My Crazy Century

by Ivan Klíma

  These were difficult conversations, and I tried to cut them as short as possible. Freedom of the word and expression, I tried to assure these writers, was taken for granted. There was no force that could limit someone’s freedoms. The telephone (at least at that time) did not permit one to see the face of one’s interlocutor, but I imagined I could see the uncertainty in their faces: How could it possibly happen that suddenly everyone was permitted? This was against all their experiences, even common sense. Fortunately, I was difficult to reach at home.

  Someone from among the group of students striking in the School of Humanities of Charles University invited me to a discussion and introduced me as a banned writer. I was asked to say something about how I had supported myself and how we smuggled our manuscripts abroad.

  Finally, the students asked me to accompany them to northern Bohemia to meet with the workers. We agreed to go first thing the next day.

  From the School of Humanities, it was only a brief walk to the School of Performing Arts, so I went to see Nanda. I bought her some food, since I’d heard from her husband that she hadn’t been home for several days. It turned out to be unnecessary because, in their sudden revolutionary fervor, people had been bringing the students more food than they could consume.

  I went straight to the classroom where students were cranking out slogans, proclamations, and posters as if on an assembly line. Nanda was excited, and when I asked her if she wanted to go home for at least one night, she said she wasn’t about to lounge about when something so marvelous was going on.

  I read the slogans on the posters and signs: CZECHS, COME WITH US! STUDENTS OF ALL DEPARTMENTS, UNITE! DOWN WITH THE CPČ! END THE RULE OF ONE PARTY! THIS COUNTRY IS OURS!

  Scarcely had I arrived home when I received a call from the Central Students’ Strike Committee, which had convened at the School of Performing Arts. They wanted my advice concerning an important matter. Could I come back? I had no idea what it could be, but they were wisely avoiding any sort of telephone conversation. I said I could be there in thirty minutes.

  On this visit—unlike my visit an hour earlier to the same building —I was met by a guard who checked my ID. Then I was led across a courtyard and up and down stairs, and at another entrance I was transferred to another guard. It was all impressively conspiratorial. Finally, I was let into a room where a committee was in session; at its head was my nephew Martin. He welcomed me and said they needed to establish that the prime minister of the government, Alexander Adamec, was a member of the presidium of the Communist Party. I said yes. I waited for another question, but none was forthcoming.

  On my way home again, I kept running into people coming from a protest demonstration. They were carrying bundles of banners as well as signs, many of which I had seen shortly before spread out on the floor and tables in Nanda’s classroom.

  I noticed that people were stopping or at least greeting one another. In the tram, I asked an older woman holding a small flag how it had been.

  She said that Dubček and Havel had spoken and, had Masaryk been alive, he would have definitely been on the balcony as well.

  This striking image stuck in my mind.

  Of course, it was a time of striking images and unexpected changes (and metamorphoses), and, just as in a real drama, the tension and uncertainty were increasing.

  The improvisation on the part of the victors, who were unprepared for victory, and the helplessness of the defeated, who could not imagine that over the course of a few days the structure that had been prophesied to endure for eternity would collapse, stood behind this remarkable, bloodless transformation.

  The unexpected development of events also led to a strange compromise, which resulted in the Communist parliament unanimously electing Václav Havel president of the republic, and Havel appointing the Communist Marián Čalfa prime minister. As the brewmaster in Havel’s play Audience says, “Them’s the paradoxes of life, right?”

  The most important thing, however, was that the heavens of freedom, imperceptible only a short time ago, had finally opened before us.

  EPILOGUE

  Most of my life up to now, I have lived without freedom. This lack of freedom assumed different forms and different intensities. Sometimes it was a matter of one’s very existence, other times prison, and other times only the loss of a job and constant police persecution. To my discredit, for several years I had been a member of the party, the party that had this lack of freedom on its conscience, the party that had enthroned terror and was responsible for one of the most loathsome periods of our history. When I understood this (fortunately, fairly early), I did everything in my power to reestablish this freedom.

  I gradually came to realize that there were two kinds of freedom, internal and external. One can behave unfreely even in free circumstances, and one can behave freely (with all the risks it entails) in unfree circumstances. I believe that for almost my entire adult life I tried to behave like a free person; I wrote about the world not the way I was ordered to but the way I perceived and experienced it.

  Now I could choose many paths upon which to continue in life. I was offered various appointments, including membership in newly arising parties. I rejected them all. I had left behind me the brief period of my life when I believed that the duty of each person who did not want to waste his own life was to try to save the world. The world did not need saving; humanity did not need the prophets who, until recently, had led it to unimaginable heights. It needed decency, work, honor, and humility.

  I wanted to keep doing what I knew how, at least a little. To write.

  ESSAYS

  Ideological Murderers

  History can be seen as a series of bloody acts to which entire nations often fall victim. In some cities or areas humiliated during wartime, every living creature, including cattle, was exterminated. Sometimes, however, the slaughter following a victorious battle was carried out by the celebrating soldiers, and their behavior has been metaphorically described as “drunk with blood.” It is a sort of afterglow of battle during which “drunken” men, before they sober up, carry out even more devastation. The occupying German forces would continue their destruction of conquered territory in Poland, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, where soldiers often assassinated, burned alive, or hanged the inhabitants they considered defiant.

  In the slaughter of the Jews, there was something even more appalling. This had no connection with soldiers who had survived the moral peril of battle and continued killing in rage and ecstasy. It was a carefully planned operation, the goal of which was to destroy an entire, precisely defined group of citizens in the shortest amount of time, without regard to sex, age, profession, creed, or religion. Thousands of men and women, officials, guards, cold-blooded killers, sadists, and obedient administrators participated in this slaughter, and they were clearly not in the condition of a soldier drunk with blood. They had days, weeks, and months to consider what they were doing. They painstakingly—and soberly—carried out orders, whatever they were, whether they impinged on their emotions or perhaps were in conflict with whatever remnant of morality and conscience they had.

  A similar slaughter, just as senseless and cold-blooded, took place two decades later in the Soviet Union. Certain individuals or entire groups, often chosen at random—there was a quota of enemies that had to be annihilated—were loaded onto trucks and executed somewhere in secrecy. Those who were not murdered outright were carted off to one of thousands of Siberian camps, where most of them, under the leadership of similar hatchet men, sadists, or obedient administrators, perished.

  Where did so many people, who were suddenly willing to commit such villainy, come from?

  Several years after the war when I was sojourning in Poland, I dug up the memoirs of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I’ve never read a book so many times as this dry, matter-of-fact record of mass murder. I don’t think I was the only one fascinated by this memoir. It inspired the French novelist Robert Merle when
he was writing Death Is My Trade. Today Merle’s novel, along with the Auschwitz commandant’s memoirs, has been almost forgotten, overshadowed by the more recent massacres in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia or the murders committed by Muslim terrorists and other fanatics. I believe, however, that there are few texts that demonstrate the degree to which one can be driven by blind obedience to an aberrant doctrine, when the fanaticized mind enables a person to concede responsibility for his actions and suppresses his last tremor of conscience.

  In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews arrived from Upper Silesia. All of them were to be exterminated. They were led from the ramp across the meadow, later named section B-II of Birkenau, to the farmhouse called Bunker I. Aumeir, Palitzsch, and a few other block leaders led them and spoke to them as one would in casual conversation, asking them about their occupations and their schooling in order to fool them. After arriving at the farmhouse they were told to undress. At first they went very quietly into the rooms where they were supposed to be disinfected. At that point some of them became suspicious and started talking about suffocation and extermination. Immediately a panic started. Those still standing outside were quickly driven into the chambers, and the doors were bolted shut. In the next transport those who were nervous or upset were identified and watched closely at all times. As soon as unrest was noticed these troublemakers were inconspicuously led behind the farmhouse and killed with a small-caliber pistol, which could not be heard by the others. . . .

  Many women hid their babies under piles of clothing. . . . The little children cried mostly because of the unusual setting in which they were being undressed. But after their mothers or the Sonderkommando encouraged them, they calmed down and continued playing, teasing each other, clutching a toy as they went into the gas chamber.

  I also watched how some women who suspected or knew what was happening, even with the fear of death all over their faces, still managed enough strength to play with their children and talk to them lovingly. Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand to help the smallest ones over the rough ground, passed by me very slowly. She stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, “How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?” . . .

  As the doors were being shut, I saw a woman trying to shove her children out of the chamber, crying out, “Why don’t you at least let my precious children live?” . . .

  According to Himmler’s orders, Auschwitz became the largest human killing center in all of history. When he gave me the order personally in the summer of 1941 to prepare a place for mass killings and then carry it out, I could never have imagined the scale, or what the consequences would be. Of course, this order was something extraordinary, something monstrous. However, the reasoning behind the order of this mass annihilation seemed correct to me. At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out. I could not allow myself to form an opinion as to whether this mass extermination of the Jews was necessary or not. At that time it was beyond my frame of mind. Since the Führer himself had ordered “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” there was no second guessing for an old National Socialist, much less an SS officer. “Führer, you order. We obey” was not just a phrase or a slogan. It was meant to be taken seriously. . . .

  Since my arrest I have been told repeatedly that I could have refused to obey this order, and even that I could have shot Himmler dead. I do not believe that among the thousands of SS officers there was even one who would have had even a glimmer of such a thought. Something like that was absolutely impossible. . . . I am convinced that not even one would have dared raise a hand against him, not even in his most secret thoughts. As leader of the SS, Himmler’s person was sacred. His fundamental orders in the name of the Führer were holy.

  Rudolf Höss came from a narrow-minded Catholic family. His father had destined him for the clergy and inculcated in him a boundless respect for authority. His father, however, died when Höss was young, and at sixteen he enlisted in the army against his mother’s protests. After the war he joined the semilegal units of the Freikorps, and when he heard Hitler’s 1922 speech in Munich, he joined the Nazi party. He and his pals then participated in the murder of a teacher whom they believed to be an informer. Höss always considered this murder an act of justice, and it was correct to carry it out because it was highly unlikely that any German court would have found him [the teacher] guilty. Höss was sentenced to ten years in prison for the teacher’s death but was released after five for good behavior. Before he joined the SS, he had made his living as a farmer. He writes that he enjoyed this work and harbored a love of horses. When the war ended, he evaded arrest and worked as a farmhand under the name of Franz Lang. During these eight months before he was captured, he didn’t kill anyone and probably didn’t feel the need to, since no one was giving him those orders, and the architect of the iniquitous ideology to which he subscribed was dead. In a letter to his wife just before his execution, he writes about himself: How tragic it is that I, by nature kind, good-natured, and always obliging, became the greatest mass-murderer . . . , who cold-bloodedly and with all the attendant ramifications carried out every single order of extermination.

  Adolf Eichmann, the man who, with wholehearted diligence, ensured a steady supply of victims, lived after the war as a more or less respectable Argentinean citizen for fifteen years without committing any crime. Eichmann, who during his trial in Jerusalem declared that he was no anti-Semite, explained his criminal activity as mere obedience.

  Had they told me my father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I would have. At that time I followed orders without thinking about them. . . . Orders were given, and because they were orders, we obeyed them. If I was given an order, it wasn’t meant to be interpreted. . . . Do you think such an insignificant person as myself was going to worry his head about it? I receive an order and look neither right nor left. It’s my job. My job is to listen and obey.

  When the elite representatives of the Nazi regime stood before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremburg, all of them, except a few, pretended to be astounded and shocked by the atrocities committed by the regime. During the screening of films from concentration camps or even when bearing witness to what went on, some even broke down in tears. Of course emotion can be simulated, but it is also possible that the moment Nazi ideology was defeated and it was clear that the consequences had inflicted misery not only on those at war with Germany but also on Germany itself, the accused, stripped of all glory and inviolability, suddenly saw the world and their deeds from another point of view.

  One of the most barbarous and vindictive SS men in Terezín was Rudi Heindl, an electrician by trade. Witnesses at his trial in Litoměřice testified that he had placed an old man on a red-hot stove. One witness testified that he had kicked her mother so hard that she died from the wounds inflicted. Many others related tales of his barbarity. After the war he again worked as an electrician and mistreated no one. In court he claimed that he didn’t want to cause anyone pain. Everything he did was upon orders from his superiors. Now he asked only that he be allowed to go to his family, his two daughters and his son who needed him. To them and to everyone around him he had always been amiable and good-natured.

  They sentenced and hanged him.

  One wonders. If Nazism had not existed, would these men have gone through life as honest, respectable farmers, workers, electricians, officials, or shopkeepers and committed no crimes? Without criminal ideologies which, often in a sophisticated way, deceive those who believe in them, would these slaughters have occurred, slaughters symptomatic of the entire first half of the twentieth century? One of course also wonders if these criminal regimes would have existed, whether hundreds of concentration camps—from Kolyma to the banks of the Rhine—would have come into being if such acquiescent people as Rudolf Höss, Adolf Eichmann, and those who had wept before the tribunal in Nuremberg had served
them.

  Höss was put on trial by the Supreme National Tribunal in Poland, which on April 2, 1947, for all the evil he inflicted upon humanity . . . and at the behest of the world’s conscience, sentenced him to death.

  In a farewell letter to his wife, the commandant of Auschwitz admits:

  Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day.

  For the several million who were slaughtered in Auschwitz, this insight came too late. And we can certainly assume that it never would have come if it had not been preceded by the absolute military defeat of the regime that the fanatic perpetrators of these crimes served.

  Utopias

  It sounds paradoxical, but all escalating violence, all barbaric and unparalleled murder or theft usually occurs in the name of the good, of morality, or of reason, or, during the modern period, in the name of the people, progress, and finally the common good. All great ideologies, such as the utopian projects of the ideal communities, sought those lofty goals, or at least professed them.

  Plato emphasizes that a person tasked with protecting the good of the community must be brought up from earliest childhood with that goal in mind. Then Plato poses the logical question: Can a bad example serve the reinforcement of the good in education? The presentation of a lie as something beneficial? And from this basic premise he draws conclusions, which have always suited those who justify censorship: Let none of the poets tell us . . . and let no one slander Proteus and Thetis, neither let any one, either in tragedy or in any other kind of poetry, introduce Hera disguised in the likeness of a priestess. . . . And he adduces entire passages from Homer and Aeschylus that cannot be approved. Then he enumerates what is necessary to reject in poetry. Education is perverted by everything that elicits horror, everything that describes suffering, the moaning and lamentation of those in torment or dying, or the description of death at all. Furthermore, events that elicit laughter cannot be depicted because laughter transforms a person in inauspicious ways.