by Marci Shore
Gheorghe Funar’s was not an intolerant nationalism, his colleague insisted. On the contrary, his colleague had had the good fortune of having traveled through almost all of Europe, and among all European countries it was Romania who granted its minorities the greatest rights. Romanians had never been extremist in any way—neither against the Jews nor against other races. This had always been a very welcoming culture, open and friendly to foreign guests. Even during the Second World War, Romania—the city councilman explained to us—was the only country that had protected Jews and Gypsies. Romanians never took any Jews or Gypsies to German camps.
“The Romanian people,” he said, “are one of the most tolerant peoples in Europe.”
I smiled and thanked him. Ariana did as well. He radiated pleasure.
We left city hall and headed into town to a café. Ariana asked me if I were a vegetarian. All the Americans she’d met were vegetarians.
Yes, she said, now that we were talking just to each other, there were problems with the Hungarians, serious problems. Not in Cluj, not where she was. The people at the Soros Foundation were ethnic Hungarians. They were her employers and she liked them; they’d always treated her well. Her former boyfriend, too, was a Hungarian. She still liked him a lot. The problem was the other Hungarians, those she did not know, those who were somewhere else.
THE NEXT DAY I was in Bucharest again, where I went to see Nicolae Gheorghe, an activist for the rights of the Roma—who were more commonly called Gypsies. Nicolae Gheorghe, nearing fifty, was a striking man, bald with a long mustache and dark, slanted eyebrows. Born into a Gypsy family, as a child he had assimilated into Romanian culture. It was as an adult that he had returned to the community of his birth—now as a sociologist, a member of the Romanian intelligentsia, someone who was integrated not only into Romanian academia but also into a milieu of European human rights activists. He spoke quickly and emphatically, gesturing with his hands.
“We don’t have a democracy,” he said. Romania remained a peasant society accepting of authoritarian rule. Romanians understood not parties but personalities; they were eager to look to charismatic leaders.
I looked at him—so charismatic himself.
Western philosophy, he told me, offered no solution for people who preferred fascism.
Nicolae Gheorghe belonged to Romania’s small human rights community. There were a handful of others, also in some way exceptional, coming together at the Helsinki Committee, a human rights NGO. At the Helsinki Committee I met Vera, the daughter of a dissident political scientist who was a veteran of Romanian prison. In the state census she had fought to be counted as an ethnic Jew, then refused to let the census taker list Judaism as her religion—after all, she did not believe in God.
Vera believed in marriage but not in wedding rings. She wore hers only when confronting critics who were likely to cackle that she would hardly be carrying on about this or that injustice if she could get a man. That week she had organized a meeting with members of the underground gay and lesbian community—underground because Romania was the only European country where homosexuality was illegal.
“I cannot agree,” one Romanian senator said, “with the misuse of bodily organs that have well-established functions.”
Another parliamentarian feared that the decriminalization of homosexuality would ruin the reputation of Romanian men as lovers.
At the Helsinki Committee I also met Gabriel. He had been a dissident under the old regime and, like Doina Cornea in Cluj, believed that former members of the Securitate still lurked behind the scenes, invisible and ubiquitous—forced by the greatness of their guilt to remain in positions of power. He knew that the old Ceauşescu people controlled the mass media, and he knew that they were watching him. The Helsinki Committee received mail that had been opened; their telephones and fax lines were tapped.
Like the Czech dissidents, Gabriel had little faith in “the people.” They were, he believed, lacking in civic education and looking for scapegoats. Most had learned to hate communism but not how to create a democratic society.
“It’s so simple to manipulate people in this country,” he said.
He was thin and soft-spoken. Also gentle. And somehow frail, like a café intellectual who saw too little sun and lived too much on coffee and cigarettes.
Gabriel offered to walk me back to my hotel. It was a long walk, and we wound through one Bucharest neighborhood after another, avoiding the stray dogs who roamed menacingly in packs. The city had a wildness about it, something untamed like the feral dogs. Yet Bucharest radiated a kind of Latin hipness as well—even the ragged clothing looked fashionable, sexier than what people wore in Prague.
Gabriel spoke about Romanians’ nostalgia for the old days, for the sadistic rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu.
“You know,” he told me before we parted, “the human being is rather perverse.”
IT WAS VERA from the Helsinki Committee who told me about the current efforts to rehabilitate Ion Antonescu. Marshal Ion Antonescu had been among the leading characters in Romania’s unsavory interwar politics. At this time Romania was still a monarchy. In the years after the First World War, Ferdinand was Romania’s king. Ferdinand’s son, Carol, was married to Princess Helen. Prince Carol’s true love, however, was Elena Lupescu from Iasi, a divorceé, and still worse, the daughter of a Roman Catholic mother and a Jewish father. Their affair caused a scandal; in 1925 Carol was forced to renounce his throne. Five years later, impenitent, he returned from exile to claim his kingdom, promising that “Madame Lupescu” would remain far away from his palace—a promise he did not keep.
Even while he brought his half-Jewish mistress to his palace, King Carol flirted with the fascists. In the end, though, the Iron Guard frightened the Romanian king, and Carol arranged for Corneliu Zelea Codreanu’s execution.
Hitler frightened the Romanian king as well. In 1940 King Carol submitted to the German dictator and the Axis powers: he signed the Vienna Diktat, giving northern Transylvania to Hungary. Broken, he abdicated in favor of Marshal Ion Antonescu, an authoritarian of the Old Right. Very soon afterward, in September 1940 under Nazi auspices, Ion Antonescu and the Iron Guard led by Codreanu’s successors joined forces to form the National-Legionary State. Like a marriage of convenience between the aristocracy and the nouveau riche, this was an alliance of convenience between the Old Right and the New Right. And it was an alliance that proved a macabre experiment. In January 1941, the Iron Guard led an orgiastic pogrom in Bucharest, murdering Jews in a slaughterhouse and hanging their bodies from meat hooks. Now Ion Antonescu had had enough. Orderly violence he approved of, but wild sadism he found distasteful. He used his army to crush the Iron Guard.
This was not where the violence ended. That June Marshal Antonescu’s regime staged its own pogrom in Madame Lupescu’s hometown of Iasi, murdering some four thousand Jews and deporting thousands of others. It was June 1941, and the streets of Iasi were strewn with corpses whose eyes had been gouged out. That same month Romanian troops joined the Wehrmacht in invading the Soviet Union; as a reward, Romania acquired a piece of conquered Ukrainian land between the Dniester and Bug Rivers, a territory Antonescu’s government named Transnistria. There in the east, in Bessarabia, northern Bukovina, and Transnistria, Romanians and Germans massacred thousands of Jews, including some twenty thousand in the Black Sea port city of Odessa. Many were shot, and many others died of disease and starvation.
What the city councilman in Cluj had said was true: Antonescu did not deport Romania’s Jews to the German camps. Instead he deported them to his own camps in Transnistria.
More than 700,000 Jews had lived in interwar Romania. Some 270,000 were killed during the Holocaust. By the 1990s only 10,000 or 20,000 remained. Vera was among them.
During the postwar Soviet occupation of Romania, Marshal Ion Antonescu was put on trial as a war criminal and shot by firing squad. Today, the Gypsy human rights activist Nicolae Gheorghe told me, the marshal was once again “highly appre
ciated.” Corneliu Vadim-Tudor’s Greater Romania Party called for a statue of Antonescu to be erected in Bucharest. In 1991, the Romanian parliament held a moment of silence in honor of the marshal. Just months earlier an exiled Romanian millionaire, once a supporter of the Iron Guard, had sponsored the founding of a Marshal Ion Antonescu League. Its members now sought to rehabilitate Antonescu through a new trial that would posthumously overturn his death sentence.
Vera and Gabriel, devoted human rights activists, like Csortan Ferenc and Doina Cornea and Nicolae Gheorghe, harbored no utopianism. They understood only too well the difficulty of changing the way people think, of engineering the human soul.
ON MY LAST night in Bucharest Vera invited me to a jazz club with her friends. The club was in the open air, on the roof of a tall building in the city’s center. And the music was not jazz but folk rock, the band’s lead singer a man in his fifties with long, pale gray hair. A Romanian Bob Dylan. An actor, Vera told me. Her friend added that his lyrics were so mesmerizingly poetic, she barely noticed the melody. He had the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.
Reason and Conscience
In the autumn of 1995 I was living in Toronto and reading about Slovakia: Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, in power once again, was waging battle against his nemesis, President Michal Kováč. That August President Kováč’s son was kidnapped in Bratislava. His kidnappers brutalized him before he was found on the other side of the Slovak border, by the Austrian police, in the trunk of a car. The Slovak opposition suspected Mečiar’s involvement, and the Christian Democrat Jan Čarnogurský demanded that the prime minister account for his whereabouts at the time of the kidnapping.
Vladimír Mečiar answered Jan Čarnogurský publicly: “Why don’t you ask your wife where I was?”
In Prague, Paní Prokopová’s life was less dramatic. In her letters that year after I’d left Prague she wrote of the early snow and the long frost. She wrote of price increases: the rent, the water, the telephone, everything was ever more expensive, and now that Pan Prokop had died, she had only one pension. She moved back and forth between her apartment in Prague and her cottage in the country, where she planted cabbage and flowers, yet everywhere she felt her husband’s absence and nowhere did she feel at peace. “I was used to him,” she wrote. Perhaps it was simply that.
An American editor I’d worked with in Prague wrote long letters, often in a melancholic tone. In September he described one of Arnošt Lustig’s public readings:
The saddest moment was the second appearance by Arnošt Lustig. I am pained to say this, not only because I know how you respect him but also because I was moved by his first appearance during the workshop, at the Globe.… This time, however, Arnošt took only one question, digressed from the answer into his employment by Playboy magazine, and began to maunder on the general themes of money and sex. One could not help suspecting that he had taken a glass or two before stepping on stage.… In view of the horror that Arnošt has survived and the beauty that he has created, no one has the right to judge him. This was only one unimportant evening in a long, important life. But with some shame I found myself that evening seeing him as one of his own characters: “Friday. Once. A lot of money from Playboy.”
The connection with Playboy was not a literary fiction: Arnošt, with his receding white hair and forehead of kindly smiling wrinkles, had become editor in chief of the Czech edition. I saw him in Toronto, when in fall 1995 he arrived for a literary festival. Paul Wilson, the onetime lead singer of the Plastic People of the Universe, hosted a discussion with Arnošt. So it was true—Paul, full of good humor, asked Arnošt before an audience of Czech émigrés—that the famous Czech novelist of the Holocaust had accepted the editorship of Playboy?
And what could be wrong—Arnošt answered, wholly unoffended, smiling as he so often did—with being able to publish very good stories by his friends, the best Czech writers? Besides, Arnošt loved women. He considered their humiliation a great evil and would not allow it. On the contrary: his Playboy would celebrate the beauty of women.
Afterward Arnošt and I sat at a café and talked about the Stalinist years. About communism, as about sex, Arnošt was open: yes, he, too, had been a young Stalinist. After the war, when he returned to Prague from the camps, he had joined the Communist Party. He was not defensive, he only explained: during the war, in the camps—in Auschwitz—the communists were the best people. They were absolutely beautiful, wonderful people. Until they got into power. Then they were horrible.
THAT YEAR, IN the peaceful cosmopolitan city of Toronto, I began to study Polish. Pani Hanka, my Polish professor, was planning to retire soon, and I was among her last students. She was a traditionalist in her teaching methods and a puritan about form. The language was precious to her.
Pani Hanka was a large, tough woman in her sixties who lived alone and appeared to have no family. She was generous with her time. When I began to write a seminar paper about a long poem called “A Poem for Adults” by the avant-garde-turned-Stalinist poet Adam Ważyk, Pani Hanka spent hours translating it with me, line by line. Gradually I realized that, like the poet Adam Ważyk, she was a Polish Jew—although about this she said almost nothing. Many things we read together, alone in her office, had emotional weight to her. Yet she was always measured in her responses. I saw her cry only once: through an international child welfare agency, she’d sponsored a young boy in Africa. They had never met, but she became very attached to him. Every month she sent him money and in return she received letters. Until one day she received a letter not from the boy, but from the agency: the child had died, bitten by a poisonous snake.
I liked Pani Hanka. She was a serious philologist, articulate about etymology and syntax and comparative Slavic grammar. Most of the students in the class, though, felt somewhat differently: they were children of Polish émigrés who already spoke some Polish, if improperly, and there was an uneasiness between them and their professor. Only gradually did I see that, even beyond the classroom, there was a tension between Pani Hanka and the Polish émigré community, a tension whose origins did not lie only in her uncompromising stance toward Polish grammar. It was a tension that had to do with Jewishness—and with communism.
The vast majority of some 3 million Jews who had lived in prewar Poland did not survive the Holocaust. Among the small number who did survive, though, and the even smaller number who survived and chose to remain in postwar Poland, there were disproportionately many communists. This came to an end in March 1968, when Poland’s communist leaders claimed that student protests against censorship were incited by Zionist conspirators. The Party responded with violent repression against the students. There followed a collusion of the worldview of the anti-Semitic Right with the communist regime and the popularization of a theory of a Nazi-Zionist conspiracy. Newspaper cartoons depicted U.S. president Lyndon Johnson joining the anti-Polish campaign led by American Zionists; Nazis saluting Israeli tanks; and Israeli occupiers of the Gaza Strip reading the works of Adolf Eichmann and thinking, “One should profit from experience.” The Party purged the universities and its own ranks; at the University of Warsaw, the philosophy department was forced to close, and Party general secretary Władysław Gomułka announced that Poland would open its borders so that those who “regard Israel as their homeland” could leave.
Some thirteen thousand Polish Jews—assimilated Jews, deeply attached to Poland—were sent into exile. Pani Hanka never spoke of this. Yet she, too, had left Poland in the wake of March 1968.
The history professor Stefan M. was more forthcoming. In some ways he was an unlikely source: a bearded man of perhaps forty, he had a demeanor dignified, austere, and somewhat distant. I asked him about Adam Ważyk, the author of the poem mourning the state of postwar Poland and invoking the refrain, “Give me a piece of old stone / let me find myself again in Warsaw.” Adam Ważyk was a communist, in fact a Stalinist—but by 1955, when he wrote “A Poem for Adults,” he already regretted who he had been and what had
happened to Poland. One day when I came to see him, Professor M. closed the door of his office and told me that in Warsaw he’d known Adam Ważyk, who by now had been dead for over a decade. It had happened when he was a young man hiking with a friend in the mountains. It was beautiful there, peaceful and deserted. Then he and his friend saw two more hikers, young women, coming toward them. He fell in love with one of them. This young woman, he came to learn, was Ważyk’s daughter. By then Adam Ważyk was an old man, broken and bitter, who believed in nothing.
THE EXPERIENCE OF communism could break people. My former Czech teacher Jarmila was a passionate devotee of pravda in the weighty Czech sense: truth as existential imperative. Yet she generously concealed much from her grandmother. Her failing grades at the military college in Vermont, just before her breakdown, had ruined her academic record. Now no school wanted to take her. Her visa had expired, and she could be deported at any moment. She was desperate.
“Why didn’t the communists prefer to kill me during the interrogations in prison?” she wrote in a letter. “It’s very humiliating to die as a beggar on the street or in the woods of Vermont.”
She added: “But whatever happens, at least you know part of the TRUTH and this is important.”
And it was the case that I knew only a part of the truth. In late January 1996 Jarmila sent me a long letter. She wrote in the philosophical idiom of the dissidents, and yet in her voice there was also a certain edge uniquely her own. By now her name was no longer Jarmila.