A Chosen Few (23 page)

It was a strained existence. They formed a small circle of friends from a community of a few thousand Jews, and Ron worked from early morning until late at night. They avoided contact with non-Jews, but that was unnatural, and after a time they started talking to Germans. The Zuriels could speak with Germans as long as the Germans weren’t of their own generation. If a German was Ron’s age, he could only think about what this person might have been doing during those years. And just thinking about it, he didn’t want to talk. It was actually easy to avoid those people. All Ron really had to do was to make it clear that he was a Jew, since Germans found it difficult to talk to Jews. It was too … awkward. They knew what Jews were thinking about them. Sometimes a conversation would start, and then it would drift to the war years, and then it would inevitably end up with the non-Jew declaring, “I didn’t know. I had no idea.” Ron didn’t believe them. He kept waiting for just one German of his generation to say, “I knew. It was terrible, and I could do nothing.” He would have accepted that. But he never heard it, and the rage pulsated through his body as he stood in silence, his face expressionless, his eyes cast toward the floor, and listened to these people politely explaining that they didn’t know, as though they just happened to have been out shopping during the twelve years when his world was being annihilated.

J
uraj Stern’s earliest memories were from underground. When he was four years old he was crowded into a small dark bunker with his parents, his grandmother, and his brother. The opening to their underground hiding place was concealed by a woodpile and a potato bin. He remembered the thwack of bullets being shot into the bunker from above while they huddled below, motionless, and braced themselves not to cry out or move if hit. But no one was ever hit. There were only those sickening dull noises.

Juraj also remembered a time when he was hidden alone, and a Slovak man would come several times a day and bring him food. The man would put an index finger against his lips and say, “Not a word. You have to be very quiet.” After two days Juraj’s father came and took him to another hiding place.

Juraj’s fondest memory was of a Romanian division that came through the town on horseback. A Romanian soldier lifted little Juraj onto his horse and galloped him around a Slovak village. He wasn’t hiding anymore. Juraj Stern’s childhood had begun.

Jews and Jewish life had vanished from their village during the war. The Sterns went to Bratislava, where Juraj’s father resumed his prewar work as an accountant in a factory. The small groups of Jews who remained moved to centers that still had communities.
Only a few Orthodox Jewish communities remained in Slovak villages. Most of the surviving Jews went to Bratislava, Brno, or Prague, where there were still Jewish communities.

Less than fifteen miles from the Sterns’ village was Nitra, whose Jewish community, though greatly reduced, had survived. Only about one hundred Jews were left in this town of forty thousand people, yet there was a synagogue, a kosher butcher, and a traditional religious slaughterer. The Jewish community in Nitra dated back to the eleventh century, in a part of town called “Jewish hill.” In 1947, Zuzana Šimko was born into a Nitra family whose background was seldom discussed. At the time of her birth her father was 44 and her mother 41. They were widow and widower. Her mother had had another family before the war, from which only a daughter survived. In 1946 the daughter, then 18, married and emigrated to Israel. Zuzana would be an adult before she would meet her half-sister and learn what had happened to her mother’s other family during the war. Her father had also had another family, all of whom had been sent to Auschwitz. For Zuzana’s parents, she was their new life.

Zuzana grew up in a building with six other Jewish families. Their household was kosher, like those of most of their neighbors. Her father remained an Orthodox Jew, clean shaven, but always wearing a hat. He had his own locksmith shop, which he would open up each morning after wrapping
tefillin
and saying morning prayers in the nearby synagogue. After closing the shop at the end of the day, before the last light was gone, he would go back to the synagogue to say his afternoon prayers. He would return again after dinner for his evening prayers. From Friday sundown to Saturday sundown he permitted no work, electricity, or sparks of any kind. Except for the smaller size of the community, Zuzana was being raised in a world very similar to the one her parents had lived in before the war.

The Slovak region, as always, was poorer and more anti-Semitic than the Czech lands. Aware of this, the government in Prague advised Slovak Jews not to push too hard for restitution of their property. In a number of violent incidents Slovaks resisted the return of Jewish property. But in general, Czechoslovakia was again a favorable place for Jews.

Moravia, a rolling pine-green farm region, once celebrated for its Jewish culture, now had a community only in its capital, Brno. This small town of wide streets, netted with streetcar wiring and
sober nineteenth-century architecture, had a thousand surviving Jews. The main street running up to a triangular plaza in the center had been renamed by the Nazis, but it was now once again called Masaryk, after the first president of Czechoslovakia, an outspoken critic of anti-Semitism.

One synagogue in Brno was reopened, a simple concrete structure that gave no hint of Jewishness from the outside. It had been built this way not so that Judaism could be practiced secretly but because of a movement of the 1930s called “functionalist architecture.” After the war, however, the remaining Jews thought this was a very sensible and discreet way to house a synagogue.

Postwar Prague, with its ten thousand Jews and two reopened synagogues, was again becoming a prosperous capital. Alice Kraus, who had survived Theresienstadt and forced labor camps, was back in Prague trying to live a normal life with her journalist husband František—trying to build a future as though their past had been normal. She never talked about what had happened to her. That unspoken chapter of her life was a mystery to her son Tomás, who was born in 1954. But the subject somehow remained present in his childhood by her weighty and conspicuous silence. Perhaps that was because Alice’s behavior contrasted so starkly with that of František, who could not stop talking about his experiences, writing about them, and lecturing on them. There are, it is said, two kinds of survivors, and Tomás Kraus was raised by one of each—the one who could not speak, and the one who could not stop speaking.

Most Czechs remember the first few years after the war as the best time Czechoslovakia ever had. As in that other happy moment, before the Nazis came, the country had a well-functioning democracy and an industry-based economy that produced a satisfactory standard of living. František was now a well-known journalist, and both Czechoslovakian radio and the Czech news agency offered him jobs. He started a foreign broadcasting section for the radio station.

Since František had not been able to have the new tenants evicted from his former apartment on Kozi Street, the Krauses moved into a large and comfortable new home. While again becoming very active in community affairs, like most Jews, they observed their religion selectively. Some went to synagogue once a week. Few observed dietary laws. Some Jews kept no connection at all with the Jewish community in Prague. The unanswerable question—“How could God have allowed the Holocaust?” —kept being
asked by people who appeared once or twice at a synagogue or community function and then never showed up again.

Only two synagogues reopened in Prague after the war—Europe’s oldest, the Old-New Synagogue, and the Jubilee. The Jubilee was a giant, neo-Moorish art nouveau building from the turn of the century, when the Community had been replacing the synagogues lost in the slum clearance program. The Old-New Synagogue was in the former Jewish ghetto where František had once lived, but in spite of its presence there, the ghetto was not really Jewish anymore. The ten thousand Jews left in Prague were now spread throughout the city. Although there were far fewer Jews in Prague than before the war, traditional practice actually increased because of the arrival of Slovak Jews from the villages. More Jews had survived in the Slovak region—where they had been able to take to the mountains and fight with partisans—than in the Czech lands. The urban Jews in Prague and Brno, who had not lived the traditional life of villages like Nitra, were being brought practices that had not been seen in the cities in generations.

The Slovak village Jews came not only in search of surviving communities, but in some cases to be able to stay in Czechoslovakia. With the new map drawn by the Allies, many of the eastern Slovak villages from the regions of Carpathia and Ruthenia now lay within Soviet borders. Viktor Feuerlicht, a small Ruthenia Jew who had fought his way into Prague with the Czech Army, did not want to live in the Soviet Union. His home town, Khoust, was now part of the Ukraine. After the war Feuerlicht decided to stay in Prague. He went to a technical school and tried to hold a factory job, but one of his arms had been badly mangled during the war, and a constant series of operations made it impossible for him to keep the job. Feuerlicht had no interest in Prague-style Judaism. Any Saturday, you could see this little man with only one good arm clutching a torah that seemed almost as big as he was, determined to go on practicing the village religion of his father, even in Prague. He became one of a small nucleus of Slovak Orthodox Jews that formed around the Old-New Synagogue.

T
O MANY
in Czechoslovakia, the Soviets were still the heroes who had saved them and made possible the return of Czech democracy. In 1946 there were more than one million registered Czechoslovakian Communists. It was the one country in Central
Europe where the Soviets could truthfully claim that Communism was popular. In 1946 the Communist party got 37.9 percent of the vote, more than any other party, and it entered into a coalition government in which it controlled key ministries. It is also true that the Communist Ministry of Information once released a peculiar statement complaining about the presence in important places of “bearded Solomons.” But in general Jews and non-Jews felt comfortable with the Czech Communist party. In the next two years the party’s membership doubled to two million. One out of every five adults in the country was a registered Communist. Czechoslovakia seemed close to becoming a Communist democracy.

But the Communists had a ruling majority only in a coalition with the Social Democrats, and their hold on the coalition was not solid. Perhaps they feared losing their edge in the next election. Perhaps they—or more likely, the Soviets—just grew impatient with the power vagaries of a parliamentary system. In 1948, with the help of what appeared to be threats from Czech-based Soviet troops, the Communists simply ousted their partners and took over the government. There was little resistance, even though the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, son of the national hero, was found dead outside his office building.

The Western Allies had not forgotten their own failure to act the last time Czechoslovakia had been taken over. This time they would respond. Their response was to greatly accelerate what was becoming the cold war by taking a harder line with the Soviets in Germany. But many Czechs took the news calmly.

For Jews, something much more important happened only three months later—the creation of the State of Israel. The new Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, like the democratic leftist coalition before it, was an enthusiastic backer of Israel. It trained pilots, shipped badly needed weapons, and sent volunteers. In addition, Czech and Slovak Jews—including many who had military experience fighting with Slovak partisans during the war—went to fight with the Haganah. One of Viktor Feuerlicht’s brothers joined the Haganah and went to Israel. Feuerlicht’s other brother, his only other surviving relative, had already emigrated to Israel. But Viktor, with his mangled arm, could not fight, and so he remained in Prague. Brno, where Masaryk Street had now been renamed Victory Street because Masaryk was considered too nationalistic, lost about one hundred of its Jews, which was one in ten. That was a smaller percentage than most communities lost. Whether related
to the Communist takeover or not, Jews left by the thousands for Israel.

Those who stayed found themselves living in a very different system. Zuzana Šimko’s father was told to close his little locksmith shop. Instead, he was placed in a workshop for a state-owned factory. He still could go to synagogue before work and take Saturdays and Jewish holidays off.

For some, it got rougher. About sixty miles from Bratislava was a town of twenty thousand people called Nové Mésto nad Váhom. It had been about one-quarter Jewish before the war, and a small community remained. A Jewish typesetter named Kraus (no relation to the Prague Kraus family) let it be known that he did not want to see his print shop nationalized. Mysteriously, the shop burned down. The town saw in this a Jewish conspiracy. He was arrested for arson and sat in jail for six weeks while the local press ran articles calling for Kraus to be hanged: “Kill the Jewish capitalist,” one article said. But after six weeks an actual arsonist was discovered, and Kraus was released without explanation or apology.