A Chosen Few (55 page)

A Jewish hotel was built next to a weedy lot, below the ramparts of the castle that once overlooked the old city and that now overlooked a highway. A kosher restaurant was established in the hotel, and a
mikveh
was built in the basement. But few people came. A lonely, hopeful desk clerk waited in the new pristine-white lobby
underneath three clocks that gave the time in New York, Bratislava, and Tel Aviv.

The new Slovak Republic was frantically rebuilding hotels and fixing up monuments, preparing for a tourism boom that did not come. In fact, tourism, never an important industry, was now declining. The restless few from the crowds that pressed into Prague no longer drifted into Bratislava, because it was no longer in the same country. The new Slovak currency—much of it simply old Czechoslovakian bills with new Slovak stamps glued to them—did not immediately collapse as feared. Fero Alexander bought a new sound system before the new money was issued, because he feared that foreign products would be unaffordable once Slovak money hit the currency market and promptly sank. The money dropped a little, but it did not sink. The impending crisis of cutting loose state industry was put off. The chemical industry might struggle and survive, but the obsolete steel and textile mills were certain to fail, and the factories that had made heavy armaments such as tanks for the now-defunct Warsaw Pact would have to find a new product or die.

The Czech Republic was selling off its state industries by offering shares to the public. But the new Slovak state was deferring such decisions, because it was keeping the economy at least limping for the time being and besides, it was hard to imagine anyone buying into a Slovak steel mill. Life was, if not prosperous, at least peaceful in the new republic. The inevitable economic crisis had not yet hit, and while the government took a strident tone toward Czechs and gypsies, there were few problems for Jews. There were occasional incidents. In September 1993 the skinheads who based themselves by the bridge cornered Baruch Myer on a quiet street at midday and beat him. But most Slovaks were still honoring Jews, still thinking of this as an anti-Communist act.

In the flat plains east of Bratislava, where massive sugar-beet cooperatives were struggling to restructure, the town of Veča celebrated its 880th anniversary. It hadn’t celebrated any previous anniversaries, and in fact, it had not even existed for about two decades. A chemical plant had been built in the newer, less historic town of
ala. Soon both towns looked the same, because their centers were torn up to build rows of block housing for the workers who relocated for the chemical plant. Then the town of Veča was eliminated, simply absorbed into
ala. There were many Slovak towns like this.
ala was more fortunate than many, because the factory
for which the town had been destroyed had a chance at survival. Other towns were destroyed for steel and arms factories that might soon be closed.

In late 1993 the town government of
ala, to celebrate the new Slovak independence and defy the old Communist order, decided to observe the anniversary of the defunct town of Veča with a four-day celebration, including goulash stands, Slovak folk dancing, speeches, and brass bands. To kick off the event, a plaque was dedicated in the Jewish cemetery to 110 Veča families who had been deported to Auschwitz. Honoring the deported Jews would be a perfect rejection of the old regime. But the cemetery looked like a vacant lot in the center of a gargantuan housing project, and nothing was even done to groom the shaggy little spot for the ceremony. As the mayor finished his speech, a strong bony hand gripped the shoulder of a visitor, He was an elderly man, one of seven remaining Jews in the town. “Look at this place,” he said, waving his hand at the akimbo tombstones obscured by tall weeds, the encroaching blocks of housing units that looked poised to swallow the little space. “After everything they have done to this place, do you think this ceremony makes a difference?”

Of all the towns in this region, the largest Jewish community was the seventy Jews, Orthodox and observant, in Galanta. Compared to Veča or even Nitra, this was a thriving community. In fact, these few Jews had preserved considerably more Jewish life than the hundreds of Jews in Bratislava. Before the war there had been fifteen hundred Jews in Galanta, but fourteen hundred had been deported to Auschwitz. The surviving population had stayed almost stable since the war.

Along with most of the town, the synagogue had been torn down to build workers’ housing, but the community prayed in a fifteen-by-thirty-foot room with prewar Torahs. There were minyans every Friday night and Saturday morning. In the absence of any trained religious leader, Adolf Schultz, in his early seventies, kept the community functioning. He and most of the other Galanta Jews observed the kosher laws. Like Arnošt Neufeld in Brno, Schultz almost obsessively maintained the Jewish cemetery.

F
ERO
A
LEXANDER
and his wife, an orthodontist, were still committed to Bratislava. The five-story building where they had an apartment, on the slope of the castle-topped hill, had been owned
by his wife’s family, who had built it in 1932. In the last Slovak state Jewish property had been “Aryanized.” The “Aryans” who had been given this building were forced to turn it over to the Communist state in 1961. Now both the Alexanders and this “Aryan” family were trying to get their property back. It was one of hundreds of such cases.

The Sterns resisted emigration. Zuzana, who had visited her relatives in Israel in the 1960s and returned feeling that Czechoslovakia was her home, felt a little less certain about the Slovak Republic. But she said, “I think that it is very necessary that there are some communities in other countries.” The Sterns have always been proud of the ancient Jewish history of Slovak towns, and even if they were among the few Jews left, they still felt they lived in a place with Jewish roots. They celebrated the major Jewish holidays with their closest friends, who happened to be Protestants. “It is a good thing to have some very good friends who have nothing against Jews and who are able to celebrate Jewish holidays too,” she said.

Zuzana Stern believed that by deciding against emigration in 1968, when all of their Jewish friends had left, “we just deferred the decision to another generation.” Soon their son and daughter would have to decide. To well-educated young Bratislava Jews, Israel was not nearly as tempting as such places as Vienna and Prague, which were culturally similar and close by.

Tomás Stern’s father, the economics professor, was encouraging him to leave, predicting a dismal future for the new republic. But Juraj and Zuzana had no intention of leaving themselves. “This is an important place for Judaism. It had one of the great yeshivas of the 19th century,” Juraj said.

“The greatest,” argued Tomás. “But you can’t have that now.”

Juraj didn’t hear his son and continued, “You can’t let that disappear. Bratislava is a Jewish place.”

“So you are going to sacrifice yourself for that?” Tomás asked.

Juraj did not answer.

I
t was Friday afternoon, and young men and boys were already appearing in the street in their Sabbath best—ever wider and furrier hats, and newer, shinier coats, and
peots
so exquisitely curled that they bounced with each step like party decorations. The clothing seemed to be a contest that no one was winning. At Seletsky’s bookstore—where, in order of quantity, Yiddish, Hebrew, Dutch, French, German, and English books on Judaism were stacked so haphazardly that it was hard to get in the store—a Hasid was bartering with Seletsky for a set of commentaries. They were doing it in diamond-district style. Mechilem Silberman, a stout, well-fed, and happy father of five, called it “the diamond mentality.” He never liked it, which is why he converted the storefront of the family home on Simonsstraat into a silver shop. The silver trade was at least a little more genteel.

His mother, Dwora Silberman, was never happy about this decision. She visited him from Israel, where she had been living since her husband Hershl died in 1985, and she cautioned him once again about going into silver. “You can’t carry silver,” she told him. If things get bad, “diamonds are a very easy thing to take with you when you flee.”

Fleeing was increasingly on her mind. Again and again, she reviewed the way her parents, the last time she saw them, had told her and Hershl to flee because they were young. Her parents had
assured her that they would not be touched because they were old. She had listened. Now she realized that they had not even been that old—only in their fifties, twenty years younger than she was now—and she knew that it was a mistake to have left them in Antwerp, left them there to die a horrible death at an early age. Over and over again, she reviewed the facts. Hershl hadn’t let her turn back. She had tried. Over and over again, she examined every detail of her guilt. Why had she left them to the Nazis? Mechilem often pointed out to her that if she had stayed, she simply would have been sent to Auschwitz with them. “I could have hidden,” she argued.

Mechilem knew that arguing with her was useless, but he had somehow to stop her from hurting herself. It was as though she felt guilty for living into old age, for outliving everyone, for living twenty years more than her parents had been allowed to. “I can’t enjoy my life,” Dwora insisted. “I eat, and I think of how my parents had nothing to eat.”