The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  You have known me as one of those who disregarded their own safety and comfort, who decided to fight for TRUTH, who were very much oppressed by the lies of the totalitarian communist system. My fight was not only political, but also religious and legal, in the sense of the preservation of fundamental human rights and the dignity of man.

  Yet this was not her only struggle. The very first began long before, in early childhood, when—she wrote—“I was fighting for my own SELF, my own I, for what I am and what I felt myself to be from the moment when my mind was able to distinguish the most basic things around me.” Her parents believed they had borne a daughter. This was not the truth. “You see,” Jarmila wrote to me, “I have always been a man.”

  Jarmila’s parents had hoped she would grow out of this—but that never happened. Instead she fought to preserve her own self. She discovered Catholicism and determined to become a priest, as “a way out of a desperate situation.”

  “I believed,” she wrote, “that God is TRUTH, which must prevail.”

  The battle against an oppressive regime was a battle by proxy for her own identity.

  The narrative continued with Jarmila’s decision to come to the United States. It was all part of a continuous whole, a story about “the fight for TRUTH, which was the most unyielding weapon against the lies of communist rule.” In 1991 she had received a scholarship from a military school in New Mexico. She decided then to leave Czechoslovakia—not only, she explained, because she wanted an education free of Marxism-Leninism, but also and more importantly because she had become disillusioned with the postcommunist fate of the anticommunist underground: relations among former dissidents had begun to fall apart. No longer did it seem to Jarmila that they were standing purely for the truth they had once sacrificed themselves for; instead she saw her friends competing for positions, for power, for money.

  So Jarmila had decided to leave. She found herself, then, in New Mexico, still as a woman. But the army was not kind to her. It was not tolerant and embracing, the way she had imagined American democracy would be. Instead she found the military to be an institution “prepared to liquidate whatever or whomever was other, who differed in some way.”

  Now Jarmila’s new name was Todd James. Later, on the phone, she used an analogy: even if everyone around me were to tell me every day that I was a rabbit, I would know that it was not true. All the insistence in the world could not make me a rabbit, knowing—as I did—that I was a human being.

  There was much in the story I did not understand: why Jarmila—now Todd James—believed he needed to come to the United States for an education free of Marxism-Leninism precisely at the moment when Marxism-Leninism was being so energetically purged from Czechoslovakia’s universities; how he had come here; who her—his—patron, Major John Hasek, really was; why Todd James felt so betrayed by the United States yet so desperate to remain there.

  A few weeks later I received from Todd James another long letter, again preoccupied with the themes of truth, struggle, betrayal. For Todd James the United States had always been the personification of the freedom for which he had unhesitatingly risked his life. Now he could not bear the way he had been treated in the army, the way that “America” had betrayed him when he had given her everything. The American military had pushed him to the brink of suicide in a way that the totalitarian state of Czechoslovakia had not—precisely because, I sensed, he had believed in America so fervently.

  Todd James went on to tell me why, despite the betrayal of an unrequited love, he had chosen an American name: he had named himself after his American doctor. Strength had always been essential to Todd James. It was strength that had carried him through his parents’ betrayal and his imprisonment, a strength that had come from the vision of revolution. Now, when he had lost himself in a new world that had also betrayed him, the support of his doctor had brought him strength again.

  It was also important to Todd James to choose an English name; it was a symbolic gesture of separation from his previous life in Czechoslovakia.

  I cannot forget about the suffering, the struggle and the pain I experienced in Czechoslovakia since childhood, but neither can I forget about the time of victory, when I organized demonstrations, led the procession on November 17th, 1989, founded with Havel and others Civic Forum, spoke on BBC, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, met Major John Hasek, who marked my life irreversibly, sent information to the US Congress, to the US Ambassador in Prague, to the CIA and US Special Operations, sat down to dinner with John Major, with Shirley T. Black, with people from the British parliament and the British information services.… At 12 I firmly believed in God and His strength, at 16 I was on my own, and at 18 I became part of the change that definitively changed the face not only of Europe, but of the whole world. For that victory I sacrificed everything I had and I was.

  Todd James—at that time Jarmila—had believed so passionately in freedom and in democracy. That representatives of these things could suffer from envy, from vanity, from weakness, had led him to despair. He believed in absolutes: in Truth, in the Self, in the battle of Good versus Evil—in God, who had destined for him “the life of a soldier, who marches from one battle to the next.” There was an eschatology in his thinking, a narrative uniting past and present and pointing toward the future. The end of communism had not meant happily-ever-after, and the fight was not yet over. There remained the imperative to speak truth to power, to create “a better world, a happier world, where there will not be so much pain and suffering.”

  “The revolution has not ended,” Todd James concluded his letter, “it’s only begun!”

  THE CANADIAN HISTORIAN Gordon Skilling had nearly single-handedly written the history of twentieth-century Czechoslovakia. Now he was in his eighties, long retired from the university.

  “I remember my first research trip to Prague,” he said the first time we met. “That was back in 1937.”

  His fiancée had traveled from New York by ship to join him; they were married in Prague’s Old Town Hall. Of course, Gordon added, they had to leave a few months after the Nazis came.

  Gordon and his wife departed Prague for England in the summer of 1939, when the city was already under German occupation. They returned in July 1948. By then Czechoslovakia was under Stalinist rule, and its president, Edvard Beneš, had seen the country he led taken from him twice: once in 1938 by the Nazis, a second time in 1948 by the communists. On both occasions he chose not to fight. In September 1948 Edvard Beneš died prematurely, just months after abdicating the presidency. Gordon was there for the memorial service held in Prague’s National Museum.

  During that 1948 stay in Czechoslovakia—nearly fifty years before my American friend Brad and I took a field trip to that village—Gordon and his wife visited Lidice, or what had once been Lidice. They found a brigade of young people laboring there, excavating the site where the Nazis had killed the villagers. Gordon and his wife could see the foundations of buildings that had once been. In one of the basements Gordon found a rough chunk of fused glass. He decided to keep it. A souvenir from a massacre.

  Several weeks after our meeting at the university, Gordon telephoned. It had been a long time since he’d worked with graduate students, and now suddenly four had contacted him: myself, a musicologist, and two political scientists. A week or so later, in the living room of Gordon’s Toronto apartment, the five of us inaugurated the Czech Living Room Seminar.

  On one occasion Václav Havel’s translator Paul Wilson joined us. A Canadian, he’d arrived in the Czechoslovak city of Brno in 1967 and had taught English for a while before learning Czech and drifting into a freelance career as a translator, initially of children’s books. As it turned out, it was rather unintentionally that Paul had become the lead singer for the Plastic People of the Universe. He wasn’t a singer at all, per se, but he was moving in circles with young musicians who believed English to be the proper language of rock and roll. And it was the 1970s, when Paul was one of very few nativ
e speakers of English in Czechoslovakia.

  The Plastic People’s manager Ivan Jirous, an art critic by profession, would schedule a lecture at a club in Prague. That was legal. He would show slides of Andy Warhol’s paintings, and the Plastic People of the Universe would play a set of Velvet Underground covers. Then the band would continue playing, moving on to their own music. For both the musicians and the audience, it was risky, but Ivan Jirous, Paul explained, “was a very persuasive guy.”

  “I was wondering,” the musicologist asked, “if it weren’t for Jirous, what would have happened?”

  “It” never would have happened without Ivan Jirous.

  Paul had been close to the girlfriend of the Plastic People’s bassist, Milan Hlavsa.

  “She stuck with Milan Hlavsa for years and years,” Paul told us, “and then she finally hooked up with a young poet who eventually killed himself. She spent the next six months typing up all his poems and then killed herself. I remember talking to her one late night and remember saying, ‘What do you think would have happened to Milan if he hadn’t met Jirous?’ and she said, ‘He probably would have just been a normal musician.’ ”

  Paul didn’t want to demonize Ivan Jirous, his friend of many years. He only wanted us to understand the spirit of the time.

  “Jirous,” Paul continued, “—I mean I’m not blaming him at all—through the force of his personality, he just drew people into this kind of vortex of resistance. They were drawn voluntarily, I mean nobody regretted what they’d done, but it was just him that gave them a drive and a focus … I always saw him, as the French call it, as an animateur, someone who could animate others to do things.”

  Ivan Jirous the animateur paid a heavy price for his charisma: he was in and out of prison nearly until communism’s very end. And after the revolution he never found a place for himself.

  The years in the Czechoslovak underground—and the years in prison—marked everyone who took part in them. Some only proved more resilient than others. The poet and philosopher Egon Bondy had been one of the underground’s gurus; the Plastic People had used his poems as song lyrics. After 1989, Bondy’s name appeared on the lustration lists as a secret police informer.

  Gordon Skilling, who had gathered us all there in his apartment, interjected: his name on a list didn’t make it true.

  But Paul, Egon Bondy’s friend, believed that it was true: there were actual transcripts of what he had written. And the secret police had ways of making people betray their friends. They had put so much pressure on Bondy, Paul remembered Bondy’s having been near collapse. He could believe Egon Bondy had been broken. This didn’t make him evil, though.

  Lustration had revealed that several people Paul had known well in the 1970s were informers. Often the friends who were their victims forgave them.

  “Of all the people I knew,” Paul said, “it was the people who were the most harmed by informers who were also the most forgiving of those informers.”

  IN TORONTO I thought more and more about the Stalinist years. In 1946, the communists had won a plurality in Czechoslovakia: 38 percent of the vote in genuinely free elections. The communist coup of two years later had not been carried out by a tiny minority: the communists had authentic popular support then. Understandably, no one wanted to remember that now.

  In 1948, just a few months after the so-called “February Revolution” had brought the communists to power, Gordon and his wife arrived in Prague to find the windows of what once had been the American information office filled with displays of American capitalist horror: workers’ strikes, lines of the desperate unemployed, beatings of blacks.

  Yet in many ways what Gordon saw in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was still mild. When he returned to Czechoslovakia two years later, in 1950, it was already a time of terror. The show trial of Milada Horáková was under way. Milada Horáková was a Protestant, a Christian, a believer. She was also an activist and a democrat who in the interwar years had played an important role in the women’s movement. When the Second World War came, she devoted herself to the anti-Nazi resistance. Imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, she behaved heroically. Hers was a strength seemingly not of this world.

  One June night at ten o’clock Gordon listened as the verdict was delivered in the show trial: death by hanging for Milada Horáková and three of her co-defendants, including the surrealist literary critic Záviš Kalandra.

  In the 1920s Záviš Kalandra had been a young radical, a student communist, part of avant-garde literary circles lending their support to the Bolshevik Revolution. Then news of the Stalinist terror of the 1930s reached Czechoslovakia. The show trials, with their self-flagellating confessions of Old Bolsheviks begging to be given the death penalty, seemed suspicious to him. Záviš Kalandra began to have doubts. For these doubts he was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. When interwar Czechoslovakia came to an end, his fate began to merge with that of Milada Horáková. Soon after the Germans occupied the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, the Gestapo came for him. The long years of the war he spent as a prisoner, in Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück.

  Milada Horáková and Záviš Kalandra were among thousands arrested after the 1948 February Revolution that saw Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš’s defeat and the Communist Party’s victory. The charges against them were fantastical: Trotskyite conspiracy on behalf of American imperialism; plots to destroy Czechoslovak people’s democracy, restore capitalist exploitation, and initiate a third world war. The trial was theater: the play had been written in advance, the defendants tortured in preparation for rehearsals. Then the live performance was broadcast over the radio and the transcripts were published daily in the newspapers. Milada Horáková was all the more a monster for being a woman, a wife, a mother. In factories throughout the country signatures were collected in support of resolutions condemning the accused; thousands of telegrams poured into the Ministry of Justice, calling for execution. Women wrote letters demanding that all of the defendants be given the supreme punishment. People wanted assurance that the glorious socialist future would not be spoiled.

  The chief prosecutor was a young colonel in uniform, and after the trial Gordon listened as he addressed an open-air meeting in Prague’s Stromovka Park. The young colonel spoke of the vileness of the West, the despicable nature of the defendants, the need for vigilance. His audience was wildly enthusiastic. Shortly afterward Milada Horáková and Záviš Kalandra went to the gallows.

  In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting the Czech novelist Milan Kundera wrote of the day following those executions:

  And knowing full well that the day before in their fair city one woman and one surrealist had been hanged by the neck, the young Czechs went on dancing and dancing, and they danced all the more frantically because the dance was the manifestation of their innocence, the purity that shone forth against the black villainy of two public enemies who betrayed the people and its hopes.

  After one woman and one surrealist were hanged, the show trials continued. Now the Communist Party turned against itself. Rudolf Slánský had been a devoted communist since before his twenty-first birthday. In September 1944 he was parachuted into Slovakia during the Slovak Uprising against the Nazis. Six years later, the Czechoslovak Communist Party held a fiftieth birthday celebration for him, the wartime hero who was now the Communist Party’s general secretary. It was a wonderful birthday party. And Rudolf Slánský’s very last. Soon afterward he was arrested—and before long was joined by other comrades, high-ranking communists like Rudolf Margolius and André Simone.

  In the end there were fourteen defendants. Eleven were Jews. All were tried as “Trotskyite-Titoist-Zionist bourgeois nationalist traitors and enemies of the Czechoslovak people, of the people’s democratic order and socialism, who, in the service of American imperialists and steered by hostile Western intelligence services, created a treasonous conspiratorial nucleus, undermined the people’s democratic order, obstructed the building of socialism, harmed the nationa
l economy, conducted espionage operations, and weakened the unity of the Czechoslovak people and the defense capability of the republic, in order to alienate the republic from its unyielding alliance and friendship with the Soviet Union, to liquidate the people’s democratic rule in Czechoslovakia, to restore capitalism, to bootstrap our republic once again to the imperialist camp, and to destroy its independence and freedom.”

  In prison the defendants’ interrogators tortured them. Those on trial all gave elaborate, self-condemning confessions. Their language was fantastical.

  PROSECUTOR: Toward what goal did this hostile operation inside the Communist Party and its apparatus serve?

  RUDOLF SLÁNSKÝ: This operation served the goal of building the treasonous center’s power inside the Party and exploiting these positions for our conspiratorial designs. By pulverizing the Party with bourgeois and petit bourgeois elements we attempted to change the character of the Communist Party, so as to transform the revolutionary party of the working class into a party controlled by bourgeois and petit bourgeois elements.

  The prosecutors were never satiated; they continually asked for deeper self-incrimination.

  PROSECUTOR: This is one part of your operation inside the Communist Party. Of course your hostile operation does not end with this …

  There was always more. Rudolf Slánský was obliging.

  RUDOLF SLÁNSKÝ: I aimed the operation of the treasonous conspiratorial nucleus inside the Party directly toward the liquidation of the people’s democratic order.

  The “treasonous nucleus” conspired with Zionists and Freemasons. It had support as well among the Communist Party’s secret police, among supposedly trusted communist comrades. Slánský and his coconspirators were able to exploit this support, using it to conceal their hostile operations.