Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  When the war finally ended, our joy soon changed into a sense of anticlimax and a yearning to fill the void that this intensity of expectation and exertion of will had left behind. A strong sense of solidarity had evolved in the concentration camps, the idea that one individual’s fate was in every way tied to the fate of the group, whether that meant the group of one’s fellow prisoners, the whole nation, or even all of humanity. For many people, the desire for material goods largely disappeared. As much as we longed for the comforts of life, for good food, clothing, and homes, it was clear to us that these things were secondary, and that our happiness and the meaning of our lives lay elsewhere. I remember how some of our fellow citizens for whom the war years had been a time of acquisition and hoarding, stared when we did not try to retrieve stolen property, to apply for restitution, to seek inheritances from relatives. This was true not only of Rudolf and myself but of any number of people who had come to identify their own well-being with the common good and who, rather logically, ended up in the most ideologically alluring political party – that of the Communists.

  The years of imprisonment had yet another paradoxical effect. Although we continually hoped for freedom, our concept of freedom had changed. Shut up behind barbed wire, robbed of all rights including the right to live, we had stopped regarding freedom as something natural and self-evident. Gradually, the idea of freedom as birthright became blurred. By the end of their time in the camps, many prisoners came to accept the view that freedom is something that has to be earned and fought for, a privilege that is awarded, like a medal. It is hardly possible for people to live for so many years as slaves in everyday contact with fascists and fascism without becoming somewhat twisted, without contracting a trace of that dry rot unwittingly and unwillingly. Usually, the reasoning went something like this: if, for the purpose of building a new society, it is necessary to give up my freedom for a time, to subsume something I cherish to a cause in which I strongly believe, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. In any case, we are a lost generation. We all might have died uselessly in the camps. Since we did survive, we want to dedicate what is left of our lives to the future.

  This streak of martyrdom was stronger than was generally understood. People felt chosen by destiny to sacrifice themselves, a feeling that was reinforced by a strong sense of guilt that characterized many who had survived the camps. Why was I alive and not my father, my mother, my friend? I owed them something. They had died in place of me. For their sake I had to build a world in which this could never happen again.

  This was where the misconception lay: in the idea that Communism was the one system under which it could never happen again. Of course we knew about the Communism of the thirties in the Soviet Union, but that was an era of cruelty that had ended long ago, the kind of crisis out of which all great change is born. Who, today, would condemn democracy for the Terror of the Jacobins after the French Revolution?

  The most eagerly embraced belief of the time was that no national or racial oppression could exist under Communism. Factual evidence to the contrary was hard to come by, and more persuasive than any piece of propaganda were the fairy tales of life in the Soviet Union spread by Czech Communists such as our middle-aged friends who had spent the war years there.

  Many of those people lied with an eye to being rewarded for their loyalty once the Party took over, but some lied because they believed, despite their own experience, that the victory of the working class was the supreme good, a goal which sanctified all means. An ideal could not be defeated by mere facts and, anyway, whatever had not yet been accomplished would be accomplished in the future. All faces were turned to the distant horizon.

  This frame of mind also helps to explain why, even years later, after all the horrors of Stalinism had become public knowledge, many old Communists could not give up their discredited faith. For them, the struggle for the ideal took on the meaning of a struggle for personal redemption. It was a victory over one’s own smallness, an unselfish subordination of an individual’s interests to the good of all society. To give up this ideal would be to disclaim the meaning of one’s whole life.

  This tendency toward self-sacrifice seemed to me extremely dangerous, even then. A good society is one in which everyone can live well, myself included. People who are ready to sacrifice their own well-being for some lofty goal are likely to exact a similar sacrifice from others who are not so willing. A political system which cannot function without martyrs is a bad, destructive system.

  Those endless discussions about the economy! I could never understand the arguments properly. I only know that Rudolf and his friends were convinced that putting our economy back on its feet was their first and most important concern, and that it could be done only through socialist economics as they understood it. They certainly did not conceive of this process as a subordination of the Czech economic system to Soviet needs. Right from the start, while he was still working for the Czechoslovak Chamber of Industry, Rudolf concentrated on trade relations with the West, and later, as a Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, he originated the so-called Dollar Offensive and other programs.

  Today it is easy to look back, to judge, and to condemn, but I am sure that the mistakes that Rudolf and people like him made were errors of judgment, caused by flaws of intellect rather than flaws of character. The intentions were good, but of course intentions do not count. Sometimes evil intentions produce good results and good intentions produce the exact opposite – everything depends on the context. If the context is good, even the most ill-intentioned actions may be viewed in the light of history as forgivable mistakes. Yet, when a man chooses a political system that turns out to be evil and incapable of correcting its errors, each one of his blunders may later be viewed as an unforgiveable crime. In a democracy, mistakes can eventually be rectified and people who perpetrate stupidity or even atrocities are regarded, with the passage of time, more with tolerance and pity than with hate. Two things about our situation in postwar Czechoslovakia should not be forgotten. First, no one except maybe the Soviet agents doubted that we would be able to run our own show, in a way that was quite different from the Russian totalitarian model. A “national road to socialism” was basic to our thinking, even to the thought of Klement Gottwald, the secretary general of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who was encouraged to believe in it by Stalin himself. Marshall Tito, who had introduced a special brand of Communism in Yugoslavia, was still a hero at the time, and following his example in our own country seemed a real possibility.

  Second was the degree to which membership in the Communist Party, very much like belonging to a religious order, determined our lives. Party discipline demanded that we constantly analyze ourselves, our thoughts, our wishes, our inclinations – and whenever we discovered some discrepancy between the commandments of the Party and our own opinions, blame it on our bourgeois background, our antiquated reasoning, our intellectual decadence, or misguided education. When a person became a Communist he wanted to be a good Communist. We believed we were building on the ruins of a system that had failed but that had left a deep imprint on our way of thinking. We were, we thought, burdened with obsolete ideas, prejudices, weaknesses. Why had we surrendered to Hitler? Why had we allowed ourselves to be locked up in concentration camps and prisons? Because we were weak, spoiled, degenerate. If ever we wished to achieve anything, we had to change. Communism was the eternal ideal of humanity, we could not doubt the ideal, only ourselves.

  It was an insidious process and as old as the world. Had it not been for the war and the overwhelming need for change, we would have seen through it easily. But when people come to reject everything and to doubt everything, it only means they doubt themselves and their ability to cope with the problems which face them – and the Party was prepared to provide the confidence that our war experiences had destroyed.

  The horrors of the Occupation had taken their toll of everyone. Tens of thousands of Czechs had been imprisoned in jails and camps, had died in Gest
apo torture chambers, had been executed. The Nazis had proclaimed the Slavs racially inferior, unfit for higher education, capable only of performing menial tasks for the master race. Universities had been closed during the war and young people forcibly drafted for hard labor in the most heavily-bombed regions of Germany. The result was a sudden loss of personal and national identity. Many good Czechs began to muse about who they really were, wondering if one could even speak of a Czech nation. After all, Czechoslovakia had only existed as a modern state since 1918.

  The war had uprooted everything we thought we knew about life, people, history, ourselves; everything we had learned in school, from our parents, from books. The democratic government of Thomas Masaryk had instilled in us the certainty that some things could no longer happen. We had listened with only half an ear when our history teachers discussed torture or the persecution of innocent people. Those things could only have happened a long time ago, in the dark ages. When it happened in our time and in a form far worse than we could imagine, it felt like the end of the world. It seemed to us that we were witnessing a total break in the evolution of mankind, the complete collapse of man as a rational being.

  For Czech Jews, the blow to identity was even worse, especially for those like Rudolf and myself whose families had considered themselves Czech for generations. Perhaps it seems odd that, before Hitler, it had never once occurred to me that I was different from other people. Rudolf once said, “When I was a child, I used to love all those books by Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, and I always imagined how I, too, would fight and fence and perform great deeds. It only occurs to me now that had I lived at that time I would have been rotting in some ghetto.” After Hitler’s Occupation, we were not Czechs anymore, not citizens, not students, not even human beings. Our value sank beneath the level even of cattle, because even cattle had to be fed. In Auschwitz, Jews became nothing more than pieces of junk that were burned in bulk in the incinerator.

  Throughout history, there have been Jews who hated themselves for what they were made to suffer, for being the perennial focus of evil and violence wherever they were. Now we wondered, how much more difficult would it have been for Hitler had there been no Jews? How many Germans had joined the Nazi Party simply because it gave them the opportunity to snatch a share of Jewish property, to vent their frustrations? Maybe the Jews by their very existence had helped the Nazis to power more than anything else.

  The Communists – even the Jews who were Communists – were in a vastly better psychological state. They suffered for an idea, for something they had chosen, not for what they were. Also, they knew what to expect from the fascists. The collapse of the old order only served to confirm their convictions. Their world was not turned upside down like ours, but moved quite logically in the direction in which they fully expected the bourgeoisie to lead it. The Nazis had always portrayed the Soviet Union as their most dangerous enemy. Eventually we came to believe that Communism was the very opposite of Nazism, a movement that would restore all the values that Nazism had destroyed, most of all the dignity of man and the solidarity of all human beings. It came to seem that only another revolution could undo what the first had done.

  That I myself did not succumb to the lure of ideology was certainly not because I was smarter than Rudolf but because I was a woman, a being much closer to reality and the basic things of life than he was. I was more interested in what was happening around me in the present, among the people I loved, than in the foggy spheres of ideology. Rudolf could decide on the basis of statistics – mostly falsified, of course – that under Communism people lived a better and happier life. I saw from close-up and with my own eyes that this was not true.

  A few months after the war was over, I took a trip to the forgotten little village near Benesov which was my father’s birthplace. It was a long trip, first by train, then by bus, and I had plenty of time for memories.

  My parents and I had once gone there in the winter to visit my grandmother. I had been quite small then, there had been lots of snow, and my grandmother’s cottage had been warm and fragrant with burning wood. Her spotted puppy had played with me, newly hatched chicks had peeped from a bin under her bed, and my grandmother had served us cake and huge walnuts. My father had taken me for a walk in the fields to show me where, as a child, he had once minded the geese. It was nearly dark when we returned; the pond was icing over and my grandmother was waiting for us on the porch, weeping because, while we were out, my father’s sister had given birth to a baby girl on their farm not far away. Grandmother said that the baby was beautiful and that she would be called Marta like my mother. When Marta was only a few years old, she died in a concentration camp just like her parents, her brothers and sisters, and her grandmother.

  I did not visit the farm. It had been taken over by strangers after the war. My grandmother’s cottage looked neglected. Everything in it seemed even smaller than before. A kind old neighbor let me in and showed me where everything had happened. “See?” she said. “Here’s where your grandmother set down her cup of coffee just before the Germans came. And here she sat with me for a while and I told her, ‘Mrs. Bloch, don’t be afraid...’”

  I know there was nothing anyone could do. But they were taking away an 86-year-old grandmother to a horrible death, and the village where she had lived all her life, where everybody loved her, had just looked on. The only thing anyone had had to say was, “Mrs. Bloch, don’t be afraid...”

  I hesitated for a long time before I decided to sign the application for Party membership. I knew I would have trouble with the discipline. I hated meetings, and I was not at all interested in an active political life. I wanted to work, to study, to have a baby, to catch up on everything the war years had deprived me of. Why would I want to spend my evenings at meetings? All my life I had had trouble marching in closed ranks. The cheers of crowds, their shouted slogans, made me shiver. Right from the start, I took a dislike to the word “masses” which jumped out at me from every pamphlet I read. Whenever I saw or heard it, I had a vision of an endless flock of sheep, an undulating sea of bent backs and hung heads and the monotonous movement of chewing jowls. I hated the hysterical adulation of Stalin, the bombastic phrases of political oratory as well as the tinkle of medals and military decorations that covered the pot bellies of Soviet officers. But, I told myself, these were all unimportant details, quite suitable, after all, for the unsophisticated Russians with their history of czarist pomp.

  In Czechoslovakia, it would all be different. We would not be building socialism in a backward society under conditions of imperialist intervention and inner turmoil, but at peace, in an industrially advanced country, with an intelligent, well-educated population. We would leap over a whole epoch.

  Still, I did not feel like getting involved in politics. I kept saying to myself, “All I want is an ordinary, quiet life.” But I came to realize that a quiet, simple life is neither ordinary nor easily attained. In order to be able to live and work in peace, to raise children, to enjoy the small and great joys life can offer, you must not only find the right partner, choose the right occupation, respect the laws of your country and your own conscience but, most importantly, you must have a solid social foundation on which to build such a life. You have to live in a social system with whose fundamental principles you agree, under a government you can trust. You cannot build a happy private life in a corrupt society anymore than you can build a house in a muddy ditch. You have to lay a foundation first.

  Rudolf used to laugh and say, “I never thought you’d be one of those people who’re neither hot or cold. If you sit on the fence now, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life!”

  That was the first mistake.

  And then, “If you find you really don’t belong in the Party, you can always resign.”

  That was the second mistake.

  Finally one night I sat down at a Party meeting of the local organization with people who to this day call one another “Comrade.” I rather liked that fo
rm of address. I liked the idea that people from different countries, speaking different languages, representing different races and cultures, could meet anywhere in the world and by calling one another “Comrade” recognize that although they had not met before and could not easily communicate, they shared certain things that they had chosen consciously and freely.

  But that first meeting depressed me. Among those present was my old acquaintance from the Housing Authority, Mr. Boucek, along with another man who, it was said, had been jailed by the Germans for black marketeering and who was now styling himself as a former political prisoner, almost a national martyr, who had “fought against fascism.” Most of the people present were at least twice my age and I was relieved when a young man with a full beard arrived to lecture us on The Foundations of Marxism. His speech was a collection of platitudes and a few cautious, underhanded attacks on President Masaryk that made me furious. I was very troubled by the time he had finished, but then an older worn-out man, a bricklayer, got up to speak.

  “This is all very nice,” he said, “but let me tell you something about real life.” He then talked about years of drudgery and poverty alternating with years of unemployment and misery, and finished by explaining what he expected from the future. He spoke slowly and groped for words, but his ideas seemed remarkably clear and to the point. On my way home, I said to myself, “One man like him is worth a hundred Mr. Bouceks and yes, yes, I am on the right side. Life is never simple. What is good is never entirely good, and evil is rarely evil through and through. I shall not permit myself to become discouraged.”