Nonetheless, it was at this meeting that I first discovered that the Party did not draw its members solely from the ranks of the working class, the intellectuals, the antifascists, and the proletarians to whom our capitalist society had never given a chance. I think I would not be far wrong in saying that these people were a minority. Much later, even official spokesmen for the Party admitted that the Party had been infiltrated – but by whom?
There were collaborators who guessed that their dubious wartime activities could best be concealed under loud proclamations of loyalty to progress and socialism; there were black marketeers and crooks who hoped that a Party card would help them protect illegal earnings; there were corrupt bureaucrats and, of course, the vast army of the “humiliated and the wronged” who, due to incompetence or laziness, had never achieved anything and knew that in the Party their shortcomings could be turned into assets. They guessed, correctly, that in an organization that relied on strict, mindless discipline, mediocrity and the inability to think independently would prove to be the highest virtues.
For them, a totalitarian regime is ideal. The State and the Party think for them, take care of them, and give them the opportunity for revenge against the people they have always envied. In a totalitarian society there is a perpetual demand for petty informers and spies. Devotion to the Party, servility, and obedience richly compensate for intelligence, initiative, and honesty.
Other kinds of people also joined the Party. A Party card, in fact, soon became an essential credential for the large number of men jockeying for positions as the managers of nationalized companies, farms, and factories or as custodians of property left behind by evicted German and Czechoslovak emigrés, whose numbers were swelling. A few years later, I happened to visit a “comrade” who had just returned from a two-year stint in a border region. His apartment was like a museum. I had never before seen so many exquisite antiques and paintings in a private collection. He told me, “When I left Prague, I had nothing except a little suitcase in hand. And now just look!”
The most respected Party members were the prewar professional revolutionaries, people who had never in their life performed any useful work, but who had never missed a meeting or a strike. They also knew how to address the crowds in words and tones that would carry them, when the time came, to the highest positions in the Party and government.
It was not long before the concierges – the female custodians of most apartment houses in Czechoslovakia – became the backbone of the Party. For years they ruled with an iron fist not only over their own buildings but over entire streets. Their lives became an intoxicating orgy of spying and informing, which sometimes involved outright blackmail. Woe to the person who incurred their displeasure! Even the highest Party functionaries were careful not to drop cigarette ash on the staircase. Nor would an opportunity be missed to slip Comrade Concierge – who was usually also the local Party cell leader – some small gift. Just how important a position the concierges attained during the 1950s can be judged from a remark one of them made to me then.
“I think Comrade President Zapotocky must have been a concierge once himself,” she said. “He has such sympathy for us!”
My dear woman, I thought to myself, Comrade President never in his life stooped to anything more strenuous than playing the accordion. At the time he was young, being a concierge was hard, honest work!
Yes, the Party was right. Many unsavory people had wormed their way into its ranks. Later though, we would wonder whether those people had not been the true core of the Party all along, whether the idealistic intellectuals and workers had not been the outsiders and infiltrators cited in Party propaganda. But even many of these honest idealists underwent a transformation when the Party seized power and began to dole out jobs. It is often said that power corrupts, but I think that what corrupted people in our country was not power alone but the fear that accompanied it. As soon as someone gained power, he became obsessed by the fear of losing it, because to lose power in our Communist society meant not a step down the social ladder to a former position, but a fall far below it. The higher one climbed, the harder one fell. The more one’s power grew, the more dangerous its loss became, and the greater one’s fear. And power sustained by fear is an infinitely cruel and dangerous combination.
I must confess, after saying all this, that for at least two years after the war was over, I did not pay much attention to public affairs; I had my hands full just finding my way back to everyday life. I spent whole months standing in lines in government offices waiting for official pieces of paper which would prove I was alive. The Germans had destroyed most of the archives; in order to get one new document, one needed to provide three old ones; in order to get hold of those three, one had to provide five others; and to find those five – it was endless. Nor was it easier to obtain other essential things: food, clothing, furniture. At the same time, I was standing on other lines in other offices, trying to find out what had happened to members of my family during the war. All my questions produced the same answers. Shot in Minsk. Perished in Maidanek. Died in Mauthausen. Deported to Auschwitz. Unaccounted for. Missing. Missing.
I would walk through the streets of Prague as though I were walking through a mine field where, with every step, the earth could open up under my feet. This was the street where I used to walk with my mother. This was the pastry shop to which my father would take me secretly on Sunday mornings for ice cream, and my mother would not know. This was the building where I first saw a flag with a swastika. This was the street through which our transport walked on the way to the train station, when people on the sidewalks stopped and took off their hats and the SS men shouted at them, “Bewegung! Move on or we’ll take you with us!”
I was unable to take the advice of people who kept telling me that the only way back to life was to forget. I wanted to save everything, to cover up nothing, to pretty up nothing, to keep things inside me the way they had been, and to live with them. I wanted to live because I was alive, not just because by some accident I was not dead.
At the beginning of 1946, I found a job with a small prestigious publishing house as an art editor. I designed book jackets, assembled illustrations and reproductions, drew and painted, negotiated with writers and artists. I did things that fascinated me and that I thoroughly enjoyed. The publisher was an older gentleman, who taught me more about literature and art than I could have learned at school. We spent countless hours in museums and libraries and, at times, just rambling through the streets of the city where he knew every stone, the history of every building, sculpture, or painting.
I had plenty of time for these excursions because, even then, Rudolf was so involved in his work at the Institute for Industrial Development that he often came home late in the evening and then sat reading even later into the night. He was a lawyer, but now, with his usual diligence, he was studying economics, trying to make up for the time he had lost during the war. I grew accustomed to falling asleep in our tiny apartment with the desk lamp lighting up a stack of books on the table. To this day, when I think of Rudolf, I see him sitting there quietly, the dim light outlining his head.
We were both so wrapped up in our work that we paid little attention to what was going on around us. I only remember that wherever one turned in that year after the war, in homes or restaurants or even in the street, whenever two people began to talk, they immediately began to argue politics. Before the first election, in May of 1946, someone had scrawled on the fence near our house, “VOTE COMMUNIST OR AT LEAST SOCIAL DEMOCRATS.” The slogan amused me. I voted for the Social Democrats because that was the way my father had voted and because Rudolf’s father had been a Social Democratic Party official. I was proud to carry on a family tradition. The Communists emerged strongest in the Parliament, even without my vote.
That autumn, I was thinking about enrolling at university, but I was pregnant and the doctor shook his head. “You have to take it easy,” he said. “You’re still weak. Why in God’s name are al
l of you young people in such a hurry about everything?”
As it turned out, I had to spend the last few weeks of my pregnancy in bed. And then one Monday evening in February, a completely flustered Rudolf took me to the hospital. Until Thursday morning when my son was finally born, Rudolf wandered around the apartment and then through the streets and then through the hospital corridors, unkempt and in need of a shave, trailing rose petals from a bouquet that did not survive the waiting.
Ask me what was the most beautiful moment of my life and I can tell you exactly: it was when the nurse brought in my baby with his hair brushed into a cowlick, with long eyelashes, and eyebrows that looked painted on his soft little face, and said, “Here you have one handsome little boy!” The whole world lit up and burst into song, the bare hospital room filled with the scents of paradise, and suddenly my father and mother and grandmother appeared beside my bed, smiling. I pressed that little head close to me and said to myself, differently than I had ever said it before, “Life... life...”
I resumed my work not long after that, but I worked at home so that I would not have to leave my baby. I withdrew completely into my private world. Outside it, things were changing, but I paid little attention. Rudolf would come home from work later and later. He regretted that he was not able to spend more time with his son but he seemed satisfied with his work and, when I look back on this time, it seems the most peaceful and contented period of our lives. Yet this would have been our last opportunity to gather our few belongings, bundle them up, and run as fast as we could from that light in the East that was rapidly becoming a conflagration.
Once or twice a week, Mrs. Machova would come to take the baby for a walk. I used those half days to take sketches I had finished over to my publisher, to bring home new work, and to take a look at life outside my home. One day at the end of February, 1948, I got ready to go out. I was in a particularly good mood. I put on my prettiest coat and a new hat and sauntered off through the streets of Prague. Toward the center of town, I came up against crowds of people, all marching in the direction of Old Town Square, and I thought sourly, Another demonstration! Why do people continue to find this kind of thing amusing? And in this freezing weather!
The intersection at the foot of St. Wenceslas Square was completely blocked by factory workers. The men stepped politely out of my way, calling out pleasant, flattering things in the charming way that men in Prague have. I smiled back at them and pushed my way through to Narodni Avenue.
As I entered the publisher’s office, the old gentleman was standing at the window, looking down at the crowded street. He did not even turn around to greet me. He said, very quietly, “This is a day to remember. Today, our democracy is dying.” I stood next to him, suddenly afraid. Out in the street, the voice of Klement Gottwald began thundering from the loudspeakers.
Every year, at the end of winter, when the air is still cold but already tinged with the promise of spring, I spend an afternoon with myself alone. Springtime has always been a time for remembrance.
There were the springtimes in Hut before the war, when people came out of their houses and into their gardens, airing out striped feather beds and turning the damp soil. Our neighbor, Grandfather Pleticha, never seemed to go back inside. Whenever I looked over into his garden I would see him standing there in an old short jacket, his hands in his pockets and a cloth cap above the weathered face of an old Czech puppet like the ones Matej Kopecky used to carve a century ago. I almost expected him to sink roots and start budding. From the corner window I had been used to seeing a bare slope covered with black trees. Then, one morning, I looked out and a green wind seemed to have blown through the forest. A few days later, the cobwebs of branches were hidden in a profusion of fresh, green leaves. People would stand outside their homes warming themselves in the sunshine and, year after year, they would say, “Isn’t it beautiful?” as though they had never seen it before.
Then there were the springtimes in the Lodz Ghetto, where not a blade of grass would grow nor a single bird fly; the stench of quicklime used as disinfectant repelled all living things. But even in the Lodz Ghetto the wind would sometimes bring with it the smell of soil, of life. Far away somewhere, really just beyond the Ghetto wall, there were fields where the Germans grew wheat.
Our last spring in Lodz, my father volunteered to work in those fields, and I worried about him. One day, I no longer remember how, I wangled a free afternoon and a pass to go after him. The sun was shining, and I saw him ahead of me, walking slowly behind the plow, bent under the strain. I saw for the first time how terribly he had aged, how pale he was, and how withered by hunger and humiliation. We stood together for a moment in the sunshine, and then my father took off his cap and said, shyly, “Now, in spring, my heart feels so heavy...” It was only many years later that I understood why he had chosen to do this work which was far more strenuous than what he had been doing before. Each day he had to walk a long distance before reaching the fields. Then, from dawn to dusk, he had to drag himself behind the plow, the heavy clogs on his feet sticking in the clay. But there he was alone with what he loved most, the freshly-turned earth, the open sky, the clean breeze. On the eve of his death, he had returned to those things from which he had come.
Springtimes in Prague – who could forget them? Forsythias on the Letna Plain. The flowering hills of Strahov. The chestnuts of Zofin. The gulls on Jirasek Bridge. There is no other city like Prague. It is not only the beauty of the buildings, of the towers and bridges, though it is that too. They rise up from the slopes and riverbanks in such harmony that it seems nature created them alongside its trees and flowers. But what is unique about Prague is the relation between the city and its people. Prague is not an uncaring backdrop which stands impassive, ignoring happiness and suffering alike. Prague lives in the lives of her people and they repay her with the love we usually reserve for other human beings. Prague is not an aggregate of buildings where people are born, work, and die. She is alive, sad, and brave, and when she smiles with spring, her smile glistens like a tear.
The spring of 1948 began dismally, with the death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk. He was the son of the first Czechoslovak president, Thomas G. Masaryk and, like his father, a symbol of the cultural values and humanistic traditions of our country. Many people believed that his presence in the new government – headed by the Communists – indicated that our road toward socialism might not, after all, deviate too far from the principles on which our Republic had been founded.
During the Nazi Occupation, Jan Masaryk had been Foreign Minister of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London. He had earned great respect from the Allied leaders and was enormously popular at home. Throughout the war he gave regular radio talks that were broadcast by the BBC; he had a way of giving people new hope and courage in the darkest moments of their lives, and they never forgot it. Whenever he appeared in public, people rallied around him and he exchanged jokes with them as though they were old friends.
Now, one morning less than a month after the Communist coup, his dead body was found on the pavement below the windows of his apartment in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Without disclosing the results of the autopsy or official investigation, the government announced that Jan Masaryk had killed himself in a fit of depression. Few people believed he was a suicide. Rumors of murder began to circulate immediately, and there were many theories about his death.
A good friend of ours, Pavel Kavan, was probably the last person to have seen Masaryk alive – except, possibly, for the unknown visitors who may have come later. Kavan, an official of the Foreign Ministry, said that Masaryk had seemed his usual self, neither unusually upset nor depressed, and had asked Kavan to return the next morning to pick up some documents. Another friend of ours, Stanislav Marek, who had known Masaryk for years, insisted that the Foreign Minister was prone to severe depressions, and that no one who really knew him well was surprised at his suicide.
The mystery of Jan Masaryk’s death was never solv
ed. But whether he had become too great an obstruction to Soviet plans and was consequently put out of their way by experts, or whether he took his own life out of despair over the future of his country, one thing was clear: the Communist coup or, as the Party came to call it, “Victorious February,” was the cause of his death.
Three or four months later, over dinner one evening, Rudolf told me that he had been offered the position of cabinet chief in the Ministry of Foreign Trade. The prospect scared me. By that time we all realized that the coup had been a fundamental upheaval, with tremendous consequences for the whole country, a revolution that some people had met with cheers and others with dread. Many of our friends had left Czechoslovakia for lives abroad; others were staying but lived with a feeling of constant apprehension. Everything around us was falling apart or being torn down. I knew that the great change I had read about in those pamphlets had finally come, but I wondered whether it would be a change for the better.
I wanted Rudolf to wait a while before he said yes or no to the Ministry. What if things took a direction he could not support? What if all that idealism should fail in practice? As an ordinary Party member he could, perhaps, voice disagreement, resign or protest. But I knew enough about Party practice by then to realize that the people who occupied positions in the higher echelon of government or Party had little margin for dissent. “Whoever is not with us is against us,” ran the slogan: either one belonged, body and soul, to the Party, or one was considered a traitor.
Under a Cruel Star Page 8