“You shouldn’t pick the tulips,” said the little boy. “It’s not allowed.”
“Oh, yes, I’m allowed,” I said. “At least today I am. I’m celebrating.”
“What are you celebrating?” asked the girl. “The end of the war?”
I thought for a moment.
“No,” I said. “The beginning of peace.”
That evening I sat again by the radio thinking that at the very same moment, somewhere in a camp high up in the mountains, Rudolf was sitting and listening too, hearing the same voice, the same words.
The voice said, “We thank Rudolf Margolius for his report and are pleased to tell him that...”
Only much later did I learn that Rudolf had only heard the first three words of that sentence when the power failed in Garmisch, silencing all radios and leaving his question without an answer. From that night on, the Czechs in his camp whiled away their hours of boredom in betting whether or not I was the Heda of the broadcast. The repatriation from Garmisch was completed toward the middle of June, and Rudolf only returned to Prague with the very last group of freed prisoners. When they reached the railway station, no one got off the train. They stood at the windows and doors watching Rudolf dial the number of the radio station from a telephone booth on the platform. When he hung up, they called out, “Was it Heda?”
Rudolf nodded, and only then did they jump off the cars and hurry home.
Two months after liberation, people had stopped cheering and embracing. They were not giving away food and clothing anymore, but selling it on the black market. Those who had compromised their integrity during the Occupation now began to calculate and plan, to watch and spy on each other, to cover their tracks, eager to secure the property they had acquired through collaboration with the Germans, by cowardice or denunciation, or by looting the homes of deported Jews. Their sense of guilt and fear of retribution soon bred hate and suspicion directed mainly at the real victims of the Occupation: the active and passive resisters, the partisans, the Jews, and political prisoners; the honest people who had stood their ground and had not betrayed their principles even at the cost of persecution. The innocent became a living reproach and a potential threat to the guilty.
Now these survivors, dead-tired from standing in endless lines for documents, ration cards, and food, disgusted by the petty skirmishes with bureaucrats and profiteers, began to worry seriously about the future of the country. It was becoming evident to many that while evil grows all by itself, good can be achieved only through hard struggle and maintained only through tireless effort, that we had to set out clear, boldly-conceived goals for ourselves and join forces to attain them. The problem was that everyone envisioned these goals differently.
For all those whom the war had displaced, the biggest worry was housing. Partisans who throughout the war had lived in the woods, widows of the executed who for years had slept on the floor of some basement, and ailing survivors of the concentration camps all spent day after day waiting in lines at the Housing Authority while butchers and grocers and other wartime profiteers walked in by the back door and were seen first. Most of them already had good apartments, but now that they had become rich they wanted better ones. There were a number of empty apartments in Prague, abandoned by the Germans, beautifully decorated with furniture that had once belonged to Jews, so how about it? Hadn’t the butchers and grocers supplied the bureaucrats at City Hall with meat and flour throughout the war? Weren’t they now entitled to a little recognition for their efforts?
Meanwhile, in the waiting room, a clerk would yell at the women who stood there weeping: “What do you want me to do? So many of you came back – how do you think we can find housing for you all? You expect miracles?” And people would walk out, humiliated, their fists clenched in rage.
I have often thought that many of our people turned to Communism not so much in revolt against the existing political system, but out of sheer despair over human nature which showed itself at its very worst after the war. Since it is impossible for men to give up on mankind, they blame the social order in which they live; they condemn the human condition.
In the end, I wound up with an apartment sooner then Mr. Boucek, the owner of a poultry store whom I would often see conferring with the clerks at the Housing Authority. Of course, he was after something luxurious, while all I wanted was a roof over my head.
One evening, just before the building closed, I marched into the office of the chairman of the Housing Authority with a shopping bag containing all my possessions, mostly gifts from friends, and declared that I would sleep right there in the office for as long as I remained homeless because I had no other place to go. That was true. I had spent the last few nights in various improvised shelters for displaced persons. Before that, I had used up the store of my acquaintances who were willing to give me a place to stay; I had decided that I would not take advantage of their patience any longer. Besides, I thought it was about time I slept in my own bed after all these years.
The chairman of the Housing Authority began to fume, but I paid no attention to him. Slowly, I unpacked my bag. I took out a cake of soap, then a toothbrush, then a glass. Next to it I laid out a white napkin, and on it a slice of bread, a piece of cheese, and a bottle of milk. I draped a towel and my nightgown over an office chair. Then I sat down in the chairman’s chair, poured myself a glass of milk, and bit into the bread. The chairman was still ranting. I finished eating and, very slowly, started taking off my shoes. Then I opened the first button of my blouse, silently praying for something, anything, to happen. I undid the second button. The chairman’s face reddened. He wiped the sweat off his neck and shot out of the office.
I put my feet up on another chair, lit a cigarette – another precious gift – and waited. Some time later, there was a knock on the door and, after my pleasant invitation to enter, the door opened a crack and the chairman’s bald pate appeared. Reassured that my preparations for the night had not proceeded any further, he let out a sigh of relief, beckoned to someone behind him, and came in. He was followed by his underling, a clerk who had previously told me many times that he understood my situation and would be only too happy to help me, but that he could not give me an apartment because he did not have one. Now he held a piece of paper toward me and said, “If we give you this deed right now so that you can move in tomorrow, will you please go away?”
I signed the deed, finished my glass of milk, and asked if they wished to share with me what remained in the bottle. They refused politely, and the chairman folded up my things with his own hands and put them back in my shopping bag. I took the bag and the deed and went to have a look at the house in which I would live. I seem to remember that the Housing Authority was eventually shut down because of corruption, but I am not certain.
The apartment was so tiny that two years later, when I was expecting a baby, Rudolf had to do all the cooking, because I could not fit between the stove and the wall. But there were lots of bookshelves and the sun shone in all day long. Friends came to visit, bringing mugs and dishes and blankets and pillows and, by the end of the summer, we were already calling it home.
Those shelves filled up quickly with books about politics and economics, old and torn, that Rudolf studied endlessly, and with a lot of new pamphlets printed on cheap paper, which I devoured. They offered such clear and simple answers to the most complicated questions that I kept feeling there had to be a mistake somewhere.
All injustice, discrimination, misery, and war, I read, stem from the fact that the handful of people who wield power are unwilling to relinquish their acquisitive urge, their exploitation of the working class, and their lust for world domination. As soon as the working people – the creators of all value – understand what must be done, they will overthrow the exploiters and their henchmen, will reeducate them as well as themselves, and the kingdom of heaven will come to earth. The real enemies of man are those who take profit from the sweat and callouses of others. If we divide the riches of the world
equally, and apply ourselves to the work at hand, each according to his ability, society will see to it that no one wants for anything.
We shall no longer fight one another for an ever-larger slice of the economic pie. We shall pool our efforts and build happiness and prosperity for all. The soil belongs to the people who till it, the factories to those who work in them. At first, of course, it will be necessary to take a firm stand against the rich; those in power will not voluntarily give up their privileges. No capitalist will give up his position without a fight. But once the new order is established, even the capitalist will understand that progress toward a better society cannot be stopped. Eventually, unwilling to be left behind, he too will join our effort. We shall all be brothers, regardless of language or race. Only capitalism breeds racism; in a socialist society, all people are equal. Democracy, a progressive idea when first conceived, has degenerated and played out its role in history; today, it affords capitalists the opportunity to exploit and the unemployed the opportunity to beg. The capitalist economy inevitably leads to depression, and depression to fascism and war. The bourgeoisie has brought the world to the brink of destruction. Do you want to see another war in a decade or two? The last of all wars, a nuclear catastrophe? Isn’t it time to change the world?
Let us go out and convince others, explain our ideas and goals. We do not wish to force people to change: people have to see the light by themselves and learn from their own experience. We can only help them toward an understanding by disseminating our ideas, our own – the only scientific truth.
Why do wars happen? See pages 45 through 47! What causes economic depressions? See page 66! Does God exist? What is truth? Marxism provides the answers to all these questions and offers solutions to problems which have plagued mankind since the dawn of history. The great change we are calling for is within our reach: people can change the conditions under which they live and through this change, man himself will eventually be transformed.
Friends – all of them young – came to visit Rudolf and me in our small apartment. They sat on the floor because there was no other place to sit and debated till morning. There was hardly an opinion that was not defended by someone, hardly an idea that went unproposed. Usually, I sat in a corner and just listened. I knew nothing about politics and less than nothing about economics. But I began to understand that life had become politics and politics had become life. It would not do anymore to say, “I don’t care. I just want to be left in peace and quiet.”
Whenever anyone defended the principles of democracy that I had been raised to believe, something inside me cried out, Yes, that’s the way it is! But then I became uncertain when I heard the objections. The principles on which the prewar Czechoslovak Republic had been founded, the humanistic, democratic ideals of Thomas G. Masaryk, were an unrealistic illusion. Our democracy had allowed the growth of the fascist and Nazi parties which had in the end destroyed it. Worst of all, it had failed to defend the country against Hitler. After Munich, where our treacherous allies had forsaken us, our democratic government had surrendered to the Germans without a struggle.
Did we want to repeat the same mistakes and live out a new version of Munich? Who had sold us out to Hitler? Our allies the Western capitalists. Who had offered us help when every other country had abandoned us? The Soviet Union. Who had liberated Prague while the American army stood watching from Pilsen, some undefended fifty miles away? The Soviet Union.
Once two friends that Rudolf had known since childhood met in our home. Zdenek’s father, a factory worker who had been unemployed for years before the war, had joined the Resistance soon after the Occupation. The Germans had arrested, then executed him. Zdenek himself had spent all the years of the war with the partisans. He limped awkwardly on feet that had been frostbitten during the war, but when he entered a room he brought with him that familiar self-assurance and strength of people for whom hardship is a challenge, an opportunity to measure oneself, to see how far one can stretch the limit of one’s will, personality, humanity. Zdenek had been accepted into the Communist Party somewhere in the forest, in a tent, by candlelight, with a submachine gun in his hands.
The other friend was Franta, one of the people who had refused to help me during those first days after my escape from the camp. He had survived the entire war living quietly, inconspicuously, in Prague. He had done nothing dishonorable. He had not collaborated with the Nazis nor had he denounced anyone. But he had not taken any risks either. Although he had completed his military service before the war as an officer in the Czechoslovak army, it had never entered his mind that he should join the Resistance. He lived out the war like a hibernating animal. He had gained nothing, but he had also lost very little.
Later on, I would often remember the conversation between these two men. Every argument Franta made for democracy sounded right and reasonable to me. But every argument Zdenek made for Communism was supported by the force of his personality and his experiences. Anything he said sounded strong and convincing simply because it was he who said it. As I listened to him, I felt almost ashamed to be agreeing with his opponent, Franta, who was so rational and prudent and who never forgot which side his bread was buttered on. It seemed unthinkable to choose Franta’s side in this confrontation between caution and courage. That evening, as usual, the debate ended in total disagreement. Only the discord between these two men was unusually sharp. Theirs was not only a clash of views but of two worlds, two contradictory sets of concepts, feelings, and visions.
Much later, during the tormented haze of the fifties, when I would try, foolishly, to pinpoint the moment when our good will and enthusiasm betrayed us, when we took our first step toward desolation and destruction, I would think of that evening. Rudolf listened carefully to the two men and entered into the debate only occasionally. But I could see that his heart was completely with Zdenek, surely in part because he had never forgiven Franta for his cowardly behavior toward me. If his reason still posed objections to Zdenek’s arguments, Rudolf had obviously decided to ignore them. The Communists at that time kept stressing the scientific basis of their ideology, but I know that the road that led many people into their ranks in Czechoslovakia was paved with good and strong emotions.
Rudolf was a very quiet, serious man, utterly unselfish. The experience of the concentration camps and the Occupation had affected him more deeply than anyone else I knew. He never overcame the humiliation that he – a young, healthy man, an officer in the Czechoslovak army – had allowed himself to be thrown into a camp without resisting and had looked on like a helpless cripple while people were murdered all around him. He had often risked his life to help his fellow inmates – they would come tell me about it themselves – but the memory of his helplessness and a sense of guilt never stopped torturing him. Now he believed more than ever before that every individual should aim to contribute to the common good, but he doubted that this could be achieved by means that had failed so miserably before.
About a week after Zdenek and Franta had spent the evening with us, Rudolf took me to see some of his friends, prewar Communist intellectuals who had lived in the Soviet Union during the war. They were a middle-aged couple who had a nice house, furnished in tasteful, totally unproletarian style. They were well-educated, very kind, and I felt quite at home with them. The wife discussed housekeeping with me and suggested ways to prepare the canned pork that came to us from the United Nations relief fund so that it would taste Czech. We asked them to tell us about their life in the Soviet Union. With tears in their eyes, they described the self-sacrifice and the patriotism of even the simplest Russians, their endurance and steadfast belief in eventual victory over the Nazis. They spoke about the profound feeling of brotherhood that reigned within the Soviet Union, the equality of the various nationalities and races, the fervor with which people performed even the hardest labor and the most dangerous tasks for their country; they described the solicitude of the Party and of the Soviet government, the friendly acceptance that they and o
ther refugees had enjoyed. We left deeply impressed.
Two days later, Rudolf brought home applications for membership in the Communist Party.
Ten years later, the old lady who had been our hostess confessed that nearly everything she and her husband told us during our visit had been untrue. They had suffered hard times in Russia. People had been afraid to talk to them. Black marketeering, collaboration, anti-Semitism were rampant. Many people died unnecessary deaths. But since they did not dare, for the most part, to guess at the cause of their suffering, they died blessing the Party and Stalin with their last breath.
Our conditioning for the revolution had begun in the concentration camps. Perhaps we had been most impressed by the example of our fellow prisoners, Communists who often behaved like beings of a higher order. Their idealism and Party discipline gave them a strength and an endurance that the rest of us could not match. They were like well-trained soldiers in a crowd of children.
But there were other things too. All survivors remember to this day the stubborn determination which dominated that time, the total concentration on a single goal, the end of the war. Life was not life in any proper sense; it was only a thrust in that one direction. All our thinking and doing justified itself by the prospect of the future. The present only existed to be overcome, somehow, anyhow.
Under a Cruel Star Page 6