The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

RUDOLF SLÁNSKÝ: I knew that intellectuals harboring cosmopolitan attitudes, bourgeois cosmopolitan politicians, who were pursuing the same goals as the conspiratorial treasonous nucleus at the head of which I stood, were organized in Masonic lodges. Their operation, too, was directed toward the restoration of capitalism in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the liquidation of the people’s democratic order. Their cosmopolitanism, their nationlessness served the imperialists, who could use these people as agents in their operation against the people’s democratic order of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

  The treasonous nucleus was infectious; the class enemy masked himself and could be anywhere.

  The trial was broadcast live. The newspapers printed the transcripts every day. In Toronto, I began spending mornings at the microfilm room at the library, reading the Czechoslovak newspapers of 1952. Splattered across the front pages of the Party daily Rudé Právo were headlines: “Death to the imperialists! Death to the fascists! Death to the traitors!” Again and again, every day, women, children, wives, mothers, fathers, sons, workers—everyone demanded death. An orgy of bloodlust. A son disowned his father and supported his execution. Artur London’s French wife disavowed her husband and demanded his punishment: she would never betray the Communist Party.

  It had been a motif of the Moscow trials of the 1930s that the accused demanded for themselves the harshest sentence. It was a motif of this trial as well.

  “There can be no thought of mitigating circumstances.… I ask the national court of justice for the most severe punishment,” the journalist André Simone said in his closing statement before the court. It was a statement too fantastical to have been believed in Moscow in the 1930s. In Prague in 1952—fifteen years after the Moscow trials—André Simone spit it back out. And the audience believed it. And they hanged him.

  IN THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING Milan Kundera wrote of his generation: “And so it happened that in February 1948 the Communists took power not in bloodshed and violence, but to the cheers of about half the population. And please note: the half that cheered was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.”

  The Stalinist years, Kundera described in that novel, were years of “innocence dancing with a bloody smile.” Kundera, I slowly began to realize, had belonged to this “better half”: he had been among those dancing. As had so many others I admired: Arnošt Lustig, Karel Kosík, Pavel Kohout, Stanislav Neumann, Jaroslav Seifert, Ludvík Vaculík. The best and the brightest young minds, caught up in an orgy of bloodlust.

  It was this moment—the moment of the show trials, of the Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia—when Milan Kundera wrote lyrical poetry affirming his love for his communist comrades, vowing never to distance himself from them. And he was far from alone: Pavel Kohout wrote court poetry to Stalin, “who always knows, at every moment, what each of us hopes for, what each of us lives by.” Stanislav Neumann wrote a love poem to his Communist Party membership card, the place “where my heart beats.” The young philosopher Karel Kosík published diatribes against “cosmopolitan bandits and evildoers the likes of Slánský.”

  Theirs was a generation whose founding moment of consciousness had been the betrayal at Munich. Bourgeois Western democracy had sold out Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany; seven years later, the Red Army had liberated her. Liberalism had failed to protect against fascism. Stalin had defeated Hitler. The war had sliced time in two; in the new world to come, the betrayal at Munich, the German occupation, the gas chambers of Auschwitz would never be repeated. This generation of young communists came to communism during the war, through the war, when communism was already Stalinism—and Stalinism was coming to power in Eastern Europe. Some came directly from Auschwitz: in the camps, Arnošt Lustig said, the communists were the best people.

  After Rudolf Slánský and André Simone and nine others were hanged that day in December 1952, their bodies were cremated. Someone, perhaps thoughtlessly, decided to store the urn holding the ashes inside a Communist Party automobile. One winter day when the roads were slippery, the Party chauffeur remembered the urn and scattered the ashes on the snow.

  Stalin died in March 1953, just months after Rudolf Slánský and ten of his communist comrades had gone to the gallows. Three years later, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, gave his “secret speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. During Stalin’s reign, Khrushchev said, Soviet communism had suffered from a “personality cult.” This had resulted in certain excesses: while the battle against class enemies was a necessary one, not all of the executions of the Stalinist era had been, strictly speaking, necessary.

  In April 1956, the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union met to discuss this “personality cult” and these “excesses.” The writers were not ready to apologize. In any case, Stalinism was their language: they had no other language with which to critique it.

  The poet Stanislav Neumann stood up to speak: his generation had grown up with Stalin’s name. And with Stalin’s name, as seventeen-year-old boys, they had come to the Communist Party. His best friends had gone to their deaths in Theresienstadt with this name. No, he would not apologize. He was not ashamed.

  With time, though, there would be shame. In 1963 the victims of the Stalinist show trials in Czechoslovakia were rehabilitated. Posthumously. Quietly.

  At the Writers’ Congress held that year a young poet turned to his older colleagues: “What kind of people were you, actually, and what kind of people are you?”

  Pavel Kohout was defensive: the poet, who was twenty-five years old in 1963, was too young to remember the First Czechoslovak Republic, too young to remember the social injustices, the poverty, the fatal weakness that had left the small country vulnerable to Hitler. Pavel Kohout had been most happy to be a poet of the Stalinist era. It had been an era of great faith.

  “I am not ashamed of that faith,” Kohout told the younger poet, “if I called it Stalin or otherwise.”

  At the 1963 Writers’ Congress, Arnošt Lustig was less defensive and more melancholy.

  “How was it possible,” Arnošt asked, “that the most beautiful idea of equality, justice, and dignity of man—which communism was—so perverted itself?”

  For Arnošt’s generation, this would become the single most haunting question. None of them would ever fully escape it.

  Yet with time the writers did construct a way out of Stalinist language. Gradually, they began to juxtapose words of the Stalinist era with other words: individual persons next to the people; conscience next to class consciousness; truth and responsibility next to faith and belief. They borrowed heavily from French existentialism, in particular from Jean-Paul Sartre. In a world in which there was no God, Sartre insisted, we ourselves were the creators of values. We had radical freedom—and radical freedom meant radical responsibility. The Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík began to rethink dialectics: perhaps Marxist teleology—in its reduction of people to mere objects of History—was in essence dehumanizing. For the inexorable progress of History rendered morality an “alien encroachment, or, at most, an external addendum.” They had all believed that the terror of the Stalinist years had been dictated by the “iron laws of History.” Yet what if History were only history, what if it had no iron laws? If this were true, then they were left—even if indirectly—with blood on their hands.

  These, the 1960s, were the years of the Czech New Wave in film, and Arnošt Lustig was among the most active participants. It was a time of creativity, a time of weaving brilliant political allegories from yarns of the horrific and the absurd. In 1963 a Czech writer published a novel about the witch trials in seventeenth-century Bohemia. Afterward, a Czech director set about making a film. Kladivo na čarodejnice (Malleus Maleficarum, “A Hammer to the Witches”) was more than graphic—it was vile. At the film’s conclusion the women accused of witchcraft, after undergoing hideous tortures, approached the stakes where they would be burned. Yet they had forgotten something. Those overseeing t
heir execution told them: “You must say thank you.” And they did. Just as had the defendants at the Rudolf Slánský trial.

  In 1967 Milan Kundera completed The Joke, the tragic story of Ludvík the young communist, cast out of both the Communist Party and the university by his own friends and comrades for having sent his would-be girlfriend a thoughtless postcard. At the Writers’ Congress a few months later, Karel Kosík told the tale of a famous Czech intellectual, imprisoned for his refusal to abandon his convictions. The famous Czech intellectual, unnamed by Kosík, was the religious reformer Jan Hus, sentenced by the Ecclesiastical Council and burned at the stake in 1415. For more than five hundred years Jan Hus had been a Czech national hero remembered for his conviction that “truth will prevail.” Now Karel Kosík told his colleagues of how a theologian had come to visit this intellectual in prison and had advised him that should the Ecclesiastical Council tell him he had one eye, even though he knew that he had two, he must acknowledge that the council was right. The imprisoned man replied that it would be of no consequence if all the world were to declare that he had only one eye. For he knew by his own reason that he had two, and a denial of reason was a betrayal of conscience.

  I thought of Jarmila—now Todd James—and the rabbit analogy: even if I were to be told every day that I was a rabbit, I would still know that it was not true.

  Toward the intellectuals who underwent such a radical ideological transformation, Gordon Skilling was sympathetic. Or rather empathetic. They were, he believed, neither opportunists nor fools.

  “I can appreciate this myself,” Gordon wrote to me, “since I went through a similar process of evolution of thinking, of movement from faith to reason and conscience.”

  I liked that Gordon was forthright about his past as a fellow traveler.

  Gordon’s ideological sympathies, like those of his Czechoslovak contemporaries, had undergone a dramatic evolution as he’d grown older. In his later years, he’d lent his support to the dissidents, many of whom had become his friends. In February 1987, the year he turned seventy-five, Charter 77 issued a document sending him birthday wishes.

  For a brief moment it had seemed that the Stalinists who had experienced a crisis of conscience might triumph: in January 1968 the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia changed course and embraced reform. Alexander Dubček, the new Party leader, promised “socialism with a human face.” For the first time, the communist government publicly acknowledged the falsity of the show trials. The Prague Spring of 1968 was a time of great hope; and the once-young Stalinists-turned-revisionist Marxists were effusive in their support. Then in August, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, and the Prague Spring was over forever. That winter the Czech student Jan Palach went to Wenceslas Square and set himself on fire. His death by self-immolation was a protest—not against the invasion itself but against his country’s resignation. Stanislav Neumann could not bring himself either to support the crushing of the ideals that had brought him to communism or to oppose the Communist Party. In 1970 the poet who had seen his best friends go to their deaths in the Nazi camps with Stalin’s name on their lips took his own life. He was forty-three years old.

  It was impossible to know what “socialism with a human face” would have been.

  THE YEAR 1968 marked a break in time: afterward few true believers in communism remained. Now many of the young Stalinists-turned-revisionist Marxists became dissidents.

  One day in Toronto a professor of European history overheard my conversation with a Czech student. The professor interjected—in perfect Czech, although he was not Czech himself. Later he told me he’d been born in Macedonia. During the Second World War, as a young child, he’d become separated from his parents. Still, he survived, and after the war found himself in a Czechoslovak orphanage, where he was raised by communist child care workers. He had been a ward of the communist state: his was a pure Stalinist upbringing. He cried when the social worker came to tell the children that Stalin had died.

  “And the girls,” he said, “the girls were sobbing.”

  Twenty years later he returned to Czechoslovakia, where he visited one of the social workers who had raised him. When they were alone she asked him: Could he ever forgive her?

  “I already have,” he answered.

  And I saw that it was true: he was forgiving. His forgiveness was not only magnanimity but also equanimity—he was accepting: it had simply been the spirit of the times.

  A Galician Summer

  It was summer of 1996 when I left Toronto and arrived in Krakow. The dormitory cafeteria was crowded with foreign summer school students, boys wearing black denim and girls in flowered, sleeveless dresses. Above them light dust swirled in the cigarette smoke.

  Behind the counter large women cloaked in white aprons, their hair tied in hairnets, poured ladles of borscht, mashed potatoes, and żurek from steaming cauldrons. Perspiration gathered along the webs of their hairnets. Boiled eggs floated in bowls of żurek.

  I was sitting alone. A man stopped at my table and asked with excessive formality if he might not join me. Perhaps not formality, perhaps rather a bit of inappropriate grandeur. His Polish was stilted and formal, he spoke with an accent. Unlike myself, though, he pronounced the Polish nasal vowels correctly, as real nasal sounds spoken from his nose, grazing his throat and slipping from his mouth. Perhaps he was French.

  “Of course,” I answered him. He was much older and more well-dressed than most of the students in the cafeteria. He asked me if I were Polish in a hopeful tone.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  “A pleasure to meet you.”

  He smiled with a kind of public warmness, as if he were a businessman, and perhaps he was.

  Inside the cafeteria sundry languages wove a mask of incomprehensible sounds, soft consonants and deep vowels in varying rhythms. It was possible to hear everything and nothing at once.

  “I have a great interest in the war,” he said.

  He was drinking weak lemon tea with his pierogies. They were coated with a sauce of lard, heated to the translucence of olive oil.

  “My wife is Polish. I have a great affection for the Polish people. So noble, and so unlucky. Always the victims of foreigners—the Russians, the Germans, the Jews …”

  I said nothing. I imagined that this man’s wife was younger than he, and very beautiful. I wondered if she spoke to him in French.

  “It is a paradox in some way that it was the Germans—historical enemies!—who resolved the problem. Forty years of communism did not do as much damage to the Poles as the centuries of economic exploitation by the Jews. Today they have a chance. Communism is over, and Hitler has taken care of the Jewish problem for the Poles.”

  His wife would not be saying this to me, I thought. Not here in Krakow. Not at the university.

  I looked at him and said nothing.

  “I do not say that I agree with everything, with his methods, of course. They were, I would say, extreme.”

  The Frenchman continued to talk. I stared into my glass of tea. Pieces of lemon swirled and drifted.

  He stood up and extended his hand. “It was a pleasure.”

  IN KRAKOW BOYS pedaling rickshaws wobbled against the uneven spaces between cobblestones that reflected the shadows of turrets. Majestic Wawel Castle had once represented a Poland never to rise again: Nazi governor-general of Poland Hans Frank had made the castle his home when the Germans came to Krakow.

  Yet in time the castle was cleansed of its Nazi taint, and Poland did rise again. It was not, though, the same Poland that had been before Hans Frank’s arrival there. By the time the Second World War ended, Poland’s eastern lands, with their Ukrainian and Belarusian minorities, had become part of the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus. As compensation Poland had expanded its boundaries to the west, expelling the Germans who lived there across the border. And of the nearly 3 million Jews who had lived in Poland before the war, almost all were gone.

  The exhibition And I Still See Their
Faces opened in a Krakowian gallery that summer. Photographs of Polish Jewry from before the war: Ordinary people. Sisters. Grandfathers. Mothers and children. Babies. The religious and the secular. Men and women walking with goats on village roads and past shops on city streets. The wealthy wearing elegant hats. The impoverished in tattered clothing. Men holding puppies. Distinguished gentlemen and marriageable girls. Wedding banquets and family portraits. Boys studying and men playing chess. A family posing around a gravestone. The elderly in a rest home. Workers in a tailor shop. A school, a graveyard, a synagogue. Men carrying buckets of water. Rabbis and painters. Soldiers in the First World War. Young women playing the piano. Families on the beach by the Baltic Sea. Pretty girls sitting in gardens—some looking happy, some sad.

  They were unspeakably beautiful photographs, all in black-and-white and sepia. They conjured up not only a lost Jewish world but also a lost Poland.

  That summer in Krakow I also met Seth, who, as the Frenchman had, shared a table at the cafeteria with me one day. Like myself, Seth was there studying Polish. He was not especially friendly—but my roommate, a cheerful college student from the Midwest who loved beer and men and parties, chatted in his direction obliviously. We learned that he was nearly thirty and that he had once been American but was now Israeli. That he was a Zionist, but on the left, and that he wanted nothing in common with the barbarians on the right. When his army unit searched Palestinians at the border check, he always spoke to them in English: Hebrew was the language of the occupier, English was benevolently neutral. Now he was a graduate student in Jerusalem. He had come to Krakow to learn Polish, having already learned Hebrew and Russian and Yiddish. He wanted to write about the vibrant Jewish life that had once been.

  This was how we met. Later we took many walks. It was summer in Krakow, and the cafés lining the square had all opened their doors to the Galician sun, which came and went abruptly. The days were fickle; powder white and dark gray clouds moved back and forth across the sky, brightness and darkness falling over them. At the outdoor cafés tables were clustered closely together and straw chairs wobbled on the cobblestones. The poetic title song of Grzegorz Turnau’s new album To tu to tam was playing everywhere. A blend of lyrical pop and soft jazz, it was delicate and breezy. Young Krakowians wore brightly colored summer clothing—oranges and yellows and greens that were almost neon. Clothing that announced that it was summer and communism had ended.