19
THE EVENTS OF 1968, FOR A FEW EXCITING MONTHS, caused the name of Victory Street in Brno to be changed once again back to Masaryk Street.
The Czechoslovakian economy, which was supposed to be the best in the Soviet bloc, had been failing. Economic reform was halfhearted and unsuccessful, and in search of change the conservative leadership was removed and the party put in the hands of Slovak party chief Alexander Dubcek. In a quip borrowed from Bertolt Brecht after the 1953 GDR uprising, the new party leader said, “We couldn't change the people, so we changed the leaders.” Dubcek was a courageous man whose destiny it was not to be thanked by history. He was a Communist who tried to save Communism in a country where the ideology had once been broadly popular. Taking a slogan from Hungary in 1956, he called for “Communism with a human face.” The mistakes of the Hungarian movement were not repeated. There was no demand for an independent foreign policy, but instead, Dubcek gave repeated assurances that Czechoslovakia was a loyal member of the Soviet bloc and a firm participant in the Warsaw Pact. Dubcek even made clear that he wanted to continue one-party Communist rule. In the end, the results were no different than in Hungary. Communism may have been capable of a human face, but Soviet power wasn't.
Dubcek offered a Communism that might have taken hold with Czechs and perhaps East Germans and Hungarians and possibly even with Poles. That was what the Soviets feared. Dubcek seriously pursued things that in the past had only been proclaimed in speeches, such as economic reform based on decentralization, de-stalinization to remove the infamous monsters from the power structure, and liberalization, which included free speech, a critical and uncensored press, and freedom to travel abroad.
For the few thousand Jews who were left in Czechoslovakia, Dubcek was a reprieve. The exact number of Jews is uncertain, because after the Slansky trial in 1952 the majority of Jews who stayed did not openly show their Jewishness. The fifteen thousand Prague Jews who were registered with the official Jewish Community were thought to constitute only a third of the Jews in Prague. “Anti-Zionist” persecution had considerably eased since the years immediately after the Slansky trial, but after the Six-Day War, the press once again felt moved to run a steady diet of anti-Zionist opinion. “Spontaneous” anti-Zionist demonstrations were organized. Jewish Community plans for a celebration of one thousand years of Prague Jewry were canceled.
The politically astute saw that the anti-Zionist campaign was simply a desperate attempt by the ruling conservatives to outma-neuver Dubcek and his emerging reformers. Most Jews were not aware of this. They only knew that words like cosmopolitans and Zionists were showing up in the newspapers. But once Dubcek gained control, everything changed. Foreign travel, religious activities, and open criticism of government policies were suddenly commonplace. People who had never been political in their lives were drawn in by the excitement. Karol Wassermann, who had limited most of his conversations to antiques and art history, was talking about political reform in the pharmacy where he still worked. He had completed his studies in art history at the university up to the doctorate level. Just as he was starting to write his doctoral dissertation, he was informed that “the proletariat will not finance two degrees.” He was already a pharmacist, and he would not be given an art history doctorate.
So art history remained his hobby. Among his other new interests was theater. He regularly attended rehearsals of new plays. Although he had always avoided politics before, he now became fascinated by the young absurdist movement in theater, which was clearly political. He was particularly enamored of the young playwright Vaclav Havel. Wassermann also studied at the state-operated Jewish Museum. When the Nazis had occupied Prague, they developed a ghoulish obsession with the Jewish Museum. They selected a team of Jewish experts to carefully catalogue all the antique Judaica that was found in the homes of Jews who were deported to the camps. Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi who established the first ghetto and was the first concentration camp administrator, wanted to create in Prague a definitive collection of relics from what he hoped would soon be an extinguished culture. The Jews who were made to work on this project painstakingly catalogued each article, because they thought the Jews would come back and their property could be returned. Most never came back, and the collection ended up in the hands of the Communist state.
BedrTch Nosek's son, also named Bedrich, became a historian for the museum. As an undergraduate at Prague's Charles University, he studied Czech history. Then he discovered, to his amazement, that a Hebrew course was offered in the state-run modern language school. Even more surprising, the course had been taught for years by an Israeli woman who was married to a Czech. She had been dismissed from the university at the time of the Slansky trial, but when the anti-Zionist campaign cooled off, she was able to start a course at the modern language school. An even greater stroke of luck was the fact that the Jewish Museum needed a new historian, and just as Nosek had completed his undergraduate work in Czech history, the university opened up its graduate program in Jewish studies—an opportunity that was offered about once a decade—to a candidate with a history degree. There were three students and four professors. None of them were Jewish. One of the professors had studied at the museum in the late 1940s under the last surviving Jewish expert on Judaica.
In Prague, Brno, and Bratislava, the Dubcek era was a time when the postwar generation of Jews started to openly express their Jewishness. Synagogue attendance increased, and social meetings and community functions became regular events. The head Czech rabbi, Richard Feter, who lived in Brno, had been quietly giving instruction to Jews on request. But now he could run a full-scale Jewish Community, even if it was only for a few hundred. He gave open lectures on Judaism and supervised community celebrations of Jewish holidays. For the first time in their lives, a new generation of Jews experienced Judaism as a living culture, and they participated excitedly, forming a range of youth groups with meetings, discussions, and social events. In 1968 Prague, suddenly the eighteenth-century Jewish town hall, the rococo building on Mais-lova Street next to the Old-New Synagogue, was a lively place with young people rushing up and down the dark wood stairways. Bratislava had its own rabbi and a Jewish youth group that more than fifty people attended every week. Being Jewish was now something more than becoming worried when you read the newspaper.
ZUZANA SKALOVA was seven years old, and her sister Eva was nine. Although Skalova is the feminine ending for the family name, Skala, originally their father had been named Spitz. But once he returned from Denmark where he had been saved during the war, he thought it would be safer to have a typical Czech name. He married a Jewish woman whose name had been Gerty Kirchner, although her parents had always cautioned her that it was safer to just use her middle name, Rene. She survived There-sienstadt and was looked after by an uncle named Schonhauser, who by coincidence had also changed his name to Skala because it would be safer. And so one fake Skala married another.
When Eva was born, the Skalas gave her the Jewish name Eva Ruth, and for a fee they had it officially registered at the Jewish Community in Prague. By the time Zuzana was born, they thought better of this and told her that her name was Shoshana, but they didn't register it. For Passover the girls would go to a seder at the Jewish town hall with about two hundred other children. Their parents were members of the Community, but they only went to synagogue for major holidays. One day when Zuzana was in the second grade, one of her schoolmates ran around the classroom saying, “Don't talk to Zuzana, she's Jewish.” Zuzana knew she was Jewish and didn't take this accusation very seriously—until she realized that it worked. No one in the class would talk to her for the rest of the day.
In 1968 things were different. The girls started going to Hebrew lessons, and there were meetings for children every Saturday afternoon. While the Skalas never observed the Sabbath, now they often met their daughters after their lessons and took them next door to the Old-New Synagogue for the Havdalah service marking the end of the Sabbath. It was a popular service for children, and the youngest child would get to hold the candle that is extinguished.
The newspapers also were different. Far from threatening Jews in coded language, they were now denouncing anti-Semitism as a political tool. The millennium of Prague Jewry was rescheduled as a major international event, to take place in June 1969.
For seven and a half months Czechoslovakia was an exciting place. Not the least of the new possibilities was the chance to travel. On August 20, when a strange scream was heard in the skies—the sound of Soviet MiGs flying over an incoming armored invasion—many Jews were out of the country and watched the fragmented reports on television. Seven Soviet and one East German division headed to Prague and Pilsen from the GDR, one Polish and two Soviet divisions came in from Poland, three Soviet divisions came into Slovakia from the Ukraine, and smaller Soviet, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces rolled into Slovakia from the Hungarian border. It was as though they were coming to fight a rebelling army. The Warsaw Pact, as the Soviet ambassador explained to U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, was moving against forces “hostile to socialism” and rescuing Czechoslovakia.
But what they encountered was angry, unarmed young people. Some at first tried to block tanks by sitting in front of them, but they quickly realized that they would simply be run over, as were walls, cars, and anything else that stood in the way of these clanking steel giants. In Bratislava girls seductively pulled up their miniskirts, and while Soviet tank and truck drivers stopped to ogle young Slovak thighs, young men ran up and smashed headlights with rocks and managed to set some oil drums on fire. A tank column from Hungary noisily squeaked and rumbled across the Danube bridge into Bratislava as university students cursed and threw bricks. A Soviet soldier dropped to firing position on the back of a tank and shot and killed a fifteen-year-old nursing student. The crowd that had gathered became furious, but the Soviets fired a few more rounds, killing another four unarmed people. The Soviets moved 175,000 troops against young Czechs and Slovaks throwing stones and bricks, which rang like off-key bells against the armor plating of unstoppable tanks.
By daybreak, August 21, every town of any size in the country was under the control of armored divisions. The foreign press reported spectacular acts of futile defiance. In Prague a legless World War II veteran dared tanks to roll over him. A girl ducked past the bayonets of a tank crew to mark a swastika on their tank. The Soviets were attacked with burning rags and Molotov cocktails. A few tanks burst into flames, and one ammunition truck exploded. Young men wrapped themselves in Czech flags and charged tanks armed only with empty cans to stuff down the barrels. Flaming rags were dropped on tanks, and more of them caught fire. Scraps of furniture, car parts, and trees were tossed across streets for barricades. The tanks rolled effortlessly over them. On Thursday and Friday one-hour nationwide work stoppages were announced by the honking of horns. In one small village a tank column was turned back from a bridge by villagers who would not move. In Bratislava brown paper was stuck over tank periscopes to momentarily blind crews, and some tanks were set on fire.
For the first time in almost two decades, Czechoslovakians had been allowed to spend their summer vacation abroad. This was the news from home they were picking up on radio, television, and newspapers. Frantisek Kraus had recently died from his wartime ailments. Alice and their son Tomas were visiting friends in West Berlin. Reading the news, they were in no hurry to return.
The Skala family, on vacation in Denmark, started picking out the words Czechoslovakia and Prague in Danish conversations. Then they turned on the television and saw their hometown. The airport, the national museum, and the television center were shot up. At least twenty people had been killed in Prague alone. Russian troops had torn up the Czech Writers Union with crowbars.
In the new freedom of 1968 a youth trip to Israel had been organized by the Joint. Milana Mandl, born, like Israel, in 1948, was one of a number of Jews her age from Brno on the trip. Because of the presence of Rabbi Feter in Brno, her generation had grown up with an isolated but fairly active Jewish life. But the summer of 1968 on a kibbutz was their first opportunity to be around other Jews. Her younger brother Martin was in a Jewish youth camp in Yugoslavia. Their parents were on vacation in the mountains of Austria. When the news broke, they gathered up Martin and went to Karlsruhe in West Germany until they could decide what to do.
A difficult decision had presented itself. It was apparent that some kind of deal had been made with Moscow. The Soviets, who had five hundred tanks positioned in Prague alone, would gradually withdraw as conditions “normalized.” Normalizing meant going back to the old ways. At the moment the borders were still open for travel, but it was likely that they would not stay that way. Those who remained outside would never be allowed back in, and those inside might not have another opportunity to leave. It also seemed likely that the “normalization,” although unpleasant for everyone, would be particularly unpleasant for Jews. Already an anti-Zionist campaign was in full swing in the Soviet bloc.
A popular Czech singer, Karol Cernoch, came out with a new song that captured the mood in Czechoslovakia: “I hope this is just a bad dream.” Thousands of Jews left the country permanently, along with tens of thousands of other Czechoslovakians.
The Skalas went back to Prague and the “normalization.” Zuzana's parents explained to her what had happened along the way, so that she would not find it too shocking when they got home to five hundred Soviet tanks. One tank, she found, was stationed in front of her grade school. There was a Russian in a padded helmet who stuck out from the top looking very lonely, she thought. Sometimes the older children would throw stones at him, but most of the time he was alone with nothing to do but stare out.
Her parents’ closest friends, three couples with whom they did everything, all moved to Bad Nauheim, a town near Frankfurt in West Germany. The Skala parents visited Bad Nauheim to see what it would be like. Their friends wanted them to move there immediately. Other friends in Prague could arrange for Eva and Zuzana to be flown to Frankfurt. They would not even need to go back. Their friends would arrange everything. These people were living very well, because the man was a distinguished doctor. Skala, on the other hand, was a clerk, and his wife had no particular skill. Under Socialism, they had lived comfortably. But they could see that the West was different. Their friends would live very well, and they would struggle along like the poor side of the family. They returned to Prague.
There was no longer much life at the Old-New Synagogue and the Jewish town hall. Security agents were positioned in the building across Maislova Street to report on who went there. The official Jewish Community could function only because it cooperated with the regime. The Jewish officials could not be trusted, and so people stopped attending the few Community activities. It was no longer fun to celebrate holidays under watchful eyes on Maislova Street. At a Hanukkah or Purim dance, the community leaders would tell the young participants not to play music or dance because it might disturb people in the neighborhood. Soon there were no activities for Jewish youth. Old people with their old ways would be tolerated, but there was no reason to encourage young people. Zuzana Skalova kept going on occasion until she was a teenager. Then, by chance, when she came across a document from the official Community leadership stating that Jewish life in Prague was free, open, and lively, she decided that she was participating in a sham staged by the Community leadership for the government. She stopped going.
Rabbi Feter was still in Brno, and Prague had Rabbi Gustave 2'icher, but they were both aging, and the two younger rabbis who were to be the next generation of rabbinate emigrated. A good Sabbath turnout at the Old-New Synagogue was twelve or fifteen older men. Only the pensioners were not worried about their careers. The second synagogue, the Jubilee on Jeruzalemska, also managed to stay open, though the neo-Moorish synagogue was too eerie and lonely for the handful of aging men hoping for a minyan, and services were moved to a small dusty upstairs room.
Viktor Feuerlicht now led the services in the Old-New Synagogue. But he, too, had been contemplating leaving. He only wore a yarmulke indoors and did not make an outward display of his Orthodoxy. Still, he was the cantor and was seen regularly at the synagogue. No new apartment or opportunity was ever available for him. He still lived in a shabby postwar apartment with his wife and two sons who could not expect to have many career possibilities. With the “normalization” they would probably have even fewer choices. One of his sons had gone to England to study mathematics, and after the occupation he decided not to come back. But Viktor still had trouble with his arm, injured during the war; and Czechoslovakia had a good, free health-care system that looked after hirn.
Under “normalization,” even apolitical people were worried about what they told their children. If children heard something different at home than at school, they might say the wrong thing at school. The Skalas did not talk very much about Jewish affairs and said even less about political affairs in front of their daughters.
Czechoslovakia's only teacher of modern Hebrew had to leave the country because of articles written by her journalist husband. As they left for Vienna, she asked BedrTch Nosek to take over the course. Nosek called it “a miracle” that all during the long hard “normalization” years, he was able to teach modern Hebrew to regular classes of up to eighty students. Of course, some of his students were called in to official offices and politely interrogated about why they were studying Hebrew. Nosek was also periodically questioned about his materials. The regime had to make certain he was not using Zionist books. But since his books were in Hebrew, they could only guess at their contents. Nosek would always assure them that they were normal language books. This response worked until an influential man from the Soviet Union, a director of adult language programs, arrived in 1982. Meeting with the heads of the school board, he simply asked, “How can you be teaching modern Hebrew? Isn't it Zionist propaganda?” After he left Czechoslovakia, Nosek's course was quietly canceled.
In the early years of “normalization,” many people were being questioned. The Krauses had hesitated too long in West Berlin before returning, and they had some explaining to do. Even Karol Wassermann was called in, the art-collecting apolitical pharmacist. That was the way Wassermann thought of himself, but another view was that he was a nonparty member, seen regularly not only at the Old-New Synagogue but at rehearsals for theater pieces that were now banned. He decided not to tell his wife when he was called in. She was a Protestant and had not been through the experiences he had. To him, it seemed nothing that terrible could happen now. If it went very badly, he could lose his job. He hated his job.
After more than an hour of questioning—normally such sessions lasted fifteen minutes—Wassermann started to get that taut, ironic look to his face that was always a prelude to losing his temper. He told the three men questioning him what he really thought of the Russians and the occupation. After two hours he was sent home. Later, he was informed to his complete astonishment that while he had been very critical, he had criticized with “a Marxist vocabulary.” He was removed from his job but was sent to direct another pharmacy, one that he was convinced was the smallest pharmacy in Prague.
ZUZANA SIMKO had been to Israel three years earlier and had met her half-sister, who had told her the stories their mother never spoke about: how Slovaks had hidden them during the war and an informer had turned them in. Zuzana's half-sister was hidden in corn husks, the father was beaten to death, and their mother escaped. After two months in Israel, Zuzana went back to Slovakia to her parents and her home in Nitra in the building full of Jewish families where they kept kosher and observed the Sabbath and every holiday. In Zuzana's mind, Jewish life was a normal and permanent thing in Czechoslovakia. She did not have to go to Israel to find it. On a rare occasion she would hear something vaguely anti-Semitic, but in general she had no problem with non-Jews. Friends gave her Hanukkah presents, and she gave them Christmas presents. Nitra was her home.
But in 1968 she saw most of the other Jewish families in her building and community pack and leave. Although she was only 20, her parents were already in their sixties and she could not bear to leave them. Her father, with whom she was especially close, candidly stated that he did not think he would live much longer if she left. Then, too, Zuzana believed in the diaspora. For her, it had become Jewish life: “I think Jews need to have communities in other places in the world.”
Within six months following the Soviet invasion, her Jewish world had vanished from Nitra. In what had been a building of six Jewish families, only the Simkos remained. Most of the Jewish people who had been clustered in the apartments near the synagogue left. The few Jews who stayed were mostly party members, though many of them were soon ousted from the party. Almost no one of Zuzana's age was left. Nitras nine centuries of traditional Judaism, which had even survived the Nazis and Stalin, this time had finally been extinguished.
At the time of the invasion Fero Alexander had been performing folk music in Budapest. In between performances he heard on the radio that there was shooting in Bratislava and Prague. The Alexanders were a musical family, and Fero played violin in a Slovak folk group, while his brother Juraj, born in Theresienstadt, was a concert cellist. Born in 1948, Fero was one of the few boys of his generation to be bar mitzvahed in Bratislava. But with the changes of the Dubcek era, he had been able to participate in a lively new youth group for Jews of his age in Bratislava.
Fero and his folk music group went back to Bratislava while there were still tanks on the street. But he was to soon find that all his friends had left. Out of the fifty or sixty Jews his age who had taken part in the Jewish youth movement, not one stayed. The only remaining rabbi in Bratislava also left. But the Alexander family stayed. Fero's brother Juraj did not want to leave because he had been hired to play in the cello section of the Slovak Chamber Orchestra. Juraj and Fero reasoned that their parents were aging and felt too old to start a new life. Fero pictured them sad and alone, the way some of the other people of their generation soon would be.
The rabbi was gone and all his friends had also left. The Jewish community consisted largely of lonely older people whose children had emigrated. This was the fate from which he had saved his parents. But soon these deserted older people were smiling, showing everybody photographs of their families in foreign lands. They seemed so proud when showing the pictures. The photos were usually in color—the first color snapshots most of them had seen. Fero imagined his family proudly showing snapshots of him in his new home somewhere and silently wondered if he had not made a mistake.
Urban renewal hit Bratislava like a bombing. A wide modern bridge was built across the Danube, connected by a new highway that cut a gash a hundred yards wide through the frilly historic old center. The bridge landed in Bratislava exactly where the old Jewish section of town had been before the war. To government planners, it had just been an abandoned neighborhood. The synagogue was no longer used and could also be torn down to make way for the new thoroughfare. Bratislava no longer had a Jewish quarter, nor did it have enough Jews to fill one.
IN KARLSRUHE a debate had gone on between Martin MandPs parents. Like many Jews from the prewar Czech lands, Martin's father had grown up with a German education. Since he had been raised as an ethnic German and since West German policy in any case was to be open to Jews, they would have few difficulties acquiring the normally elusive German citizenship. Martin's father wanted to do it, but his mother did not want to be a German. While the arguments volleyed back and forth, a letter arrived from their daughter Milana, still on the kibbutz. She missed her home and wanted to see Brno once more. She loved being in Israel, but once she understood the situation—that the Czechoslovakian borders would soon be closed and she would never be able to go back—she realized that she was not prepared to never again see Moravia.
The Mandl family flew back to Prague and from there to Brno, where they met their daughter at the small Brno airport. It was now 1969, and travel restrictions would soon be reimposed. When Milana saw her family, her first words to them were, “I only came back to tell you that I am moving to Israel.”
She did not understand that she had already made her choice. It would be another twenty-two years before she had the chance to return to Israel. In Brno the Jewish life she had known was gone. There were no more meetings for young people or Hebrew lessons. In 1970, Rabbi Feter died, and there was no one to take his place. Martin did not have an opportunity to be a Jewish teenager, as his sister had had only a few years earlier. In 1974 their father was able to visit his brother in West Germany, While he was away, Milana was called in for questioning. Many young people were questioned during the “normalization.” Seated in a room with three very polite interrogators, she was presented with a long list of places she had gone, people with whom she had talked, words that had been spoken, Then the questions began. Milana was supposed to realize that people all around her were informants, and so she might as well be one too. But instead she laughed. All their information and all their questions seemed so inconsequential. Apparently it was decided that she did not make a very good informant. She was never called back.
In Brno, Masaryk Street was renamed Victory once more. But the victory of 1945 was fading. Now when Czechoslovakians thought of the Red Army, they thought of the 1968 invasion.