A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Gyorgy Gado, a schoolteacher at the time, enthusiastically participated in the demonstrations. In fact, he was one of the party dissidents who had been attending meetings for a year leading up to this rebellion. But when the shooting started, he backed away. He saw that there were really two factions in the rebellion. One wanted to reform Communism and make it live up to democratic egalitarian ideals. The other wanted to resurrect Horthy's fascist Hungarian state. Gado feared the latter would triumph if the Soviets backed down. Although in later years he would modify this view, at the time he concluded that the Soviets were the only safeguard Hungary had against fascism.

  Even Gyorgy Konrad, while involved in the rebellion, had noticed that it had some worrisome elements. When it first erupted and Konrad was trying to put to bed his new literary magazine, he had to work over constant shouting both on the street and in the building. At one point someone in the building from an office near his shouted, “Jewish murderers!” Konrad later heard similar comments on the street. Konrad's wife sat on a committee of schoolteachers that began talking of purging the teaching staffs of Jews. Konrad believed that the rebelling Communists would in the long term lose out to a conservative element. But he thought that the moderate wing of the conservative movement would gain control.

  The subject will always be debated, because Soviet tanks preempted any political process at all. A working-class Hungarian Communist, Janos Kadar, was placed at the head of a government that ruled by martial law. Once again, when the Red Army came to Ujpest, the Lippners and some of the other Jewish families were relieved to see them. Gado, having been frightened by his glimpse of counterrevolutionaries, rejoined the Communist party. Zsuzsa Gazdag, on the other hand, quit the party.

  Gyula Lippner used his connections at the big state company to get a good supply of glass and, being an experienced window man, he was kept busy replacing missing panes all over Ujpest. Since the Kadar government had a more liberal attitude about economic activities, he was able to turn this into a small shop that did windows and picture framing.

  An estimated 180,000 Hungarians emigrated. At least 20,000 of them were Jewish. The Seiferts stayed, though most of Geza's family left. A relative of Ilona's who had survived Auschwitz left with his wife and child, leaving behind the unnerving warning, “It's starting again.” But Geza and Ilona had been more frightened about “it starting again” during the uprising. At first they thought it was a grand thing. They had not liked the way the institutions they had built had been shut down and replaced by an official Jewish Community. They had thought there were many things wrong with the way the Soviets had been doing things, and they liked the way the Hungarians were standing up to them. Then, for the first time since the Red Army had entered in 1945, they started hearing the phrase “true Hungarians.” In Geza's legal circles a distinction was being made about “true Hungarian” lawyers being the only ones who should be allowed to practice once the Soviets had been driven out. Anyone who had lived through the Horthy era knew that this was code for the exclusion of Jews from the practice of law. Now that the uprising was crushed and the Soviets were back in control, the Seiferts were ready to take their chances. “I am sure,” said Ilona Seifert, “that lots of people were killed who did nothing. And they are also martyrs. But it was not the same, ‘56 and the Holocaust.… I have to say that there were a lot of martyrs from that time, but not one child, not a ninety-nine-year-old man or woman. I am sure they did terrible things and people suffered, for example, people who were in the prisons in ‘56… but it was not the same.”

  To the Seiferts, Budapest was home. The Communists, even the Soviets, were people they could work with. They allowed an official Jewish Community, and by being active in the official community you could negotiate things, accomplish things, maintain a Jewish life. It was a question of negotiating skills.

  But many Jews did not agree. So many families from the Jewish neighborhoods left that Andras Kovacs's school went from four classes to only two. On November 11, Gyorgy Konrad's cousin and one of his best friends came to him and told him people were being arrested. It would be years before Hungarians learned how many people had been arrested and eliminated. Even Imre Nagy was quietly executed without an announcement. But Konrad's friends understood what was happening because some of their circle, including the brother of Gyorgy's closest friend, had been among those rounded up. Gyorgy's friend and his cousin had decided to leave the country. They wanted Konrad to come too. “Don't stay here and be arrested,” they argued.

  But there were forces holding Gyorgy Konrad to Hungary. His wife and her three-year-old daughter could come with him, but could he leave his parents alone? In truth, he was more afraid of leaving than staying. He was determined to be a writer. If he was arrested, he could write about that. “I believe prison would be a good school. As long as I survive, nothing that happens to me here can be bad for me as a writer.” But if he left, he would cut himself off from the Hungarian language, his language. He wasn't sure he could ever write in anything but Hungarian, and Hungarian is a language that has no cousins. Only in Hungary can you be a Hungarian writer.

  14

  From Moscow to Berlin

  MEDICINE HAD BEEN ONE OF THE GREAT SUCCESS FIELDS of Soviet Jewry. At the time Stalin exposed the “doctors’ plot,” Moritz Mebel was among the more than 15 percent of doctors in the Soviet Union who were Jewish. He could not understand what had gone wrong. After his family fled Nazi Germany, he had never experienced anti-Semitism while he was growing up in Moscow. To him, anti-Semitism was a German sickness that he had escaped by moving to the Soviet Union, a nation that had welcomed him and his family. Then he went off to war, and after fighting in the Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, he was even shipped east to fight the Japanese. But when he returned to Moscow, the Soviet Union seemed different. He didn't feel welcome anymore.

  After the years of frontline combat, he was now hearing that Jews were cowards and couldn't fight, that they all hid far from the front lines. Two hundred thousand Jews had died fighting in the Red Army, an army that—though certainly nobody wanted to mention this while Stalin was in power—was founded by a Jew, Trotsky. Yet it was a popular insult to ask a Jew with a combat medal where he bought it.

  As Mebel the veteran was finishing his education, he started feeling that opportunities for advancement were closed to him. He certainly would have no future in the foreign service. But medicine was a field where many Jews had advanced and even made it to the exclusive Kremlin staff, as the entire world soon learned. Even though he had known many Jewish doctors during his studies, even though the urologist under whom he interned was a Jew, he was still certain that he would not be allowed to hold a good position in Moscow or Leningrad. He went to Estonia, and there he was quickly elevated to medical director of his hospital. Once the “doctors’ plot” was announced, he was advised that it was only a matter of time until he was removed from his position in the hospital. Then Stalin died, and his problem, along with those of many other people, was solved.

  Mebel was in love with a German Jewish microbiologist, Sonja, whose family had also fled Germany when Hitler came to power. She was eight years old at the time, and unlike Moritz, she did not remember Nazi Germany. Sonja worked in the Microbiology Institute in Moscow. Of the five hundred qualified microbiologists, doctors, and chemists there, she had the lowest position, and she was convinced that this was due to the combination of being a Jew and a German.

  Sonja reached a conclusion that many Jews before her had also reached: Even if she could not advance, she could learn. She was in an excellent department headed by a distinguished professional, a Spaniard who had been chief medical officer for the Republican Army. She worked for a renowned expert in her field. “The most important thing for me is knowledge, because nobody can take it away from me,” she said.

  Unlike the Mebels, Sonja's family had always intended to return to Germany. Since the day they fled it had been their dream that someday the Nazis would b
e defeated and they would go back. But when the Nazis were defeated, Sonja's mother was seriously ill, and the family stayed in Moscow until she died at the age of 46 in 1948. By then, Stalin had closed the borders and they could not leave.

  In 1957, Sonja moved to Berlin with her family, although the following year she returned to Moscow to marry Moritz Mebel. Then the two of them moved to Berlin. Moritz had never thought he would go back to Germany. He had been a Soviet citizen for more than twenty years. But he felt that the new GDR wanted him and the Soviet Union no longer did. He, too, felt certain that he was not going back to the old Germany but to a new Germany to which he could make a contribution. The Soviet Union seemed to have no role for him anymore. In an odd way he felt as though he were coming home. But he was not sure he liked the feeling.

  He worked at the Charite Hospital in East Berlin, in Mitte, the old historic center of the city where the government had been, and the university and the opera, and famous cabarets. It did not look very different from the last time he had seen it while serving in the Red Army at the end of the war. The Reichstag was still burned black and peppered with bullet holes and shrapnel gashes. The great museums and government buildings of the wide Unter den Linden were also still war-scarred. The tight bullet patterns on the fronts of dark buildings reminded him of those days of house-to-house fighting when you would realize that someone was shooting from above somewhere, and you would just raise your weapon in a cold sweat and unload everything at the building overhead, hoping to stop whoever was up there.

  Mitte was left standing, but with hardly a flat, untouched surface in the neighborhood. A few missing blocks had been cleared. Some buildings still weren't inhabitable. But none of this was upsetting to Mebel. Restoring buildings was not a priority for the new East Germany. Education, social service, and health care were. The Charite was a good hospital. But it was there that he found something he had not expected in this new society: He found the old Germany. The rest of the staff was acutely aware that he had been an officer in the Red Army. He certainly would never hide that fact. On the contrary, as a Jew in the Soviet Union he had become accustomed to defensively asserting his war record. He had served in what was supposed to be the good army. The problem was that many of the people with whom he was now working had been in the bad army. The hospital's director had been the surgeon general for the Sixth German Army, of which all but a few thousand had died at the hands of the Soviets when trapped in a subzero showdown at Stalingrad. He and the other former army officers did not talk to Mebel. Mebel had fought against Germans.

  Although he was an experienced urologist and former hospital director, Mebel was allowed only to do anesthesia. After a time he changed hospitals, but the situation was not much better. Finding that if he worked hard and alone he would at least not be obstructed, he did research in the evenings in an empty laboratory that he was not allowed to use during the days.

  Sonja did microbiological research. The head of her section was rumored to have been an important Nazi. That was not supposed to be possible in the GDR, but there he was. Another one of the scientists with whom she worked was a known former Nazi party member. But most of her colleagues were younger than she was, too young to have been Nazis. Soon, it seemed, all the Nazis would be gone. Germany had only to raise a new generation and be patient.

  Like the rest of the Soviet bloc, the GDR had flirted with official anti-Semitism at the time of the Slansky trial. It was a relatively brief episode in the GDR. This was Germany, and if it was not a “new” Germany, it was nothing. But at the time, some Jews lost official positions. There were a few trials. A friend of Mia Lehmann, a loyal party militant, was tried for a mythical crime. The Lehmanns were deeply disturbed. Many Jews were more than disturbed. About eight thousand of them migrated to West Germany.

  Jews weren't the only ones leaving. Discontent was closely related to economic failure. On June 16, 1953, East Berlin workers protested a ten percent increase in production norms. By the following day it had become an open revolt put down by Soviet troops. About 1,500 people received prison sentences and 109 were killed, including 41 Soviet soldiers executed for refusing to fire on German workers. That year, 300,000 East Germans left. In the subsequent calm, 150,000 was an average yearly figure for emigration. By the late 1950s, the West German economy had grown dramatically and lifted its people from the misery of 1945. East Germans were still digging out, and the economy would not show dramatic improvement until the 1960s.

  A guarded border divided the two Germanies, but Berlin was an open city. From East Berlin, West Germany was only a few stops on the S-bahn. The neighborhoods adjacent to Mitte on the western side were in West Berlin, where tall cranes were erecting new buildings; old historic buildings, of which there were far fewer than in Mitte, were being refurbished, and the consumer product deluge of the 1950s, cranked out by the U.S. economy and the Marshall Plan, was beginning to become part of the new lifestyle.

  Germans crossed back and forth every day for work and shopping. But many were not coming back. In East Berlin the endemic labor shortage was growing into a serious problem because of peopie migrating West. In a culture that creates a word for everything, the new word for leaving the East was Republikflucht, which in 1957 became a crime. After that, anyone who wanted to leave had to do so without warning anyone. Children would go to school and find their teacher gone. At Moritz Mebel's clinic it became difficult to schedule surgical procedures, because you never knew who was going to show up the next day.

  Mia Lehmann's Nazi neighbor who had grown so fond of her daughter suddenly announced that she would have that operation she had been needing. Although she had always flaunted her contacts in the West, she went to an East Berlin hospital. Back from the hospital, she could not say enough about the East German medical service, how nice they were, and free! and so efficient— and free! When she was well enough, she and her husband vanished to the West.

  The two-tier economy was becoming unbearable for East Ber-liners. Prices were much cheaper in the East, especially with West German marks worth far more than East German marks. In fact, East German marks weren't worth anything outside of East Germany. East Germans like Mia Lehmann who had no interest in going to the West would go to their neighborhood store or hairdresser and be told that their money was no longer accepted. With West German marks being offered, no one wanted the low-value eastern currency.

  ALL OF THESE TENSIONS were hardening the regime, instilling the “us or them” brand of official paranoia, making the state increasingly insistent on conformism and increasingly distrustful of rebellious individualists. Georges Alexan's teenage daughter Irene was not fitting in.

  Her father had remarried, to an outsider in their circle of outsiders. She was a German, not Jewish, not from abroad. Irene, resenting her, had divided the world into her father's world, which she loved—Jewish and American—and her stepmother's world, which she hated—gentile and German. She continued to insist that she was Jewish, and her father continued to be ambiguous. The day before Christmas, he would hand Irene some money and tell her to buy a tree. She would run out to the street, buy one, and bring it back. But neither of them knew what to do with the tree. Her father went back to reading, back to his customary posture, bent over a book with his hat on.

  Irene's rebellion grew. She dropped out of school and later took a lover, ironically a non-Jewish lover, and became pregnant at 18. Her father didn't want them to marry, because they seemed an obvious mismatch. A classic parental mistake, his opposition fueled their determination.

  She had a job in the East German news agency, where her skill in English was valued, though she mostly distributed English-language copy to the right desks. As she went through the office reading copy, she made comments with that New York brand of irreverence that had become her style. These were not times for irreverent pregnant teenagers in the GDR. She was informed that she was a “bourgeois leftist revisionist” and that she needed to be reeducated. This was to be accomplished by
sending her to work in a factory assembly line.

  Factory work? She had never done anything like that. She had grown up among the privileged Communist elite. She didn't even know people who worked in factories. Wandering East Berlin, 18 and pregnant, she contemplated the fact that for the first time in her life she was not going to be in a privileged position. She was not going to be in the vanguard, not a Soviet freedom fighter—she was going to be a faceless German in a factory.

  And then someone came to her and said he was from the government and that he understood she was scheduled to go to a factory because she was a bourgeois leftist revisionist. She said that was true, but she didn't want to go, that she was a good Communist and she didn't know what had happened. The man's face glowed with a hospitable smile. “If that is true, if you are right, if you are a correct person, then maybe we could work together.” He explained that he would appreciate having conversations with her, not very often, just from time to time. Maybe once or twice a year. She could just talk about what she thought was going on, her views on people and events in the office, and these would be secret conversations that no one else in the office would know about.

  Now she would not have to go to a factory. She would do undercover work! She liked that idea. It seemed like the guerrilla fighter of her childhood fantasies exposing the Nazis.

  That summer of 1961, Irene gave birth to a boy, Stefan. Alone, she took her new baby home to her small apartment on a quiet war-scarred street of Mitte. Her street was quieter than usual that night, and she was feeling very alone with her baby, whom she was not exactly sure how to care for. Soldiers had erected a makeshift gate at the entrance to her block, and she had to prove that she lived there before she could pass through. To Irene, that meant that she would be alone with the baby. Visitors would not be let into the block—unless they came from the other direction. But when she looked down the block, it appeared to be completely closed off on the other end with swirls and tunnels and spirals of barbed wire suspended between new concrete posts. It looked like some kind of military construction project winding through the center of the city. The border was closing.