A Chosen Few (38 page)

Irene started having informal meetings to which non-Jews were not invited. She called her group Uns für Unsere, We for Ourselves. For four years they had monthly meetings, a small group of Jews who discovered that they all had the same background. They had been born in the United States, France, England, or Australia, wherever their parents had found shelter from Hitler. They had all been brought back to Germany when young and had never felt completely German but had never given much thought to being Jewish either, because they were all from good Communist households. They became like archeologists brushing off the rocks of their lives, looking for clues to a bygone civilization. Irene arranged lectures on Jewish law, on holidays, on Israel. She started arranging for Lubavitch rabbis from the West to come for holidays.

M
OST OF THE
E
AST
B
ERLIN
J
EWS
had other things on their mind. Their religion was the new socialist Germany, but it was getting harder to stay a believer. When Brezhnev decided to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, he meant to send a message to people throughout the Soviet bloc. The event marked the beginning of a slow decline in which idealism turned to disillusionment. It made loyal Communists wonder about the entire system. If East Germany went its own way and reformed its errors, which was what many loyal Communists were hoping would happen, would not the Soviets treat them the way they had the Czechoslovakians? The Warsaw Pact was for mutual defense, and a central concept was that the USSR was not supposed to intervene in the internal affairs of its members. But obviously the Soviets would intervene.

When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, in East Germany it was mainly the intelligentsia who were upset. But as the economy failed to perform year after year, discontent spread. East Germans grew a little angrier every year, and as the Stasi accurately reported on growing discontent, the regime grew more repressive and distrustful. “There was not physical repression but mental,” said an East German journalist of Jewish background, “I mean people were never afraid to voice their opinions, especially in factories. They voiced their opinions very openly, but of course the state authorities didn’t like it and the people were deprived of fundamental freedoms like travel, to read what they want. I mean, they could see television,
they could listen to the radio, but if you wanted to read
The New York Times
or
Le Figaro
, you couldn’t, unless you were a privileged person like I was, who was working as a journalist. Of course we had everything, but that was only a privileged smaller group—writers and journalists.”

Mia Lehmann and her husband often talked about how things were not going well. They had understood the need for the Berlin Wall as a temporary measure, but not as a permanent policy. By the time of her husband’s death in 1963, he had become extremely critical of the GDR system. Mia knew that the dream—the new egalitarian Germany—was drifting far off course. As a trade union official, she earned her living doing what she did best. She spent her days in factories asking people why they were unhappy. “I had to deal with people in the factory. I knew what the economic side was. And it went down and down.”

While the average East German was worried about the economy, the Communist elite, like Mia Lehmann, was troubled by incidents such as the Wolf Biermann affair in 1976. Biermann was the West German son of an Auschwitz victim who moved to the GDR and became a popular poet and ballad writer. He had the kind of impeccable “antifascist” credentials that made friendly criticism permissible. But by the mid-1960s, he was being almost entirely censored, and in 1975, after being granted permission for a visit to the West, he was not allowed back into East Germany. This was a shock to many East German Jews who, like Biermann, had suffered under the Nazis and gone to the GDR for idealistic reasons. What had gone wrong that the new socialist Germany would treat in this way one of their own who had come back to rebuild?

H
ungary had a long-distance runner of extraordinary endurance who had never won any Olympic medals. Rather than compete in sports, he ran to publicize political events. For the centennial of Lenin’s birth he ran from Budapest to Moscow. He had carved out a strange career for himself—a runner who never competed. To Gyula Gazdag, it was what everyone had to do—shape and fit a career to the needs of the state, let yourself be used; rather than compete in the real world, offer yourself to the state in a symbolic gesture. This was the subject of his first documentary film.

The state, not surprisingly, did not like being portrayed in documentary films in this ironic light. Under János Kádár, Budapest had begun at last to lose the dark, bombed-out look from the war. The last of the great historic bridges that connected Buda and Pest across the Danube was rebuilt in the 1960s. By 1970, the last of the bombed-out lots had been cleared and rebuilt. Limited private initiative was tolerated. But films satirizing the system were not.

Most of Gyula’s subsequent films were not appreciated by the state either, and six of them were banned. After Gyula made a film, he would be called into a political office, and the ideological problems of the work would be explained to him. Sometimes he would be told that if he did such a film again, he would no longer be
allowed to make films. He was frequently spied on. “I didn’t know Gyula was applying to military school,” a neighbor once said to his parents.

“What!?”

“They came by. Said he had applied to military school and needed to ask us certain security questions about him.”

Gyula had been one of only eleven accepted out of some 900 applicants to the film institute. But while being a film director was a privileged position, it earned a very low state salary. Because Hungarian Communism believed in incentives, the bulk of a filmmaker’s income was paid on delivery of projects. When a film was banned, not only would the filmmaker not get his money, but neither would anyone else who worked on the film. When Gyula’s film was banned, he was letting down his friends and colleagues. That was how the system worked under the soft Hungarian dictatorship of János Kádár, the man known as Father Joe. “It seems that people here, even when grown up, need a father to tell them what to do,” György Konrád wrote.

Konrád also tested the limits of the system’s vaunted tolerance. Two-thirds of the essays he wrote following the 1956 uprising were not published. He would play with the system. With a certain editor, certain things would get by for a time. Then editors would change. Classics would work. Politics would not. Things had to be hidden or carefully woven. Thinking there must be something more worthwhile to do than write essays that no one was allowed to read, he became a social worker, and from 1959 to 1965 he worked with troubled children.

“I believed it was better to have jobs that were independent from the ideological literary scene because there I was more dependent. Here, I do something that corresponds to my own values, because to do something for children is okay. And to edit the classics is also okay, so I can earn my livelihood and support my family in two solid activities, and I’m not depending on the censors.”

In 1969, Konrád’s first work of fiction was published, a novel based on his work experience, called
The Case Worker
. This was a surprisingly liberal period in Hungary, considering the repression taking place in neighboring Czechoslovakia. The Hungarian uprising was now more than a decade in the past. During the Six-Day War the government attempted an “anti-Zionist campaign.” The government official who led it was of Jewish birth. But Jews responded with surprising assertiveness. Even the official Jewish
Community, which was often resented for legitimizing government policy, dared what was to be remembered as its bravest moment. Community leader Geza Seifert, without the customary gerrymandering of phrases, declared the support of Hungarian Jews for Israel in its struggle.

Unexpectedly, the Six-Day War had stirred up forgotten sentiments in Konrád. He had gone to a newsstand, bought a newspaper, and started reading. Suddenly he felt faint, the sickening flutter of anxiety in his stomach. The war had broken out. Jews were once again being singled out for a slaughter. Could this be happening again? He began to think increasingly about the fact that he was a Jew and to read Jewish history. But when the anti-Zionist campaign started attacking Jewish government officials, attacking some of the very people who were censoring writers, Konrád had little sympathy for the Jewish officials. “I am not interested in the fact that they are Jews,” he would say. “Only that they are censors.”

György Gadó was so angered by the government’s only slightly modified Soviet anti-Zionist line that he turned in his party membership. In the government statistical bureau where he worked, he was demoted to a low-level clerk.

As in Poland, support for Israel during the Six-Day War was seen as an expression of anti-Russian sentiments. Jews found themselves with the most unlikely of allies. Andras Kovacs took an excursion on the Danube and visited a small village inhabited by ethnic Germans who had been living in Hungary for many generations without losing their German identity. Kovacs was sitting on a park bench enjoying the setting when the village guide came over to him and started talking in German. Kovacs answered in German, and as they talked, he realized that the guide was extremely drunk. The guide at about the same time realized that Kovacs was Jewish.

“Aha,” said the guide, scrutinizing Kovacs through drooping eyelids. “Are you Jewish?”

“Yes,” said Kovacs, preparing himself.

The guide, leaning forward, stared into Kovacs’ eyes. “I am German,” he said. “We are eternal enemies. I fought in the SS in the Second World War, and I was put in a prison for twelve years.”

Then he clamped a thick hand on Kovacs’s shoulder and lowered his voice. “Now times have changed. Now we are on the same side. I fought the same Russians that you fought in Israel.”

I
N THE EARLY
1970s, Konrád helped to smuggle a friend’s manuscript out of Hungary. The friend had been expelled from the university and given a laborer job and had written about his experience. For his part in the smuggling, Konrád lost his job, but he was able to get another as an urban sociologist for a planning institute. This experience led to his second novel,
The City Builder
. He was informed that the novel was “too dark,” lacking in optimism, and it was refused Hungarian publication. The book was published in the United States.

Since Hungarians do not learn other languages and others do not learn theirs, translations are always in demand. When György Gadó’s low-level clerical job was finally taken from him, for the next twenty years he could not get a job and he survived by doing translations from Russian and German. Andras Kovacs was also forced into the free-lance translation trade. He had been an editor in a publishing house as well as a teacher of philosophy at the university. But like Konrád, he was writing for the underground press, and he decided as a deliberate provocation to run an article that, rather than being anonymous, would bear his byline. He was removed from both the publishing house and the university. In 1980 a West German university offered him a one-year teaching position. After descending into a labyrinth of bureaucracy, Kovacs finally got a Hungarian passport so that he could travel. But it came with only one exit visa. He could leave but he could not come back. It was a virtual invitation to emigrate. Konrád received a similar passport.

Kovacs left and taught in Bonn for a year, then moved on to Paris and New York. But Konrád stubbornly held to his Hungarian-speaking country.

Z
OLTÁ;N
G
ARDOS
was born two years after the Hungarian uprising. He had always been aware that his parents had a painful secret. They would be watching television, and if something about World War II came on, Zoltán would look over at his father, staring silently into the blue light of the television, and he would see tears running down his cheeks. Nothing was said.

When Zoltán was 13, he met a girl in school who, although not a practicing Jew, talked very openly about being Jewish, and in his conversations with her Zoltán began to suspect that he might also
be Jewish. At 15 they were in love, and he wanted to know more about Judaism.

Slowly he got the truth from his Communist atheist parents. He learned that his father, who was an accountant, had wanted to be a lawyer but had been barred from higher education before the war because he was Jewish. While his father was in a Russian forced labor camp, his family had been deported to Auschwitz—his mother, wife, and son—and were all killed. After the war, he remarried to Zoltán’s mother, also a Jew, who had survived in hiding. Zoltán never did learn more than these vague details, which were so fraught with emotion that he too started to find the subject difficult to talk about.

He would not think about it for the present. Someday, after his parents died, he thought, he might try to explore this secret more. But his girlfriend wanted to talk about it. Soon he began to realize that some of his friends also had the same secret. Then he realized that most of his friends had this secret. Why was it, he wondered, that unknowingly he had been drawn to so many Jewish people?