by Marci Shore
Not all was new. In the background hooves tapped on cobblestone pavement as horse-drawn carriages emerged from alleyways onto the main square. Sounds of a Poland that had once been. Krakow still looked like a city of knights and princesses, a fairy tale preserved even during the war.
Krakow was beautiful, but Seth felt wrath toward the medieval city and toward the Poles who lived there. He refused to go dancing. For him Poland was a graveyard trampled upon by anti-Semites—who had gazed with veiled smiles as their Jewish neighbors filed into the trains that would take them to the gas chambers.
It was warm and sunny on the day that Seth and I made the hour-and-a-half-long bus trip to Auschwitz. The camp was now a museum. There were guides, a bookstore, a cafeteria. The camp itself was tight, condensed. Everything was close together: sidewalks and redbrick buildings. A once-electrified fence. Very little was growing there. In the center everything was gray and red, the color of dirt and bricks. There were cobblestones and well-defined paths. It was a miniature town, its own civilization. Inside the pavilions were exhibits: an entire room filled with eyeglasses, suitcases, shoes.
Birkenau was a ten-minute bus ride away. It was unlike Auschwitz. There were no redbrick barracks, no ARBEIT MACHT FREI cast in iron above the gate. Once upon a time Birkenau had been a forest. Now there was only dry earth and vastness, and one could easily become lost there. It was a long walk along a dirt path encroached upon by weeds to the crematoria. Amid the ruins it was dark and cool and quiet.
“Think About Whether or Not I Was Right”
At the Institute for Contemporary History in Prague’s picturesque district of Malá Strana, Czech historians were revisiting the Stalinist show trials, that theater of horrors where some of the most talented had played the role of avant-garde directors.
That summer of 1996, after I left Krakow, I went to Prague, where at the film archives the archivist brought me the footage of Milada Horáková’s show trial. I found the transcripts of the trial easily: after all, they had been published in multiple newspapers at the time. But I wanted to see something more. The interrogators, at the very least, knew how the script had been written, how the confessions had been extracted. Could the prosecutors have truly believed the defendants? What did it mean to truly believe? I wanted to see the staging, the clothing, the gestures, the expressions on their faces. I wanted to hear the rhythm of their speech and the tone of their voices. I wanted to imagine how it felt to be inside that room.
The film reels were in black-and-white. Watching them, it was difficult to imagine there had ever been color in that courtroom. Milada Horáková wore a tailored jacket, a straight skirt, wire glasses, and her hair pulled back tightly in a bun. She confessed to leading an espionage ring, to conspiring together with the West to begin a third world war that would overthrow socialism in Czechoslovakia and return nationalized factories to exploitative bourgeois owners. Like the Nazis, the Stalinists had tortured her. They had broken her … yet not to the end. Unlike Rudolf Slánský and André Simone and other victims of the Stalinist show trials, Milada Horáková had never been a communist. And she was not so obliging. There were moments when she hesitated, wandered from her script, subtly, as if shyly. “I have a different position.” “I cannot answer that.” Silence.
The prosecutor addressed Milada Horáková as Paní obžalovaná—“Madame, the Accused.” It was a singsong phrase, especially in high-pitched Prague Czech, the first syllable stressed, the last elongated. Paní obžalovaná! Over and over again.
PROSECUTOR: Paní obžalovaná, you are confessing, then, that you worked in a criminal way against the state … against the people’s democracy of the Czechoslovak Republic?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: Yes—of that I feel guilty.
PROSECUTOR: Paní obžalovaná, I am asking you again … did your program mean the return of nationalized businesses to the mill owners?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: The return of the ownership of these factories.
PROSECUTOR: Thus a program for millionaires—not for the people.
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: It was a program for the bourgeois strata.
PROSECUTOR: Hence via that path there was to have been a renewal of capitalism here. What do you think, how might the workers of a nationalized factory accept their former master—being aware that he would exploit their work further?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: I have a different position toward that matter.
Every day the newspapers published the transcripts of the trial. Every day the papers published letters from readers. From angry readers. From readers demanding justice.
Here, before the faces of the working people, on the bench of the accused, concludes the shameful path of the bourgeoisie, of criminals united against the people of this republic in order to thrust a dagger in their backs!
With outrage we, miners, are following the trial against the band of grand traitors and spies, who shrank from nothing, not even the spilling of the blood of their own people and their own nation, in order that their golden capitalist times be returned to them.
Our workers, our peasants, our intelligentsia, our women and our youth, who in the struggle with the great powers of yesterday are working for the establishment of a beautiful future, express their deep disgust for them.
This middle-aged woman, the prosecutor insisted, had been plotting another world war, a war of the West against the East, a war to restore capitalism.
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: Wars of the Western powers against the East, that means against the people’s democratic countries and the Soviet Union.
PROSECUTOR: And, in such a case, on whose side would the former SS men of West Germany stand, and on whose side would you and your coconspirators stand?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ:—I cannot answer that.
PROSECUTOR: You cannot? Thank you.
PROSECUTOR: Paní obžalovaná, when the entire republic is working constructively and when against that a handful of people assist in preparing a war against their own republic, is that not a foreign and hostile element?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: (silent)
PROSECUTOR: Thank you, that is also an answer.
PROSECUTOR: The only real conception was war, Paní obžalovaná, war against the republic, as the single condition for the realization of your plans.
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: We in the committee also thought about—with which I myself of course did not then agree, because from an international perspective I did not regard it as somehow practical—about the possibility of a diplomatic road, about international elections, under international control, etc.
Then the prosecutor reminded the audience of the betrayal at Munich, that moment in September 1938 when Western bourgeois democracy had sold out Czechoslovakia, when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had handed the first part of the small republic to Hitler.
PROSECUTOR: Do you recall a certain act of international control, which we paid for in 1938?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: I do recall. And just for that reason in these conceptions, as I have stated here, we envisaged a war.
PROSECUTOR: You envisaged a war and to war belongs the atomic bomb. At least so they threaten us.
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: I am, Prosecutor Sir, really about matters of war …
PROSECUTOR: You were counting on the fact that in the case of war perhaps Prague as well would be struck?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: If there were to be a war, we would have to count on striking all targets.
PROSECUTOR: Among them even Prague? Is your sixteen-year-old daughter in Prague?
MILADA HORÁKOVÁ: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: Thank you. That is enough.
During the trial, women and children, the adolescent and teen-aged activists known as pioneers, factory workers and miners, wrote letters. They expressed their outrage at the evildoers. They expected justice from the communist state. They knew what they wanted: “We, women from Vimperk, from a border town, we, who are devoted co-builders of socialism in our country, demand for all of the accused the highest
punishment!”
The legacy of totalitarianism was “the spirit of the trial,” Milan Kundera wrote.
Sitting in the small room alone in the film archives, I watched the trial conclude. Milada Horáková delivered her final words. They were words of advice: “Do not do what I did, what I have done.”
That summer in a Prague bookstore I found Milada Horáková’s last letters, written in the final hours of her life to her friends, to her sister and her mother-in-law, to her husband and her daughter, to her elderly father.
“ ‘Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death,’ ” Milada Horáková wrote to her mother-in-law, “ ‘I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.’ ”
She believed in God. She believed, too, in the world to come. “If I depart before you do,” she wrote to her husband, “it is only to wait for you patiently …”
She would wait there for her father as well.
Father, Papa, forgive me, understand me, don’t harden your heart toward me! As I grew there grew in me so many of your qualities, even though otherwise directed. I know that this should not afflict your eighty-one years. I know that I should stand by you and kiss your dear hand, before the time of your departure to Mother arrives. It happened otherwise. Nevertheless I will stand by you just the same and with Mother I will wait for you … but as you see, we do not part for long.
For her daughter, Jana, Milada Horáková wished independence. She wanted Jana to be courageous. She wanted her to study hard at school, to get regular exercise, to take care of her complexion. In Nazi prison she’d read the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa’s letters to her daughter Marie Antoinette, queen of France, and had been impressed by the care the empress took to dispense practical advice, womanly advice. Now in her final hours, Milada Horáková, too, counseled her daughter about clothing, cosmetics, hairstyles.
You must, my little girl, find your own path. Search for it independently, do not let anything deter you, not even the memory of your mother and father. If you really do love them, you will not hurt them by seeing them critically—only you must not find yourself on a path that is dishonest, untruthful, false and unsuited to life. I have reconsidered many things, changed my mind about many values—yet what has remained unchanging for me, that without which I cannot imagine my life, is the freedom of my conscience. You, my young daughter, think about whether or not I was right.
That was not all.
There were inexplicable paradoxes. For the letter ended with a reading list: Czechoslovak Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald’s With the Soviet Union for Time Eternal; Stalin’s The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course; literature by Stalinist court poets. She wanted Jana to read these books—when Jana did she would surely think of her mother.
The last letter was dated 27 June 1950, at 2:30 A.M. At 5:00 A.M. that morning Milada Horáková went to the gallows. The surrealist Záviš Kalandra had preceded her by some minutes. There were four executions that morning; hers was the last.
“I am departing without hatred,” Milada Horáková told her executioners. “I wish you, I wish you …” She died before she finished the sentence.
Milada Horáková’s letters were never delivered. But neither were they destroyed—neither discarded nor shredded nor burned. It would have been so easy: a few letters, one match from the package used to light the cigarettes the prison guard undoubtedly carried. Instead the letters went to the archives, where the paper yellowed and the door was locked.
Eighteen years later, when the Prague Spring came, Milada Horáková’s family asked for her letters. The Communist Party said no.
Twenty more years passed. Then came the Velvet Revolution, when statues came down and streets were renamed. One was renamed in honor of the feminist democrat who had departed without hatred. Milada Horáková Street was one of the largest and busiest streets in Prague, quite close to Prague Castle.
Just months after the revolution, the forty-year-old letters found their way out of the dusty archives, and a new generation, a generation too young to have known their author, published them. Copies were on sale in ordinary bookstores. I bought one.
I was a voyeur, reading those letters.
The Other Side of Stalinism
In September 1996 I returned to Stanford. That fall Amanda, whom I had not seen since the night more than a year earlier when we had run through Prague in the rain, Amanda holding her disembodied ponytail, wrote to me from Massachusetts. It was wet and cold there, and she described her life as working her way through a fog. In that fog something distinct had emerged: a goodbye letter Oskar had left on his computer. The letter was in Czech. Amanda had pored over it with a dictionary, she could make out some phrases but not others. It was tormenting her. She enclosed a copy of Oskar’s letter.
“If you find it a bearable task,” Amanda wrote, “could you take a look at it? If reading it is not too difficult, would you be willing to translate? You can just throw it out without reading it, I certainly would understand.”
I looked at the piece of paper. It written on 22 December 1994, at Prague’s airport, by a man wrenched with despair.
She had sent the letter to Vlasta in Prague as well. Vlasta, though, had not been able to bring herself to translate it. I called Amanda. I would do it, I told her, but only if she was sure she wanted this. Was she?
Yes, she told me, she was.
I hung up the phone and began to type.
SETH SENT LONG letters from Jerusalem. Even as he pleaded with me to come to Israel, he was apprehensive. Above all he feared that my ambivalence toward Zionism would inevitably become my ambivalence toward him, that I would fly away “disappointed and disgusted.”
But Seth was wrong. There was much that drew me to Israel.
From my first visit, seven years earlier, I remembered vividly the greenness of the peaches and the saltiness of the Mediterranean. Mangos and falafel and coconut ice cream. Sundresses and beaded earrings and dancing on sand. The expanse of the Negev. The bright blue of the sea. The labyrinth of the Old City. The sun that set so quickly, vanishing just a moment after it began to slide downward in the sky. The wrenching beauty of Jerusalem. So many richly sensuous impressions, all uninnocent for being set against the backdrop of violence.
When classes ended in December I left on a flight from San Francisco. I was, after all, very happy to be in Israel again.
In Jerusalem, though, I was still thinking about Stalinist terror. On 8 June 1950 Milada Horáková and Záviš Kalandra were sentenced to death. Three days later the poet Stanislav Neumann’s article appeared in the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, Rudé Právo:
Here quite spontaneously in the middle of applause erupted the slogan: We want peace! Here are young people speaking about the future of our children, our pioneers—and over there are the condemned who speculated on war, who desired war, who helped to foment war.
And this, too, is the whole difference. We love mankind, we believe in mankind, we know that the most precious thing in the world is human life. We are fighting so that the dreams of our parents not only become reality but also become small for us—we are fighting so that all of human life blossoms like an exquisite flower, so that our children do not recognize and our grandchildren forget the meaning of the words poverty, war, fascism.
They love nothing except themselves. They are willing to murder thousands of people so that the factories will be returned to them. They hate mankind, they despise mankind, they want to return to the past.
I thought about Stanislav Neumann’s best friends going to their deaths in Theresienstadt with Stalin’s name on their lips. I thought about Karel Kosík and Milan Kundera and Pavel Kohout, writing odes to the Communist Party while others were hanged. I thought of Arnošt Lustig, who said that in the camps the communists were the very best people. Arnošt had joined those people in the resistance. That generation had come to Stalinism during the Second World War, through the war—it was Auschwitz that was the other sid
e of the Stalinist experience. If I really wanted to understand Stalinism, I would have to understand the war.
And so some days after I arrived in Israel I went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. I went there to see Professor Yisrael Gutman—who had survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Majdanek, Auschwitz, and a death march to Mauthausen before going on to a new life in the new Jewish state as a historian of the old Jewish world. By now Yisrael Gutman was a man in his mid-seventies who had long been a central figure at Israel’s Holocaust memorial.
Yisrael Gutman talked about the anti-Nazi resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. These young men and women were not traditional, religious Jews but rather young revolutionaries of various kinds: Zionists, communists, and Bundists who rejected both Zionism and communism and instead embraced both a Marxism and a nationalism of a different kind. The uprising these young revolutionaries led in the Warsaw Ghetto had happened in the spring of 1943. This was some nine months after the “Aktion” of summer 1942 when most of the ghetto’s residents had been gassed at Treblinka. Yet some remained. And when the Germans came to take the remaining ones, this small group of revolutionaries rose up against them.
It was a hopeless battle. In the end the Germans set fire to the ghetto, and the Jewish quarter of Warsaw burned to the ground.
Yisrael Gutman also talked about the Poles: the Jewish resistance had not intended to impress the Poles with their uprising—yet it happened that way. The Polish underground was impressed, despite their willful lack of interest, for they feared that an uprising in the ghetto would bring about a general uprising in Warsaw before the moment was right. They feared, too, that the Jews were communists.