A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Slovaks began to swing to the left, and the nationalists were forced out of government. Throughout Central Europe nationalists and anti-Communists were being voted out and replaced by former Communists. Communists became the largest party in Poland and made gains in both the Slovak Republic and the eastern part of reunited Germany. In Hungary, Antall died in 1994 and a former Communist official, Gyula Horn, was elected Prime Minister. It was not so much nationalism that was alienating voters. Everywhere in Central Europe except the Czech Republic, a large part of the electorate was already disillusioned with capitalism.

  But Slovak nationalists also had a public relations dilemma. If Slovaks started looking at the history of the last Slovak state, they would be afraid of the new one. So a little revisionism was needed to assuage public fear. But the new revisionism instead reinforced that fear.

  Zuzana was at an office party talking to someone whose husband was involved in planning the new Slovak state. The woman assured Zuzana that there was no reason to be worried.

  “I am afraid for my children,” Zuzana explained.

  The woman smiled and said, “Why are you afraid? Tm not afraid. Why are you afraid for your children?”

  Zuzana said, “You are not worrying because your children are not Jews.”

  Without a moment's hesitation the woman answered, “It is not true about the Second World War. It's not true about the Holocaust. Why are you so afraid?”

  This, of course, was exactly why Zuzana Stern was afraid.

  For many Jews the issue was less what they would do than the future of their children. Silvia Kraus's father, Tomas Kraus, son of the Slovak Jew accused of burning his own shop to avoid nationalization in the late 1940s, thought both his daughters should leave. But he intended to stay. After the fall of Communism he dropped his career as a sports journalist to start an import-export business. He believed capitalism had a future in the Slovak Republic. He resigned as president of the Bratislava Jewish Community to give more time to his new business. But he was determined that his daughters leave as soon as they finished school. Silvia said that she would at least like to do some specialty work in Vienna. “Then I will see,” she said. Vienna, which had been an impossible world away under Communism, turned out to be a half-hour commute from Bratislava. But no one on a Slovak salary could afford to go there. Economics replaced police controls as the isolating factor for Slovaks.

  Still, travel did become a possibility. Summer trips to Israel were organized every year, and some fifteen Slovak Jews moved there permanently in the first three years after the Velvet Revolution. To Fero Alexander, the new possibilities became almost an obsession. He had always traveled with his folk group. Now, instead of finding his way through the labyrinth of Communist bureaucracy, there were airfares to be researched, compared, and quoted at length. He, his wife, and his three sons went to Israel. “I got a wonderful fare,” he said, “$250 round trip. But here that is two months’ salary.”

  So many Slovak Jews were visiting Israel that the community attempted to persuade El Al to offer twice-weekly flights from Bratislava to Tel Aviv. In Israel, Fero's second son, who had wanted to be bar mitzvahed several years earlier but could find no one in Bratislava to teach him, belatedly had the ceremony. His youngest son was bar mitzvahed in Bratislava in January 1993, the first Bratislava bar mitzvah in almost twenty years.

  The Bratislava community searched world Jewry for a rabbi who would move to the new republic. Fero wanted to find someone in the American Conservative tradition, but no such rabbi could be found. Instead, they found a twenty-nine-year-old American Lubavitcher, Baruch Myer. To most Bratislava Jews, the Hasidic practices of Lubavitchers seemed extreme, but one of the things that made Lubavitchers different was the fact that they were willing to come. “They come. They settle anywhere,” said Fero Alexander. If Baruch Myer did not exactly fit in with his dark clothes, beard, and hat, he made up for that difference by learning fluent Slovak before arriving. He immediately began a wide range of projects. He eagerly established a kosher chicken operation. He slaughtered the birds and trained women to clean them by hand under strictly observed religious law. But when Bratislava Jews discovered that kosher chickens were three times as expensive as regular chickens, they were not willing to buy them. Myer's kosher chickens were simply unaffordable.

  A Jewish hotel was built next to a weedy lot, below the ramparts of the castle that once overlooked the old city and that now overlooked a highway. A kosher restaurant was established in the hotel, and a mikveh was built in the basement. But few people came. A lonely, hopeful desk clerk waited in the new pristine-white lobby underneath three clocks that gave the time in New York, Bratislava, and Tel Aviv.

  The new Slovak Republic was frantically rebuilding hotels and fixing up monuments, preparing for a tourism boom that did not come. In fact, tourism, never an important industry, was now declining. The restless few from the crowds that pressed into Prague no longer drifted into Bratislava, because it was no longer in the same country. The new Slovak currency—much of it simply old Chechoslovakian bills with new Slovak stamps glued to them—did not immediately collapse as feared. Fero Alexander bought a new sound system before the new money was issued, because he feared that foreign products would be unaffordable once Slovak money hit the currency market and promptly sank. The money dropped a little, but it did not sink. The impending crisis of cutting loose state industry was put off. The chemical industry might struggle and survive, but the obsolete steel and textile mills were certain to fail, and the factories that had made heavy armaments such as tanks for the now-defunct Warsaw Pact would have to find a new product or die.

  The Czech Republic was selling off its state industries by offering shares to the public. But the new Slovak state was deferring such decisions, because it was keeping the economy at least limping for the time being and besides, it was hard to imagine anyone buying into a Slovak steel mill. Life was, if not prosperous, at least peaceful in the new republic. The inevitable economic crisis had not yet hit, and while the government took a strident tone toward Czechs and gypsies, there were few problems for Jews. There were occasional incidents. In September 1993 the skinheads who based themselves by the bridge cornered Baruch Myer on a quiet street at midday and beat him. But most Slovaks were still honoring Jews, si ill thinking of this as an anti-Communist act.

  In the flat plains east of Bratislava, where massive sugar-beet cooperatives were struggling to restructure, the town of Veca celebrated its 880th anniversary. It hadn't celebrated any previous anniversaries, and in fact, it had not even existed for about two decades. A chemical plant had been built in the newer, less historic town of Sala. Soon both towns looked the same, because their centers were torn up to build rows of block housing for the workers who relocated for the chemical plant. Then the town of Veca was eliminated, simply absorbed into Sala. There were many Slovak towns like this. Sala was more fortunate than many, because the factory for which the town had been destroyed had a chance at survival. Other towns were destroyed for steel and arms factories that might soon be closed.

  In late 1993 the town government of Sala, to celebrate the new Slovak independence and defy the old Communist order, decided to observe the anniversary of the defunct town of Veca with a four-day celebration, including goulash stands, Slovak folk dancing, speeches, and brass bands. To kick off the event, a plaque was dedicated in the Jewish cemetery to 110 Veca families who had been deported to Auschwitz. Honoring the deported Jews would be a perfect rejection of the old regime. But the cemetery looked like a vacant lot in the center of a gargantuan housing project, and nothing was even done to groom the shaggy little spot for the ceremony. As the mayor finished his speech, a strong bony hand gripped the shoulder of a visitor, He was an elderly man, one of seven remaining Jews in the town. “Look at this place,” he said, waving his hand at the akimbo tombstones obscured by tall weeds, the encroaching blocks of housing units that looked poised to swallow the little space. “After everything they ha
ve done to this place, do you think this ceremony makes a difference?”

  Of all the towns in this region, the largest Jewish community was the seventy Jews, Orthodox and observant, in Galanta. Compared to Veca or even Nitra, this was a thriving community. In fact, these few Jews had preserved considerably more Jewish life than the hundreds of Jews in Bratislava. Before the war there had been fifteen hundred Jews in Galanta, but fourteen hundred had been deported to Auschwitz. The surviving population had stayed almost stable since the war.

  Along with most of the town, the synagogue had been torn down to build workers’ housing, but the community prayed in a fifteen-by-thirty-foot room with prewar Torahs. There were minyans every Friday night and Saturday morning. In the absence of any trained religious leader, Adolf Schultz, in his early seventies, kept the community functioning. He and most of the other Galanta Jews observed the kosher laws. Like Arnost Neufeld in Brno, Schultz almost obsessively maintained the Jewish cemetery.

  FERO ALEXANDER and his wife, an orthodontist, were still committed to Bratislava. The five-story building where they had an apartment, on the slope of the castle-topped hill, had been owned by his wife's family, who had built it in 1932. In the last Slovak state Jewish property had been “Aryanized.” The “Aryans” who had been given this building were forced to turn it over to the Communist state in 1961. Now both the Alexanders and this “Aryan” family were trying to get their property back. It was one of hundreds of such cases.

  The Sterns resisted emigration. Zuzana, who had visited her relatives in Israel in the 1960s and returned feeling that Czechoslovakia was her home, felt a little less certain about the Slovak Republic. But she said, “I think that it is very necessary that there are some communities in other countries.” The Sterns have always been proud of the ancient Jewish history of Slovak towns, and even if they v/ere among the few Jews left, they still felt they lived in a place with Jewish roots. They celebrated the major Jewish holidays with their closest friends, who happened to be Protestants. “It is a good thing to have some very good friends who have nothing against Jews and who are able to celebrate Jewish holidays too,” she said.

  Zuzana Stern believed that by deciding against emigration in 1968, when all of their Jewish friends had left, “we just deferred the decision to another generation.” Soon their son and daughter would have to decide. To well-educated young Bratislava Jews, Israel was not nearly as tempting as such places as Vienna and Piague, which were culturally similar and close by.

  Tomas Stern's father, the economics professor, was encouraging him to leave, predicting a dismal future for the new republic. But Juraj and Zuzana had no intention of leaving themselves. “This is an important place for Judaism. It had one of the great yeshivas of the 19th century,” Juraj said.

  “The greatest,” argued Tomas. “But you can't have that now.”

  Juraj didn't hear his son and continued, “You can't let that disappear. Bratislava is a Jewish place.”

  “So you are going to sacrifice yourself for that?” Tomas asked.

  Juraj did not answer.

  30

  In Antwerp

  IT WAS FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AND YOUNG MEN AND BOYS were already appearing in the street in their Sabbath best— ever wider and furrier hats, and newer, shinier coats, and peots so exquisitely curled that they bounced with each step like party decorations. The clothing seemed to be a contest that no one was winning. At Seletsky's bookstore—where, in order of quantity, Yiddish, Hebrew, Dutch, French, German, and English books on Judaism were stacked so haphazardly that it was hard to get in the store—a Hasid was bartering with Seletsky for a set of commentaries. They were doing it in diamond-district style. Mechilem Silberman, a stout, well-fed, and happy father of five, called it “the diamond mentality.” He never liked it, which is why he converted the storefront of the family home on Simonsstraat into a silver shop. The silver trade was at least a little more genteel.

  His mother, Dwora Silberman, was never happy about this decision. She visited him from Israel, where she had been living since her husband Hershl died in 1985, and she cautioned him once again about going into silver. “You can't carry silver,” she told him. If things get bad, “diamonds are a very easy thing to take with you when you flee.”

  Fleeing was increasingly on her mind. Again and again, she reviewed the way her parents, the last time she saw them, had told her and Hershl to flee because they were young. Her parents had assured her that they would not be touched because they were old. She had listened. Now she realized that they had not even been that old—only in their fifties, twenty years younger than she was now—and she knew that it was a mistake to have left them in Antwerp, left them there to die a horrible death at an early age. Over and over again, she reviewed the facts. Hershl hadn't let her turn back. She had tried. Over and over again, she examined every detail of her guilt. Why had she left them to the Nazis? Mechilem often pointed out to her that if she had stayed, she simply would have been sent to Auschwitz with them. “I could have hidden,” she argued.

  Mechilem knew that arguing with her was useless, but he had somehow to stop her from hurting herself. It was as though she felt guilty for living into old age, for outliving everyone, for living twenty years more than her parents had been allowed to. “I can't enjoy my life,” Dwora insisted. “I eat, and I think of how my parents had nothing to eat.”

  Her first child, born when Antwerp was barely behind the combat lines, had married an English dentist and moved to Israel. The second had married a French doctor and moved to Israel. In all, four of her children had married professionals and moved to Israel. Mechilem was the only Silberman left in Europe.

  That was how the Jewish population of Antwerp remained at about the same size—large families where most left but a few brought in a mate and stayed. Mechilem's wife came from England. The important thing was that traditional Orthodox Judaism remained in the world. Still, it was difficult for Antwerp Jews to see their children leave. Harry Biron was an Antwerp Jew who raised his two daughters to be Zionists. When they went to Israel, he said, “We gave them the idealistic education of Israel, the dream. So they followed the dream. The education was right, but 1 would like them in Antwerp, preferably in a house just down the street.”

  In 1986, Jozef Rottenberg sold his multimillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, which he had started after the war with a few employees, to an American multinational. The company had become large by Belgian standards, but he thought it would be too small to stand up to competition in a fully integrated European economy. His family's dark, handsome, high-ceilinged Flemish house had a coatroom always filled with the hats and wraps of a half-dozen visitors, and the elegant little garden was littered with the toys and tricycles of grandchildren. Mordechai, the first postwar Rottenberg, whose birth was celebrated on the streets of the diamond district, grew up to have the Rottenberg good looks and charisma. He worked for his father's company, then after it was sold moved into cosmetics. He had one brother with an Antwerp diamond company, another in Vienna, one in Israel, two in New York, and a sister in England.

  Mechilem Silberman was comfortable in the heart of the diamond district where they had always lived, with his shop full of antique silver that was too heavy and unsuitable for sudden flight. “If only he would do a little diamonds on the side,” Dwora said.

  Mechilem wore a vest and a yarmulke with a hat over it, shaved the top of his head, and wore a frizzy blond beard. He did not want to be like his father, Hershl, who had seemed afraid, stayed cleanshaven, and taken his hat off when gentiles came in. But for all Mechilem's apparent boldness, he confessed, “I'm not sure why, but I am not sure we are safe here.” And he admitted that if he went to a doctor or lawyer or bank director, he still took his hat off. His doctor always laughed about it, because none of his other Jewish patients did that anymore. Removing the fear would take one more generation. His children would not take off a hat. “Kids today would never do that. They aren't ashamed of anything.” But it
was different for Mechilem. When they were traveling, away from the world of the diamond district, and his children started speaking Yiddish in loud voices, Mechilem felt embarrassed and would tell them to speak English, his wife's language—a good, neutral international language.

  In 1988 a liberal synagogue, like those of the American Reform movement, was attempted in Antwerp, but it found few followers and soon died. Those who were not kosher or did not observe the Sabbath tried to keep it out of the sight of those who did. There were Jews in Antwerp who drove their cars on Saturday. But they would not drive down the Belgielei. It was believed that Jewish law made a distinction between nonobservance in private and flaunting in public.

  “We've lost that golden middle way of my parents,” said Mechilem. “Everyone is getting either nonpracticing and modernized or Hasidic.” There was a consistent pattern. The survivor generation was clean-shaven and dressed normally but with a hat; the postwar generation wore vests and beards and their children were in full regalia. Sam Perl, an Orthodox Jew of the clean-shaven hat-wearing survivor generation, thought this impulse toward ever more exotic dress was driven by fear of assimilation. “They are afraid they will come reaching over the other side of the world and they will be lost. It's a weakness.” He blamed religious leaders for trying to keep the young traditional. “I tell you, the spiritual leaders think all this clothing and everything will keep them back. Keep them away from the street. But unfortunately, they are putting this into their heads as though it were a great principle, and it's not true. Judaism is not just this. If you have to count only on the clothing, it's very sad and very bad. If you don't have a way to live life—Jews are becoming more and more extreme. I think there will be a reaction against this,” he said.