barbara Gruberska wanted to know.

Kazimiera said she was very thin, dirty, and dressed in rags. “She was more like an animal than a human being.” The woman had stayed the night in Kazimiera’s home, just sitting on a chair, crying until morning light.

T
he events of 1968, for a few exciting months, caused the name of Victory Street in Brno to be changed once again back to Masaryk Street.

The Czechoslovakian economy, which was supposed to be the best in the Soviet bloc, had been failing. Economic reform was halfhearted and unsuccessful, and in search of change the conservative leadership was removed and the party put in the hands of Slovak party chief Alexander Dubček. In a quip borrowed from Bertolt Brecht after the 1953 GDR uprising, the new party leader said, “We couldn’t change the people, so we changed the leaders.” Dubček was a courageous man whose destiny it was not to be thanked by history. He was a Communist who tried to save Communism in a country where the ideology had once been broadly popular. Taking a slogan from Hungary in 1956, he called for “Communism with a human face.” The mistakes of the Hungarian movement were not repeated. There was no demand for an independent foreign policy, but instead, Dubček gave repeated assurances that Czechoslovakia was a loyal member of the Soviet bloc and a firm participant in the Warsaw Pact. Dubček even made clear that he wanted to continue one-party Communist rule. In the end, the results were no different than in Hungary. Communism may have been capable of a human face, but Soviet power wasn’t.

Dubček offered a Communism that might have taken hold with
Czechs and perhaps East Germans and Hungarians and possibly even with Poles. That was what the Soviets feared. Dubček seriously pursued things that in the past had only been proclaimed in speeches, such as economic reform based on decentralization, destalinization to remove the infamous monsters from the power structure, and liberalization, which included free speech, a critical and uncensored press, and freedom to travel abroad.

For the few thousand Jews who were left in Czechoslovakia, Dubček was a reprieve. The exact number of Jews is uncertain, because after the Slansky trial in 1952 the majority of Jews who stayed did not openly show their Jewishness. The fifteen thousand Prague Jews who were registered with the official Jewish Community were thought to constitute only a third of the Jews in Prague. “Anti-Zionist” persecution had considerably eased since the years immediately after the Slansky trial, but after the Six-Day War, the press once again felt moved to run a steady diet of anti-Zionist opinion. “Spontaneous” anti-Zionist demonstrations were organized. Jewish Community plans for a celebration of one thousand years of Prague Jewry were canceled.

The politically astute saw that the anti-Zionist campaign was simply a desperate attempt by the ruling conservatives to outmaneuver Dubček and his emerging reformers. Most Jews were not aware of this. They only knew that words like
cosmopolitans
and
Zionists
were showing up in the newspapers. But once Dubček gained control, everything changed. Foreign travel, religious activities, and open criticism of government policies were suddenly commonplace. People who had never been political in their lives were drawn in by the excitement. Karol Wassermann, who had limited most of his conversations to antiques and art history, was talking about political reform in the pharmacy where he still worked. He had completed his studies in art history at the university up to the doctorate level. Just as he was starting to write his doctoral dissertation, he was informed that “the proletariat will not finance two degrees.” He was already a pharmacist, and he would not be given an art history doctorate.

So art history remained his hobby. Among his other new interests was theater. He regularly attended rehearsals of new plays. Although he had always avoided politics before, he now became fascinated by the young absurdist movement in theater, which was clearly political. He was particularly enamored of the young playwright Václav Havel. Wassermann also studied at the state-operated
Jewish Museum. When the Nazis had occupied Prague, they developed a ghoulish obsession with the Jewish Museum. They selected a team of Jewish experts to carefully catalogue all the antique Judaica that was found in the homes of Jews who were deported to the camps. Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi who established the first ghetto and was the first concentration camp administrator, wanted to create in Prague a definitive collection of relics from what he hoped would soon be an extinguished culture. The Jews who were made to work on this project painstakingly catalogued each article, because they thought the Jews would come back and their property could be returned. Most never came back, and the collection ended up in the hands of the Communist state.

Bedrǐch Nosek’s son, also named Bedrǐch, became a historian for the museum. As an undergraduate at Prague’s Charles University, he studied Czech history. Then he discovered, to his amazement, that a Hebrew course was offered in the state-run modern language school. Even more surprising, the course had been taught for years by an Israeli woman who was married to a Czech. She had been dismissed from the university at the time of the Slansky trial, but when the anti-Zionist campaign cooled off, she was able to start a course at the modern language school. An even greater stroke of luck was the fact that the Jewish Museum needed a new historian, and just as Nosek had completed his undergraduate work in Czech history, the university opened up its graduate program in Jewish studies—an opportunity that was offered about once a decade—to a candidate with a history degree. There were three students and four professors. None of them were Jewish. One of the professors had studied at the museum in the late 1940s under the last surviving Jewish expert on Judaica.

In Prague, Brno, and Bratislava, the Dubček era was a time when the postwar generation of Jews started to openly express their Jewishness. Synagogue attendance increased, and social meetings and community functions became regular events. The head Czech rabbi, Richard Feter, who lived in Brno, had been quietly giving instruction to Jews on request. But now he could run a full-scale Jewish Community, even if it was only for a few hundred. He gave open lectures on Judaism and supervised community celebrations of Jewish holidays. For the first time in their lives, a new generation of Jews experienced Judaism as a living culture, and they participated excitedly, forming a range of youth groups with meetings, discussions, and social events. In 1968 Prague, suddenly the
eighteenth-century Jewish town hall, the rococo building on Maislova Street next to the Old-New Synagogue, was a lively place with young people rushing up and down the dark wood stairways. Bratislava had its own rabbi and a Jewish youth group that more than fifty people attended every week. Being Jewish was now something more than becoming worried when you read the newspaper.

Z
UZANA
S
KÁLOVÁ
was seven years old, and her sister Eva was nine. Although Skálová is the feminine ending for the family name, Skala, originally their father had been named Spitz. But once he returned from Denmark where he had been saved during the war, he thought it would be safer to have a typical Czech name. He married a Jewish woman whose name had been Gerty Kirchner, although her parents had always cautioned her that it was safer to just use her middle name, René. She survived Theresienstadt and was looked after by an uncle named Schonhauser, who by coincidence had also changed his name to Skala because it would be safer. And so one fake Skala married another.

When Eva was born, the Skalas gave her the Jewish name Eva Ruth, and for a fee they had it officially registered at the Jewish Community in Prague. By the time Zuzana was born, they thought better of this and told her that her name was Shoshana, but they didn’t register it. For Passover the girls would go to a seder at the Jewish town hall with about two hundred other children. Their parents were members of the Community, but they only went to synagogue for major holidays. One day when Zuzana was in the second grade, one of her schoolmates ran around the classroom saying, “Don’t talk to Zuzana, she’s Jewish.” Zuzana knew she was Jewish and didn’t take this accusation very seriously—until she realized that it worked. No one in the class would talk to her for the rest of the day.