A Chosen Few (54 page)

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 “
Vynútené 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 Košice,
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.

A
FTER 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 Tomás 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 Tomás? Whatever Tomás 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.”

Tomás 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 “
Na stráz
,” “Attention!” In the crowd, along with the occasional anti-Semitic sign, he saw two flags of the Guardists, the Slovak SS.

S
ILVIA
K
RAUS
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 stráz
” 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 nation 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 Wassermann 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.

The Slovaks began to swing to the left, and the nationalists were forced out of government. Throughout Central Europe nationalists and anti-Communists were being voted out and replaced by former Communists. Communists became the largest party in Poland and made gains in both the Slovak Republic and the eastern part of reunited Germany. In Hungary, Antall died in 1994 and a former Communist official, Gyula Horn, was elected Prime Minister. It was not so much nationalism that was alienating voters. Everywhere in Central Europe except the Czech Republic, a large part of the electorate was already disillusioned with capitalism.

But Slovak nationalists also had a public relations dilemma. If Slovaks started looking at the history of the last Slovak state, they would be afraid of the new one. So a little revisionism was needed to assuage public fear. But the new revisionism instead reinforced that fear.

Zuzana was at an office party talking to someone whose husband was involved in planning the new Slovak state. The woman assured Zuzana that there was no reason to be worried.

“I am afraid for my children,” Zuzana explained.

The woman smiled and said, “Why are you afraid? I’m not afraid. Why are you afraid for your children?”

Zuzana said, “You are not worrying because your children are not Jews.”

Without a moment’s hesitation the woman answered, “It is not true about the Second World War. It’s not true about the Holocaust. Why are you so afraid?”

This, of course, was exactly why Zuzana Stern was afraid.

For many Jews the issue was less what they would do than the future of their children. Silvia Kraus’s father, Tomás Kraus, son of the Slovak Jew accused of burning his own shop to avoid nationalization in the late 1940s, thought both his daughters should leave. But he intended to stay. After the fall of Communism he dropped his career as a sports journalist to start an import-export business. He believed capitalism had a future in the Slovak Republic. He resigned as president of the Bratislava Jewish Community to give more time to his new business. But he was determined that his daughters leave as soon as they finished school. Silvia said that she would at least like to do some specialty work in Vienna. “Then I will see,” she said. Vienna, which had been an impossible world away under Communism, turned out to be a half-hour commute from Bratislava. But no one on a Slovak salary could afford to go
there. Economics replaced police controls as the isolating factor for Slovaks.

Still, travel did become a possibility. Summer trips to Israel were organized every year, and some fifteen Slovak Jews moved there permanently in the first three years after the Velvet Revolution. To Fero Alexander, the new possibilities became almost an obsession. He had always traveled with his folk group. Now, instead of finding his way through the labyrinth of Communist bureaucracy, there were airfares to be researched, compared, and quoted at length. He, his wife, and his three sons went to Israel. “I got a wonderful fare,” he said, “$250 round trip. But here that is two months’ salary.”

So many Slovak Jews were visiting Israel that the community attempted to persuade El Al to offer twice-weekly flights from Bratislava to Tel Aviv. In Israel, Fero’s second son, who had wanted to be bar mitzvahed several years earlier but could find no one in Bratislava to teach him, belatedly had the ceremony. His youngest son was bar mitzvahed in Bratislava in January 1993, the first Bratislava bar mitzvah in almost twenty years.

The Bratislava community searched world Jewry for a rabbi who would move to the new republic. Fero wanted to find someone in the American Conservative tradition, but no such rabbi could be found. Instead, they found a twenty-nine-year-old American Lubavitcher, Baruch Myer. To most Bratislava Jews, the Hasidic practices of Lubavitchers seemed extreme, but one of the things that made Lubavitchers different was the fact that they were willing to come. “They come. They settle anywhere,” said Fero Alexander. If Baruch Myer did not exactly fit in with his dark clothes, beard, and hat, he made up for that difference by learning fluent Slovak before arriving. He immediately began a wide range of projects. He eagerly established a kosher chicken operation. He slaughtered the birds and trained women to clean them by hand under strictly observed religious law. But when Bratislava Jews discovered that kosher chickens were three times as expensive as regular chickens, they were not willing to buy them. Myer’s kosher chickens were simply unaffordable.