A Chosen Few (25 page)

As in Czechoslovakia and everywhere else where Stalin’s influence was felt, the Polish regime hardened in tone and substance after 1948. Władysław Gomułka, with his Polish-nationalist brand of Communism, was removed from power, even imprisoned, and a government that followed every hand-gesture in the Kremlin was installed. But once again as things worsened for Poles, Jews saw an improvement in their lives. As the police state cracked down on the population, fascist and anti-Semitic activities were no longer tolerated. A Pole caught throwing Jews off trains or scribbling anti-Semitic graffiti—or, for that matter, any kind of graffiti—was quickly arrested. Also, Jews profited from the anti-Semitic stereotype of the
żydokomuna
(Jewish Communist). Polish anti-Semites became afraid of Jews because their own hate propaganda had convinced them that all Jews had connections to top-ranking state security people.

In 1949, when Marian Turski moved to Warsaw, the reconstruction process was only beginning. The old center of town was being rebuilt, stone by stone, reproducing the pastel historic buildings. The heaps of refuse where the ghetto had been were starting to be cleared away and replaced with modern apartment buildings with huge gates and massive entranceways, as well as a relatively
restrained touch of the neoclassic ornamentation that seemed to obsess architects in the last years of Stalin. Soon the area that had previously been a downtown district, then a Jewish death camp, then an ash heap, had become a desirable new housing project. Turski moved into one of these new buildings in 1951, in an apartment with a view of the new Old Town, and began his career as a journalist.

Most of the young men in Turski’s circle of friends were pursuing the same young woman. He too thought her extremely beautiful, and he was amazed that she seemed to prefer him, then finally chose him. Turski, a small, dark-haired, awkward man with a slight speech defect, often pondered why she had chosen him. Even months after they started living together, he still shook his head in astonishment. One day after they had been living together for six months, he was talking to her about his Jewish background, and she told him that she too was Jewish. Her family had hidden in Warsaw and been caught and were all killed, but the Nazis had never caught her. She had lived openly as a Polish Catholic. After the war she continued living that way.

Her choice of him now made sense to Turski. Now he understood that she had chosen him because she wanted to find a Jew. After they had lived together for thirty-five years and raised a daughter together, Turski was still convinced of this. When it was suggested to him that perhaps she simply fell in love with him, he persisted, “Well, I hope so. But there were so many handsome young men surrounding her, and she chose me! I understood that this was because she wanted to have a Jewish boy.”

I
N THE EARLY
1950s both Jakub Gutenbaum and Barbara Góra were studying in Moscow on Soviet scholarships. Foreign students were given much higher living allowances than the Soviet students, and their lives were relatively comfortable. They could buy the food in the shops that Soviets could not afford, and attend museums, the opera, and the ballet. Student life in Moscow was pleasant, except for occasional signs that all was not well in the Soviet Union. A Soviet student was taken away from Gutenbaum’s class and never again seen.

Gutenbaum and Góra knew each other because he was dating one of her roommates. But they had very different experiences. Gutenbaum never changed his name. He had already learned that
a face like his would identify him faster than a piece of paper. So he filled out his papers correctly, writing “Polish citizen, Jewish nationality.”

But Barbara Góra, the former Irene Hochberg, had learned to pass as a Pole. If things turned, no one even knew she was Jewish. Why should anyone think Barbara Góra was Jewish? It was rumored that some in her group were clandestine Jews. Barbara even knew of one, a friend from the Ukraine. Once Barbara was even asked how she had survived the war, so she knew that some of her fellow students suspected her. But she had been playing this game well for a decade, and she was confident.

On November 7, 1952, like thousands of Muscovites, she walked to Red Square and saw Stalin on the reviewing stand. Teams of experts around the world examined photos of that event, not only to see who was standing close and who was kept far away, but to search Stalin’s face for signs of rumored illness, both physical and mental. But Barbara Góra simply went and saw Stalin. It was the last time he was seen in public.

On January 13, 1953, it was announced that nine top doctors from the elite Kremlin staff had misused their professional skills to murder two of Stalin’s top aides. Although it was not mentioned that six of the nine doctors were Jewish, it was pointed out that these six had connections with that great bourgeois Jewish conspiracy, the American Joint Distribution Committee. The doctors, it was discovered, were part of a Zionist spy network that was plotting against the Soviet state. The Soviet press ran regular articles warning the citizenry against Zionist connivers and especially Jewish doctors. The people were advised to be on the lookout for these doctor-poisoners, who were allegedly committing ever more fantastic crimes, including changing children into animals. There was nothing more dangerous than contact with a Jew. Gentiles with Jewish spouses were encouraged to get divorces. Some did; others simply staged divorces for appearances.

Suddenly, Jakub Gutenbaum felt as though the air around him had lost its oxygen. No one wanted to come near him, talk to him, or be seen in his company. In addition to the distrust of Jews, there was a general distrust of anyone who had been in contact with Germans during the war or with any other foreigners. If you had had contact with foreigners, that meant you might have been recruited by foreign agents. One of Jakub’s friends had lived in Rostov, north of Moscow, for three days while it was under German occupation. She had never mentioned it, knowing it would
disqualify her from a university education, but now the authorities discovered the truth and she was thrown out of the university. And then there was Gutenbaum—not only a Jew, but a Jew who had spent the entire war under Germans. Those terrible years of survival in the Warsaw ghetto and the camps were now classified as “contact with the West.”

One hundred students were gathered together and handed a sixteen-page questionnaire, on which they had to answer questions about their birthdate, parents, grandparents, military record, and parents’ occupation. Do you know any foreigners? the questionnaire asked, and: Have you ever exchanged letters with a foreigner? Gutenbaum and a girl from Bulgaria were the only two foreign students in this particular group summoned for the questionnaire. There was one official present to answer the students’ own questions, and Jakub and the Bulgarian girl very quietly asked what they should do about the question of knowing foreigners. “Since we are foreigners and grew up somewhere else, we have always known foreigners, but not in the same sense.” The room grew quiet and tense. Everyone knew that the two students could not have it on their papers that they knew foreigners, no matter what the reason. And it would also probably be remembered that the other ninety-eight students in the group had been with the two who were caught knowing foreigners. The official left the room and did not come back for fifteen minutes. When he did return, he gave the ruling: “Since everybody knows it, it is not necessary to write it.” Everyone in the room seemed to exhale as one, like a single organ. Reprieve.

Then, with the country’s leading doctors in prison, being tortured and waiting to die, thousands of others awaiting a similar fate, and Soviet Jewry bracing for what might be a second Holocaust, the problem was solved in the manner of a badly written nineteenth-century melodrama: The villain, possessed with his own mad hatred, rolled his eyes up in his head and fell over dead. There are a number of different accounts of Stalin’s death—even the date varies. All that is certain is that he had a stroke and that no first-rate specialists were available to treat him. One distinguished doctor later said that he had been consulted from his prison cell.

Once Stalin had died, things changed almost instantly. People were released from prison without explanation. The press discontinued its anti-Semitic campaign. Jakub Gutenbaum no longer felt isolated. People were friendly to him again. “The Russians are friendly people,” he said.

I
n 1948 the Communist party, which had been in a coalition government, simply took over the Hungarian government the same way that the party had done in Czechoslovakia, except that in Hungary the Communist party had been only a small minority faction. The takeover was not popular with the general population. But many Jews at the time had been more concerned about the resurgence of extreme right-wing nationalist movements. To them, the Communist party was the alternative to fascism.

The new government was led by Matyas Rakosi, who had a Jewish mother and a number of close Jewish associates, including the head of internal police, Gabor Peters. But these ties did not mean that their ascension to power was good for Hungarian Jews. Zionist organizations were banned. Jewish publications were closed down. The only Jewish organizations permitted were those directly controlled by the state under the auspices of the official Jewish Community. The curriculum in Jewish schools was made to conform to the state curriculum, and the schools were eventually taken over by the state. One Jewish high school was allowed, the Anne Frank School, but it was maintained as a kind of second-class high school, since its graduates would find it difficult to be accepted by universities. As in Czechoslovakia, any Jewish religious activities or affiliations would greatly damage the chances for
advancement not only of an individual but sometimes of the family.

The policy of nationalizing the economy also came as a hard blow to many Jews, because they happened to be of the merchant class. To Ilona and Géza Seifert, now married, the antireligious policies meant a dismantling of three years of hard work by the community in building Jewish institutions. In addition, Ilona’s father lost his soda factory. Gyula Lippner tried to keep his family china shop—since he was a party member who had enthusiastically supported the regime, he hoped one little china shop in Újpest would be permitted. Originally, it was said that the nationalization was only for substantial businesses and that little shops would not be bothered. But in 1949 a few Jews were arrested on charges of Zionism, and Lippner decided that this was no time for a Jew to test the limits of the new system. He voluntarily turned over the china shop and accepted a job with a large state-owned paper company.

The Lippners were not practicing Jews, but they told their two sons that the family was Jewish and they repeatedly explained that they should be careful with this information because “it is a very dangerous thing to be a Jew in Hungary.” In general they tried to be good Communists and raise their sons to be good Communists and join the young Communists, and they did all the other things good Communist families did to get ahead.

Even the Konráds’ hardware store in Berettyó was nationalized. Many of the surviving Jewish men had started new families with Jewish women from elsewhere or non-Jewish women from town, and they had opened small shops in their traditional trades. In 1949, once they realized that even these little shops were to be taken, signs appeared on the doors of little ateliers all over Berettyó saying that the owner was away and would be back shortly. The shop owners and their families loaded themselves into trucks and drove to Czechoslovakia, from where they could still travel easily to “the new Soviet ally,” Israel. They settled in a small town on the Mediterranean coast, where they reopened their shops, and continued to speak Hungarian. For two decades Berettyó Jewish life was preserved in this Israeli village.

In Berettyó itself, Jewish life had ended. The more affluent and better-educated families did not get on the trucks to Israel but instead drifted, a few at a time, to Budapest. György Konrád, now 16, went to Budapest in search of something to do after the family
hardware business was nationalized. Having struggled to learn Russian ever since those first curious troops had appeared in Berettyó in 1945, he had now learned it well enough to work translating articles from
Pravda
and other party organs into Hungarian. These were wordy, tedious thousand-word items that tortured language to assure political conformity. Each of György’s translations was carefully filed in an archive, where in all probability it was never again seen.

T
HE
G
AZDAG FAMILY
lived in Ferencváros, in southern Pest, where a small tributary forks off the Danube, only to rejoin it south of the capital. Both parents were party members who enjoyed the opportunities of the new system: Ervin was a chemical engineer, and Zsuzsa, no longer a nurse, was a film editor. A successful Communist family, they believed in the future of this new egalitarian society. Their son Gyula, born in 1947, was six years old walking home from first grade with several other children. Suddenly his friends started pushing one boy because he was fat. Gyula decided to defend the fat boy—he was being raised with this kind of idealism. For the rest of the walk home, the boys shouted, pushed, and scuffled until, one by one, they broke away at their homes. When they got to the street where the Gazdags lived, only Gyula, the fat boy, and one of the other boys were left. They were neighbors. Each boy went to the gate of his building, but they continued to shout at each other. The fat boy shouted at the other boy, “You dirty Jew!” That seemed to put the other boy in his place, so Gyula also started shouting “Dirty Jew!” He went right over to the gateway and shouted it in the boy’s face. At that moment an elderly woman who lived in Gyula’s building was trying to get through the gate. She glared at Gyula and said, “You silly little boy. You are Jew too,” and pushed past him to the street.