The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  “It is surely our lot,” Adam wrote of himself and Henry Dasko, of Irena Grudzińska and Kostek Gebert and Staszek Krajewski and their many friends, the children of Polish-Jewish communists,“—we, the plague-stricken sons—to live to the end and die with that ‘Christian’ blemish. We have been thus marked.”

  IN PRAGUE IN autumn 2007 an eighty-six-year-old woman was put on trial as an accomplice to murder. Nearly six decades earlier she had been a young prosecutor in the show trial of Milada Horáková, who was sentenced to death for Trotskyite conspiracy on behalf of American imperialism, with the goals of destroying the Czechoslovak people’s democracy, restoring capitalist exploitation, and plotting a third world war. Now this elderly woman was the last participant in that show trial who remained alive; there was no one else with whom to settle accounts. The defendant did not appear in court—her health was too poor and she could no longer see. Yet she did make a statement to the press: “I was fighting for my country and for a social order where no one could be out of work.”

  The eighty-six-year-old former prosecutor was sentenced to six years in prison.

  Six months later Prague saw the premiere of an opera based on the trial of Milada Horáková. The trial that had been staged so theatrically in 1950 was now restaged as theater once again, and Milada Horáková’s farewell letter was set to music.

  In autumn 2008 a very young historian named Adam Hradilek was working as a researcher at the Prague-based Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, the Czech counterpart to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. He was investigating the story of an aspiring fighter pilot. When the communists took power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Miroslav Dvořáček was twenty years old. At that time he and nearly one hundred other young cadets had been expelled from the Airborne Military Academy for “lacking a positive attitude” toward the new people’s democracy.

  Miroslav Dvořáček was among a group of the expelled cadets who, after defecting from Czechoslovakia to the American-occupied zone in Germany, became couriers for the Western-sponsored, anticommunist Czechoslovak intelligence service. The Czech general who recruited the young men promised them that once they’d completed their assignments he would arrange for them to become military pilots in the West. These boys had been formed by the war. Above all they wanted to fly.

  In the West, Miroslav Dvořáček was given some six weeks of training. He was taught how to communicate by Morse code and how to read a map. In December 1949 his instructors gave him a compass, false identification papers, and a bottle of whiskey and sent him across the border.

  Miroslav Dvořáček was not experienced at intelligence work. Nor was he especially skilled at it. During his second trip back to Czechoslovakia, in March of 1950, he was riding a tram across the Vltava River in Prague when he spotted an old friend named Iva. Excited to see her again, he got off the tram and went along with Iva to her student dormitory. He left his suitcase in her room and went off to look for the man he’d been sent to contact.

  In the meantime Iva told her boyfriend that he couldn’t spend the night with her because Miroslav Dvořáček was visiting. Iva’s boyfriend, who could not have been pleased, mentioned this to his friend Milan Kundera, who also lived in the dormitory.

  Later in the day Miroslav Dvořáček returned to Iva’s dormitory room. There the police arrested him.

  Digging around in the secret police archives, the young historian Adam Hradilek found a police document naming Milan Kundera as the student who had reported Miroslav Dvořáček’s presence in the dormitory.

  In The Art of the Novel, Kundera described Prague as the “city of the weak.”

  Miroslav Dvořáček spent fourteen years in a communist prison camp.

  Martin Šimečka, the author of the touching Slovak novel The Year of the Frog, was now the editor of the Czech weekly Respekt. It was Martin who first published the story about Miroslav Dvořáček and Milan Kundera’s fateful denunciation—in a rather more sensationalist way than the inexperienced Adam Hradilek would have liked.

  The story caused a scandal—although I did not entirely understand why. I was not surprised by what Adam Hradilek had found in the archives. The possibility—or probability—that Milan Kundera was the informant did not change how I thought about him: he was an unusually gifted writer who had been a Stalinist in his youth.

  Martin Šimečka’s colleague Samuel Abrahám—also from Bratislava, of the same generation, a political scientist, a writer and editor who shared many of Martin’s liberal democratic commitments—wrote to Milan Kundera in Paris. Samuel was shocked by the Respekt article: a high-quality intellectual weekly had suddenly deteriorated, he believed, into tabloid journalism.

  And Milan Kundera answered Samuel Abrahám: “I did not think it was possible to start such an international persecution on the basis of a single lie.”

  I wondered: Was Milan Kundera truly surprised? The legacy of totalitarianism is “the spirit of the trial,” he had written.

  Samuel, though, was surprised. He was also angry and hurt. He published an essay that was in part an open letter to Martin Šimečka.

  Respekt, the magazine in which the article was published, reproduced a facsimile of a police document from 1950. To assure the public that neither the story nor the document was a matter of speculation by the authors, the editor in chief, Martin Šimečka, wrote in the editorial of the same issue of the journal: “We did not search for it, it was revealed to us for reasons that can only be of a metaphysical nature.” Who cares about facts, logic, motivation, or what the accused has to say? The journalists do not doubt the “holy writ” of the communist police from the 1950s. Kundera can say whatever he likes, deny the accusations a thousand times, but it will not take away the stigma of guilt.

  In spring 2009, at a conference in Vilnius, I saw both Samuel Abrahám and Martin Šimečka, who now no longer spoke to each other. Late at night, in the hotel bar, Samuel, Tim, and I talked about the “Kundera affair.” Samuel could not believe it was possible: Milan Kundera might have been a communist, but surely he had not denounced Miroslav Dvořáček. Milan Kundera, after all, was from a cultured family in Brno, his father was a classical pianist, he had been raised up among the bourgeois intelligentsia, amid Habsburg liberalism …

  Samuel was a bright man, but he was misunderstanding something fundamental about Stalinism: a childhood spent listening to Mozart offered one no immunity against it. In 1950 Milan Kundera, like so many young Czechs whose political consciousness had been formed by the “betrayal at Munich” and the German occupation that followed, was an impassioned young Stalinist, deeply committed to building communism in Czechoslovakia. In accordance with the worldview that he himself entirely publicly at that time avowed, reporting the presence of a foreign agent in his dormitory would have been not a crime but, on the contrary, a moral imperative.

  And unlike Milada Horáková and Rudolf Margolius and so many other victims of Stalinism, Miroslav Dvořáček was working for foreign intelligence.

  Milan Kundera’s sympathies in those years were not at all a secret: his poetry was published in the Stalinist-era literary newspapers. And after all, it was not only Kundera. This was the trajectory of a generation: those born in the 1920s who became the young Stalinists of the 1940s and 1950s, writing court poetry for the Party, and subsequently the revisionist Marxists of the 1960s, striving for “socialism with a human face,” and finally the dissidents and émigrés of the 1970s and 1980s, articulating the most sophisticated critiques of totalitarianism.

  “My own youth, my own ‘lyrical age’ and poetic activity coincide with the worst period of the Stalinist era,” Kundera said in an interview in the mid-1960s. In Kundera’s opinion, no one of his generation could really be satisfied with himself.

  This is what I told Samuel Abrahám in Vilnius, in the bar of the neoclassical Hotel Conti, which extended the length of the block in two directions. When Tim and I had flown into Vilnius via Helsinki the day before, no one had checked
our passports at the airport: Lithuania was now a member of the European Union. Yet in the hotel room, in the binder containing hotel information, included among the list of “services available for an additional charge,” together with “dry cleaning,” “fitness center,” and “sauna,” was the service “bodyguard.” It was a reminder that Vilnius was still a post-Soviet city.

  The next day I talked to Martin Šimečka, who unapologetically stood not only by his decision to publish the article but also by his conviction that Milan Kundera was guilty. For the files in the Czech archives, Martin insisted, were 99 percent trustworthy.

  Martin, like Samuel, was a very bright man, but this, too, made little sense. No archive was 99 percent trustworthy: documents always concealed as well as revealed. The author of any given report could always prove to have been manipulative and self-interested, or simply stupid or sloppy or confused. There was no such thing as a perfectly objective source, produced outside time and place and human frailty.

  In any case, it seemed to me that if there were to be a public discussion, the real questions should be these: Why did so many of the brightest minds of Milan Kundera’s generation become Stalinists in their youth? Why in 1946 did the communists win 38 percent of the vote in genuinely free elections? How was Stalinism in Czechoslovakia able to happen?

  “Kundera’s past as a young Stalinist,” Martin wrote to me later, “was actually forgotten or pushed away from national memory.”

  Martin’s father had been of Kundera’s generation. And during all the years of debates about communism between father and son, Martin had never once asked his father if, in the 1950s, he had ever done anything like this—if he had ever committed crimes, played a direct role in arrests, imprisonments, executions. Now it was too late.

  Martin had loved his father very much, yet I did not doubt that had Milan Šimečka still been alive today, Martin would have asked him these questions, no matter how difficult. Despite his blindness about the archives, Martin was imbued with a self-critical spirit. He agreed with Václav Havel that his generation, too, was tainted.

  “We are still not free,” he told the audience at the Vilnius conference. “All of us who lived at least part of our adult lives under communism have been marked by the past to the extent that we may never be able to discuss it in the language of a natural, free world.”

  Martin said something else as well: in 1989 East Europeans had hoped that they would have something to teach, to give to Western Europe; they cherished the conviction that the experience of suffering had made them more sensitive, more inquisitive, more intellectual.

  “Today,” Martin said, “that hope looks pathetic.”

  “SOMEDAY,” HEDA MARGOLIUS had told me when I’d interviewed her in 1997 in Prague, “I’d like to see a public discussion come into being here about those people who truly to the depths of their souls believed that communism was a new opportunity for humanity, who were willing to renounce everything that was theirs alone for a better future for everyone. Today it’s only with difficulty that we can conjure up such people in our minds.”

  Now was not yet the time, Heda acknowledged. But someday.

  The “Kundera affair” might have been the beginning of such a discussion—but was not. The Czechs and Slovaks perhaps were not ready. In Poland, though, there were some who were ready.

  That same spring of 2009 Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance sent a letter to the city council of Klimontów, the hometown of Bruno Jasieński, the dandy and futurist who once wore a top hat and a monocle. It had come to the Institute of National Remembrance’s attention that in the small Polish town of Klimontów there remained a street named after Bruno Jasieński—a street that was in effect “a glorification … of the politics of Josef Stalin, of the criminal ideology of communism.”

  The letter continued:

  I wish to direct attention to the fact that maintaining a name of this type in independent Poland should be considered an act having a negative educational impact; a glorification of a criminal ideology; and a betrayal of the Homeland; as well as an objective encouragement to commit acts in violation of the Constitution of the Polish Republic.

  The Institute of National Remembrance demanded that the street’s name be changed.

  The street in question was a small street, on which stood a school, a church, and the house where Bruno Jasieński was born. Fans of the largely forgotten futurist poet signed a petition in protest. In the Institute of National Remembrance’s letter, they wrote, “There is not a shadow of benevolence or even understanding for a person caught in the gears of the totalitarian system.”

  Bruno Jasieński’s supporters continued:

  One can find weak points in the biography of virtually everyone … In the opinion of the Institute of National Remembrance’s historians, patrons of streets should be without flaws! Bruno Jasieński with certainty does not fulfill such criteria. With his complicated biography he is the perfect admonition against Stalinist totalitarianism. For the errors of his youth he paid the highest price. He spent more than a year in Soviet prison. He was tortured. He lived through hell on earth. Death for him was a long-awaited redemption. Yet even then, pushed into the depth of despair, he maintained his humanity. He did not drag innocent people with him to ruin …

  Bruno Jasieński was perhaps not quite so innocent as his twenty-first-century fans made him appear—during the Stalinist years he more than once played the role of accuser. Still, what the petition’s authors wrote was true: his biography revealed the tragedy of Stalinism. And for his youthful idealism he did pay the highest price.

  “Fortunately,” the letter written by Bruno Jasieński’s fans went on, “his poems survived the Stalinist terror. If language is our spiritual Homeland and the testament of our ancestors, then as a poet Jasieński did much more for Poland than have those custodians of patriotism who are currently accusing him.”

  Days later Gazeta Wyborcza published a letter of protest by an older Polish literary critic.

  “Was Jasieński a communist?” he wrote.

  He was an antifascist, a romantic of proletarian revolution, a victim of Soviet pathology, a deeply tragic figure. Painfully sensitive to injury and intolerance, he believed—naïvely?—in a utopia of humanity liberated from national and social conflicts, just as, in the early twentieth century, so many of the great thinkers and artists believed. Anyone unable to distinguish human dreams from brutal totalitarian politics does not understand the twentieth century.

  Gazeta Wyborcza published his letter on 23 April. The following day, the Institute of National Remembrance’s president recoiled: he apologized to the Klimontów city council and withdrew the institute’s demand.

  I WAS VISITING Poland that spring of 2009. A few months earlier, the Polish translation of Caviar and Ashes had appeared. Now a liberal Polish writer named Daniel Passent published a column about the book. It began with a satire of the Institute of National Remembrance: If the institute were to seek a new president, who would be a viable choice? Those on the right would have a reason to oppose all potential candidates: One was a renegade for having left when the current president appeared. Another had a father who had been a communist. Still another had a husband who was politically involved on the left.

  “It seems,” the columnist wrote, “that no Pole can be seated upon the barrel of gunpowder that is the Institute of National Remembrance (unless it were to be a real Pole, in the style of Dr. Chodakiewicz), and that it will be necessary to entrust that position to someone unburdened by studies at a totalitarian university, with professors who have not undergone lustration, someone uncompromised by collaboration with Gazeta Wyborcza, someone who, in addition, needs to have been conceived in vitro, in order that his father be unknown (and his grandfather from the Wehrmacht as well).”

  The “authentic Pole” Marek Chodakiewicz was the paradigmatic model of a “historian from the Institute of National Remembrance,” determined to defend Poland’s good name abroad. He had de
voted a weirdly sexual diatribe to Caviar and Ashes, in which, by fusing “homosexual” and “Cominform,” he coined the pejorative neologism “Hominform.”

  “This is a work about the unhappy, the complex-laden, the lost and the alienated, about the neurotics, hysterics, and the frustrated ones, about drunks, suicides, homosexuals,” Marek wrote.

  “It’s a pity,” he commented further, “that Shore chose to occupy herself with these pathological types, rather than writing a book about normal people.”

  Daniel Passent’s satire of the Institute of National Remembrance and historians like Marek Chodakiewicz was poignantly reminiscent of Antoni Słonimski’s sardonic columns of the 1930s. In 1937 Słonimski had asked his readers the rhetorical question: “If such an enormous majority of the nation is Judaized and communized and the rest is composed of Masons, Germans and Ukrainians, then where are the real Poles?” The subject of another column that year was how often one heard, “Are you a Pole? A quarter Pole? Can you prove your Polishness?”

  As at Shabbat dinner at Bogna’s apartment more than a decade earlier, the spirit of the 1930s—the return of the repressed—was palpable.

  Daniel Passent proposed me to head the Institute of National Remembrance—precisely because I was not a Pole and had written a book that could not have been written by anyone in Poland, in a tone that could not have been taken by anyone in Poland.

  I was unsure if this was true. It was the case, though, that listening to the Polish reception of Caviar and Ashes at moments felt like eavesdropping on a collective psychotherapy session. Those who loved the book were preoccupied with the same question as those who hated it: Why hadn’t a Pole written this book?