Under a Cruel Star

by Helen Epstein

  Rudolf worked late almost every night and was often summoned to the Ministry on Sundays while I spent whole afternoons in the park, wheeling my baby in his carriage, envying the happy family clusters around me. Before Rudolf had taken the job at the Ministry we had never missed a good play, and both of us, especially Rudolf who was a gifted violinist, loved music. Now when I bought tickets to the theater or for a concert, he almost always called at the last minute to say he could not get away in time. Our child was growing up hardly knowing his father.

  Once, I managed to talk Rudolf into taking a week-end trip to the mountains. We were both avid skiers and there is nothing more beautiful than our mountains in the winter. But that Saturday the weather was against us. Barely a few miles out of Prague we got into a snowstorm and, by the time we reached the foothills, it was snowing so hard that we could not tell the road from the middle of a field. We moved at a snail’s pace, looking out a half-open door, trying to guess where we were. Suddenly Rudolf turned to me and said in amazement, “Would you believe it? For almost an hour now, I haven’t thought of foreign trade!”

  Much later, I came to wonder whether this insane workload was not intentional. No one who held a responsible government position had a free moment in which to verify how his work affected the everyday life of the ordinary person. Government and Party functionaries socialized only with each other; they saw only each other at their conferences, meetings, and councils; they judged the state of the country only from official papers and reports which were often inaccurate or completely fake. Because each of them concentrated so intensely on his own limited area of work, they lost perspective and any genuine understanding of the real needs and wishes of the people. Even if they had occasion to speak with someone outside their circle, that person usually did not feel free to complain or criticize. Rudolf was not the kind of man who inspired fear, but his belief in the rightness of what he was doing moved people, silenced them and, eventually isolated him.

  Gradually, I became Rudolf’s only link with the ordinary world. Except for one fierce argument over a serve I had bungled during a volley-ball match two weeks after our wedding, we had never had any of those personal conflicts that add zest to the best of marriages. Now we wasted most of the precious time we spent together in bitter, useless arguments about the political situation – useless, because Rudolf considered his statistics far more reliable than my day-to-day experiences and complaints, which he dismissed as narrow and prejudiced. People were well-off, he argued. Poverty was a thing of the past. No one was out of work. Yes, here and there, something went wrong. But everything would be straightened out eventually. Give it time. “Just wait a few years. You’ll see.”

  Late one night, the wife of the grocer at whose store my mother used to shop before the war knocked at our apartment door. In tears, she told us that the police had barged into their apartment, turned everything upside down, and had taken her husband away without telling her where or why. The grocer, a kind, jolly, very fat man, was also a well-known black marketeer, so it did not seem impossible to us that he had been arrested for good reason. But why had it been done in gangster fashion? Rudolf promised to find out what he could, and the woman went home somewhat relieved. The following day we found out that many small shopkeepers and artisans had been dragged away at the same time and that no one knew where they were or what they were accused of having done. Many of them waited in jail for months before they were finally tried by People’s Tribunals whose decisions were based not on our established legal system but on “class feeling,” and whose sentences were meted out in a completely haphazard way.

  The grocer’s arrest was the first event that jarred Rudolf as much as it did me. He was able to ascertain the whereabouts of the unlucky grocer after just a few days, and to inform his wife of them. But that was all. I think it was the first time that it dawned on Rudolf how precarious the rule of law and the dispensation of justice had become in our country.

  By this time, late in 1949, the Soviet Union had become our model. Yugoslavia had been officially declared a preserve of spies and traitors, and all our Ministries were being reorganized along more centralized lines. Rudolf’s job at the Ministry of Foreign Trade had been eliminated; he was now a deputy minister, in charge of trade with the West. The official newspapers declared that the class struggle was escalating but that we were not to worry since the Party was ever alert and watchful. Movie houses were showing films that featured saboteurs and spies trying to undermine the unity of the working class; bookstores were stocked with books about the Great Conspiracy against the Party and Comrade Stalin. We read about the uncanny cleverness of the enemy who was adept at disguising himself before the closest of colleagues and even his own family.

  No one was, by then, repeating the old slogan that any person who meant well would have an opportunity to develop his abilities and take part in building socialism. The Party had given up on persuasion and had instead taken up cadre evaluation. People sat up till late at night filling out forms that probed into the lives of third-generation ancestors. What a person knew, what kind of work he could do and how well, became irrelevant. The things that mattered were class-consciousness and class origin, attitude toward the New Order, and, most of all, devotion to the Soviet Union.

  The rationale was not at all complex. Every individual is a product of his class, education, upbringing, and environment. If your father had owned a notions store or a peanut stand, you were clearly the product of a private enterprise mentality and, therefore, could not be trusted. The way in which backgrounds were evaluated at the time sometimes produced comic results. I knew a man who, before the war, had owned a tiny yard-goods store in a small village and who had barely managed to feed his family. His shop had been nationalized and, as a former member of the petty bourgeoisie, he had been sent to work in a factory by way of reeducation. From that moment on, his children could proudly write “worker” in every questionnaire which asked for their father’s occupation and were thereby easily able to acquire positions and salaries of a kind that their bourgeois father had never dreamed possible. On the other hand, the son of Party ideologue and Minister Ladislav Stoll was, at first, refused admission to university and advised to go work in the coal mines since, as the son of a government official, he was not of worker or peasant origin.

  In the summer of 1949, Rudolf was preparing to go to London as head of a delegation that was to negotiate a trade agreement with England. It was an extremely difficult, precarious enterprise. The Soviet Union had, earlier, prohibited Czechoslovakia from participating in the Marshall Plan and viewed with suspicion all our dealings with the West. Any concessions that Rudolf made to the demands of the British could later be construed by the Party as intentional sabotage of our national interests or, at best, as incompetence. I did not know any details of the situation; I only saw that Rudolf was even more thoughtful and concerned than usual. Then, one evening, he came home in an altogether different mood. He said he had been assured a completely free hand in the upcoming negotiations and that the Party would consider any accord a success.

  Rudolf flew to London and then returned twice to Prague for consultations. I was happy to see him, but we did not talk much; his thoughts were elsewhere. When the trade agreement was finally signed and Rudolf returned home, President Gottwald summoned him to his private apartment, embraced him, and congratulated him on a job superbly done. On the side of the British the agreement had been negotiated by Harold Wilson, who later became a Labour prime minister; it was considered an important asset in the development of our trade with the West. Rudolf, who had returned home exhausted, could finally relax.

  The autumn that year was beautiful and warm, and Rudolf was so tired that I managed to talk him into taking a week’s vacation. We loaded the car and, without any specific destination in mind, set out for a drive through Bohemia. But the vacation was not a success. The beauty of the landscape, calm and restful, only intensified the apprehension which, by that time, almost ne
ver left me. For hours, we sat side by side in silence, but not in the way we had so often done in the past when we had felt so close to one another that there was no need to talk. Now we were silent out of fear that anything we said would betray our anxiety. I watched Rudolf’s tired profile as he drove and thought, what a wretched wife I am; instead of giving him support, I’m always pulling him back, discouraging him.

  Heda and Rudolf Margolius relaxing in the Bohemian countryside.

  We had put the top of the car down and were driving down deserted tree-lined country roads. On both sides, the sloping fields were engraved with the dark parallel lines of freshly-plowed furrows. I clearly remember one part of the road where the crowns of tall old trees intertwined above us like a shimmering golden net cast over the blue sky. I threw my head back, the wind hit my face, and suddenly I was struck with such a sure sense of impending disaster that it was as though we were hurtling down the leafy tunnel straight into destruction, as though death itself was waiting at the end of that peaceful country road. To this day my heart sinks whenever I look up in a car and, instead of the sky, see a vault of branches which the trees fold over my head in a gesture of despair.

  On the third day of our vacation, we reached the village where my old friend Martin, a former partisan who had helped hide me during the last months of the war, was staying in a cottage by a lake. We spent the night there, the water quietly splashing under our windows as though we were sleeping in a boat.

  The next morning Rudolf went for a walk in the woods, and Martin suggested that the two of us go out in the rowboat. When we had reached the middle of the lake, Martin stowed the oars and said soberly, “Now listen: you have to do everything possible to get your husband to leave his job. If you can’t find any other way, cause some scandal so that they fire him! If he stays there, he’s done for, that’s for sure. When I talk to him, I can’t understand how someone so smart can be so blind. The more he works, the better he does, the worse it’ll be. Everything he achieves will be turned against him. We’re running on the Russian track now and all the stops will be the same. They’ll start looking for scapegoats any day, especially among those people who have the genuine interests of the country at heart. Rudolf is made-to-order for the role.”

  That lonely rowboat in the middle of the lake, that terse, serious voice – it took me back to years before. Martin was not making small talk on an autumn morning. This was not a friendly warning, but an order from a commander of the partisans.

  “What about you, Martin?” I asked. “Are you looking out for yourself? Or are you mixed up in something again? Be careful! This isn’t Nazi Germany. It won’t be over in six years. This time you don’t stand a chance.”

  People like Rudolf, who staked their lives on their convictions, did not do so without deliberation. Theirs was an arduously-won faith that could not easily be shaken. They ascribed the steadily deteriorating quality of life in Czechoslovakia after the coup to the incompetence of the people on top, people who had been chosen for their positions because of their working-class background, and who often lacked both experience and professional qualifications. They were incapable – it was argued – of mastering the intensifying conflicts within our society which, in turn, were caused by increasing international tension. As late as 1950, I would hear people say, “The Soviets should take the situation in hand. If Stalin only knew what was going on here, he would step in and put an end to this mess!” Once the wife of a prewar Communist who had been arrested a few weeks before came to me for advice and actually wondered out loud whether she should turn to the Soviet Embassy for help.

  Those were the days of the Cold War. The Iron Curtain had come down and had cut us off from the rest of the world. Our newspapers printed every word that Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky uttered in his endless speeches at the United Nations but never mentioned that anything was said in reply. All we ever read about the West was news of strikes which, apparently, took place all the time and everywhere, and of the persecution of Communists. Once I was listening to the news on the radio and caught the word “Netherlands” I pricked up my ears but the news item was only that the Soviet Folk Dance Collective had enjoyed a great success in Amsterdam. That was the only bit of news from the West that we had had for months.

  The few books by Western authors that were being translated at the time – mainly works of fiction by Howard Fast, Stephen Heym, and Jack Lindsay – gave such a grim picture of life in the West that we could only conclude that the Party was right, that the West had reached the terminal stages of moral and economic decay.

  Very few people listened to foreign broadcasts such as Radio Free Europe or the BBC, partly out of fear, but mainly because the broadcasts were so effectively jammed that it was almost impossible to understand what was being said. Occasionally someone would catch a few words out of context, surmise the rest, and pass it on. That first bit became further distorted by repetition until people dismissed it with a wave of the hand, “Now you see how they lie!”

  We believed that another world war was just around the corner and that police surveillance had become the rule all over the world – not only in our own country. Throughout 1950 and 1951, the officially-proclaimed, ideologically-justified class war within Czechoslovakia intensified, and most of us believed that it was a necessary evil. We all knew that the regime had many internal enemies, that the black market and all sorts of other rackets were flourishing. When the arrests first started, it was generally assumed that the accused were all guilty of something. Few people at that time chose to believe that there was something basically wrong with our judicial system. After all, the accused almost invariably confessed.

  I remember the amazement with which I read reports of the trial of a group of priests accused of treason. Not only did they promptly confess to every crime with which they were charged, but they spoke like lecturers on Marxism, formulating their testimony in the purest Party jargon. One comrade explained the phenomenon to me in this way: while interrogating the accused, our investigators sought to reeducate them, and to clarify the goals and principles of the Party in such a manner that the accused would themselves understand how and why they were guilty. Such was the force of the Party’s truth, the comrade insisted, that, in the end, it won over even the enemy. Every government had an obligation to defend itself against its enemies. Just look at America and Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts! It was only when someone we knew well was arrested, someone we knew could not possibly have been guilty of any crime, that we began to pull our heads out of the sand.

  At first we would say, there must be some mistake. He’ll be held for questioning and then let go. It will all be clarified in no time.

  Then, when the person was not immediately released: I’ve known this man for years. He’s no traitor. Something shady’s going on here. It must be some kind of conspiracy masterminded by the West. They want to weaken the Party and cast suspicion on our best people. It won’t work. Truth will out.

  Finally, we would say nothing at all. Stunned, terrified silence was our only response. Only then did it begin to dawn on a few people that we were, in fact, the victims of a conspiracy, but hardly of one that was directed by the West.

  It was not until years later, when some of the people arrested in the early 1950s were released and cautiously “rehabilitated,” their innocence reluctantly proclaimed by the Party, that the whole picture became clear. One day in 1956, at a time when the “rehabilitated” had begun to be seen in the streets, I met my friend Pavel Eisler, who had never formally joined the Party but who had belonged to the earliest group of its enthusiasts and had worked in the Office of the President until 1951. He stopped short when he saw me, so upset that he could not say a word. For a few moments we just stood there staring at each other.

  Then he said, “I just saw a man from our office who was arrested in 1950. At the time I was so surprised. I thought: Who would have guessed? He seemed such a decent fellow, yet he was a traitor. Now, after six years,
he’s out of jail. And he was completely innocent! He looks twenty years older, his hair is gray, his teeth were all knocked out. And when they were taking him away, all I did was shake my head and wonder. Can you believe that? I didn’t even feel sorry for him! My God, what idiots we were!”

  That’s what we were, the worst kind of idiots.

  The more dignified and humane an image of man was drawn by the Party, the less did men themselves come to mean in society. The better and more joyous our lives appeared on the pages of the newspapers, the sadder they were in reality. The housing shortage became desperate. Often two or three families were crammed into one apartment, deprived of all comfort and privacy. In order to make room for the young, many retired people were forcibly moved to the country, sometimes into summer cottages situated in remote areas and unfit for year-round habitation. Many elderly people who did not belong to the working class were denied their old-age pensions and lived in dismal poverty.

  There were endless lines in front of stores. There were shortages of practically every household staple. Every few months, there were new rumors about an upcoming currency devaluation. People would panic, buying up anything they could find. The chaotic economy and the constant barrage of ideology drained all pleasure from honest work. Almost everyone was moonlighting for an often semi-legal second income and put in an appearance at his regular place of work just to rest up. Nationalized enterprises went steadily downhill. Our lives, permeated by insecurity, became hopeless drudgery. Suspicion became so prevalent that no one trusted anyone else. The enemy was no longer outside but within the Party as well; not even the comrades dared to speak out. Our whole world began to disintegrate. Even Rudolf’s optimism was gone by 1951, replaced by a driven self-punishing toil.