In the early years of “normalization,” many people were being questioned. The Krauses had hesitated too long in West Berlin before returning, and they had some explaining to do. Even Karol Wassermann was called in, the art-collecting apolitical pharmacist. That was the way Wassermann thought of himself, but another view was that he was a nonparty member, seen regularly not only at the Old-New Synagogue but at rehearsals for theater pieces that were now banned. He decided not to tell his wife when he was called in. She was a Protestant and had not been through the experiences he had. To him, it seemed nothing that terrible could happen now. If it went very badly, he could lose his job. He hated his job.
After more than an hour of questioning—normally such sessions lasted fifteen minutes—Wassermann started to get that taut, ironic look to his face that was always a prelude to losing his temper. He told the three men questioning him what he really thought of the Russians and the occupation. After two hours he was sent home. Later, he was informed to his complete astonishment that while he had been very critical, he had criticized with “a Marxist vocabulary.” He was removed from his job but was sent to direct another pharmacy, one that he was convinced was the smallest pharmacy in Prague.
ZUZANA SIMKO had been to Israel three years earlier and had met her half-sister, who had told her the stories their mother never spoke about: how Slovaks had hidden them during the war and an informer had turned them in. Zuzana's half-sister was hidden in corn husks, the father was beaten to death, and their mother escaped. After two months in Israel, Zuzana went back to Slovakia to her parents and her home in Nitra in the building full of Jewish families where they kept kosher and observed the Sabbath and every holiday. In Zuzana's mind, Jewish life was a normal and permanent thing in Czechoslovakia. She did not have to go to Israel to find it. On a rare occasion she would hear something vaguely anti-Semitic, but in general she had no problem with non-Jews. Friends gave her Hanukkah presents, and she gave them Christmas presents. Nitra was her home.
But in 1968 she saw most of the other Jewish families in her building and community pack and leave. Although she was only 20, her parents were already in their sixties and she could not bear to leave them. Her father, with whom she was especially close, candidly stated that he did not think he would live much longer if she left. Then, too, Zuzana believed in the diaspora. For her, it had become Jewish life: “I think Jews need to have communities in other places in the world.”
Within six months following the Soviet invasion, her Jewish world had vanished from Nitra. In what had been a building of six Jewish families, only the Simkos remained. Most of the Jewish people who had been clustered in the apartments near the synagogue left. The few Jews who stayed were mostly party members, though many of them were soon ousted from the party. Almost no one of Zuzana's age was left. Nitras nine centuries of traditional Judaism, which had even survived the Nazis and Stalin, this time had finally been extinguished.
At the time of the invasion Fero Alexander had been performing folk music in Budapest. In between performances he heard on the radio that there was shooting in Bratislava and Prague. The Alexanders were a musical family, and Fero played violin in a Slovak folk group, while his brother Juraj, born in Theresienstadt, was a concert cellist. Born in 1948, Fero was one of the few boys of his generation to be bar mitzvahed in Bratislava. But with the changes of the Dubcek era, he had been able to participate in a lively new youth group for Jews of his age in Bratislava.
Fero and his folk music group went back to Bratislava while there were still tanks on the street. But he was to soon find that all his friends had left. Out of the fifty or sixty Jews his age who had taken part in the Jewish youth movement, not one stayed. The only remaining rabbi in Bratislava also left. But the Alexander family stayed. Fero's brother Juraj did not want to leave because he had been hired to play in the cello section of the Slovak Chamber Orchestra. Juraj and Fero reasoned that their parents were aging and felt too old to start a new life. Fero pictured them sad and alone, the way some of the other people of their generation soon would be.
The rabbi was gone and all his friends had also left. The Jewish community consisted largely of lonely older people whose children had emigrated. This was the fate from which he had saved his parents. But soon these deserted older people were smiling, showing everybody photographs of their families in foreign lands. They seemed so proud when showing the pictures. The photos were usually in color—the first color snapshots most of them had seen. Fero imagined his family proudly showing snapshots of him in his new home somewhere and silently wondered if he had not made a mistake.
Urban renewal hit Bratislava like a bombing. A wide modern bridge was built across the Danube, connected by a new highway that cut a gash a hundred yards wide through the frilly historic old center. The bridge landed in Bratislava exactly where the old Jewish section of town had been before the war. To government planners, it had just been an abandoned neighborhood. The synagogue was no longer used and could also be torn down to make way for the new thoroughfare. Bratislava no longer had a Jewish quarter, nor did it have enough Jews to fill one.
IN KARLSRUHE a debate had gone on between Martin MandPs parents. Like many Jews from the prewar Czech lands, Martin's father had grown up with a German education. Since he had been raised as an ethnic German and since West German policy in any case was to be open to Jews, they would have few difficulties acquiring the normally elusive German citizenship. Martin's father wanted to do it, but his mother did not want to be a German. While the arguments volleyed back and forth, a letter arrived from their daughter Milana, still on the kibbutz. She missed her home and wanted to see Brno once more. She loved being in Israel, but once she understood the situation—that the Czechoslovakian borders would soon be closed and she would never be able to go back—she realized that she was not prepared to never again see Moravia.
The Mandl family flew back to Prague and from there to Brno, where they met their daughter at the small Brno airport. It was now 1969, and travel restrictions would soon be reimposed. When Milana saw her family, her first words to them were, “I only came back to tell you that I am moving to Israel.”
She did not understand that she had already made her choice. It would be another twenty-two years before she had the chance to return to Israel. In Brno the Jewish life she had known was gone. There were no more meetings for young people or Hebrew lessons. In 1970, Rabbi Feter died, and there was no one to take his place. Martin did not have an opportunity to be a Jewish teenager, as his sister had had only a few years earlier. In 1974 their father was able to visit his brother in West Germany, While he was away, Milana was called in for questioning. Many young people were questioned during the “normalization.” Seated in a room with three very polite interrogators, she was presented with a long list of places she had gone, people with whom she had talked, words that had been spoken, Then the questions began. Milana was supposed to realize that people all around her were informants, and so she might as well be one too. But instead she laughed. All their information and all their questions seemed so inconsequential. Apparently it was decided that she did not make a very good informant. She was never called back.
In Brno, Masaryk Street was renamed Victory once more. But the victory of 1945 was fading. Now when Czechoslovakians thought of the Red Army, they thought of the 1968 invasion.
P A R T F O U R
THE
RITE
OF
PASSAGE
“As a Jew I have been persecuted, as a Jew. Waiki, my beloved, my husband, had been murdered. I couldnt put being Jewish aside, like a dress that had become old-fashioned.
Being Jewish is a fact, but Ym not successful in giving it any content. Not possible without belief in God.”
GRETE WEIL, The Bride Price
20
East German
Autumn
ASIDE FROM A VERY SMALL NUCLEUS THAT KEPT ONE synagogue on Rykestrasse alive, Jewish practice in East Berlin by the 1970s had become
largely a death cult. The biggest event of the year at the synagogue was the annual memorial on November 9 to Kristallnacht. One Berlin Jew who attended every year with his two sons was asked if he did anything else to practice Judaism. “I take my sons to the cemetery,” he said. “They know they are Jewish.”
The only functioning synagogue in East Berlin is a large, tasteful, moderately neo-Moorish building on Rykestrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, discreetly tucked behind a courtyard. Most surviving German synagogues are somewhat tucked away. Irene Runge had first walked into a synagogue when she was in her twenties. “It was a Friday night, and I was really in the mood, and it was my step forward.” At that time a handful of young American Jews who were opposed to the Vietnam war had gone to the GDR, and Irene, with her New York English and her hunger for anything American, met most of them. One of them, an American Jew for whom a trip to the synagogue was a banal event, took her to the Rykestrasse synagogue for this major step.
“It was horrible. It was like Germany. No one would say hello or nobody would be friendly, and I thought Jews were like the people I knew and I thought, ‘This can't be Jewish/And I was never going to go there again.” It was, in fact, very German. One hundred people was a huge turnout for a major holiday. Twenty was more typical. The people would file in quietly and take their places in their pews as in a church. There was none of the wandering the floor, debating, match-making, or gossiping that went on in the Rue Pavee synagogue or even the one favored by Jews of Ostjuden background on Joachimstalerstrasse in West Berlin which was even more hidden from the street. On Rykestrasse the East Berlin Jews would take their places silently, sit through the service in silence because few could read Hebrew, and then silently walk out, much like any other kind of German public meeting.
Several years after Irene's first synagogue visit, her Jewish friends—and that was most of her friends—were talking increasingly about their Jewish identity. Their parents had always said they were Jewish, and yet they knew nothing about being Jewish. Now, in their thirties, they were beginning to ask themselves exactly who they were. If they had a Jewish identity at all, it was a negative one. They were Jews because they were not Germans. They couldn't be Germans because of what Germans had done to the Jews. But they wanted to be something more than just not German. A group of them, all officials in the university youth organization, started going together to lectures and cultural events at the East Berlin Jewish Community. Irene found this only slightly more impressive than going to synagogue. “Also very German,” she reported. “You know, they had all the chairs, and then there was the lecture, and then ‘I thank you in the name of blah, blah, blah and thank you for coming/and that was it!”
Nevertheless, in 1975 she became a registered member of the East Berlin Jewish Community. The following year she took her son, Stefan, who, a year past bar mitzvah age, had never been to a synagogue, to a Rosh Hashanah service on Rykestrasse. Stefan said, “For me it was interesting to sit in a synagogue with all the people and to get a hat.”
Stefan had been raised by his non-Jewish father's parents in a village near Berlin. When his father remarried, they moved back to Berlin, a five-minute walk from the Rykestrasse synagogue. Now he was having more contact with his mother, who informed him for the first time, shortly before taking him to the synagogue, that he was a Jew. After Irene had taken him the first time, he would often drop in on a Friday evening. He knew no Hebrew and could not follow the service, but in time he memorized certain passages. Eventually he decided to be circumcised and bar mitzvahed. The circumcision was easy to arrange, since the head of the East Berlin Community, Peter Kirchner, was a doctor and a mohel, someone who performed ritual circumcisions. Stefan remembers almost no one coming to his bar mitzvah. Irene remembers it as a big community success. But Irene was the only family member present. Her father not only would not go, but for years after he refused to speak to his grandson. Stefan's father and stepmother, both non-Jews, were very upset by what they saw as a bizarre extremist activity.
But Stefan was not religious. He simply did it to have a Jewish identity. “In Germany the people don't know Judaism as a religion. They know it as a population,” he explained. “I thought it was a bit of solidarity, and I loved being a member of this population.” He had spent his childhood being moved from one home to another and one identity to another, and as he approached adulthood he was looking for solid things to hold onto. He was drawing closer to his mother at a time when she too was in search of an identity. Mother and son became Jews together. “My mother is Jewish, so I am a Jew,” he said.
But Irene rarely went to services, and when she did, not knowing Hebrew, they made very little sense to her. The first time she ever understood a service was when a rabbi came from Toronto and gave a Yom Kippur service in German. The other thing that stood out about that service was an argument that broke out on the women's side about whether the service was a legitimate excuse to skip the Monday local Communist party meeting. Gradually, Irene got increasingly involved. She began attending the annual Hanuk-kah party and a few other social events. In the early 1980s she was invited to join the board of the Jewish Community. Once she was a member, she wanted to weed out the non-Jews who had always been welcome at Community events. Most Community meetings had a majority of non-Jews. “Because they love going to Jewish places and listening to those boring lectures,” said Irene. “Whereas the Jews, you know—they just come for the Hanukkah party.” To Germans going to Jewish events was an attempt to come to terms with history, and it was always a way to assert that you were “one of the good Germans.” Irene, raised in the Communist elite, always held the notion of members and nonmembers. If you were not a Jew, you were not part of the club and you did not belong at the meeting. Why should Jews have to help the Germans work out their problems?
Irene started having informal meetings to which non-Jews were not invited. She called her group Uns fur Unsere, We for Ourselves. For four years they had monthly meetings, a small group of Jews who discovered that they all had the same background. They had been born in the United States, France, England, or Australia, wherever their parents had found shelter from Hitler. They had all been brought back to Germany when young and had never felt completely German but had never given much thought to being Jewish either, because they were all from good Communist households. They became like archeologists brushing off the rocks of their lives, looking for clues to a bygone civilization. Irene arranged lectures on Jewish law, on holidays, on Israel. She started arranging for Lubavitch rabbis from the West to come for holidays.
MOST OF THE EAST BERLIN JEWS had other things on their mind. Their religion was the new socialist Germany, but it was getting harder to stay a believer. When Brezhnev decided to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, he meant to send a message to people throughout the Soviet bloc. The event marked the beginning of a slow decline in which idealism turned to disillusionment. It made loyal Communists wonder about the entire system. If East Germany went its own way and reformed its errors, which was what many loyal Communists were hoping would happen, would not the Soviets treat them the way they had the Czechoslovakians? The Warsaw Pact was for mutual defense, and a central concept was that the USSR was not supposed to intervene in the internal affairs of its members. But obviously the Soviets would intervene.
When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, in East Germany it was mainly the intelligentsia who were upset. But as the economy failed to perform year after year, discontent spread. East Germans grew a little angrier every year, and as the Stasi accurately reported on growing discontent, the regime grew more repressive and distrustful. “There was not physical repression but mental,” said an East German journalist of Jewish background, “I mean people were never afraid to voice their opinions, especially in factories. They voiced their opinions very openly, but of course the state authorities didn't like it and the people were deprived of fundamental freedoms like travel, to read what they want. I mean, they could see television, they could listen to the ra
dio, but if you wanted to read The New York Times or he Figaro, you couldn't, unless you were a privileged person like I was, who was working as a journalist. Of course we had everything, but that was only a privileged smaller group—writers and journalists/’
Mia Lehmann and her husband often talked about how things were not going well. They had understood the need for the Berlin Wall as a temporary measure, but not as a permanent policy. By the time of her husband's death in 1963, he had become extremely critical of the GDR system. Mia knew that the dream—the new egalitarian Germany—was drifting far off course. As a trade union official, she earned her living doing what she did best. She spent her days in factories asking people why they were unhappy. “I had to deal with people in the factory. I knew what the economic side was. And it went down and down.”
While the average East German was worried about the economy, the Communist elite, like Mia Lehmann, was troubled by incidents such as the Wolf Biermann affair in 1976. Biermann was the West German son of an Auschwitz victim who moved to the GDR and became a popular poet and ballad writer. He had the kind of impeccable “antifascist” credentials that made friendly criticism permissible. But by the mid-1960s, he was being almost entirely censored, and in 1975, after being granted permission for a visit to the West, he was not allowed back into East Germany. This was a shock to many East German Jews who, like Biermann, had suffered under the Nazis and gone to the GDR for idealistic reasons. What had gone wrong that the new socialist Germany would treat in this way one of their own who had come back to rebuild?
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