by Dita Kraus
I remember how hurt I felt when Otto’s cousin Eva Kraus was getting married, and I, already visibly pregnant, came to the wedding in the only maternity dress I owned. It was black with a white collar, and Eva remarked, “At least for my wedding you could have put on a better dress.”
* * *
A certain Mrs. Maternová had been appointed by the state to manage the Kraus factory when the German Arisator 8 was imprisoned after the war. Of course her office was the best room of the villa, while the accountant and two secretaries occupied the others. Mrs. Maternová was a short, plump woman of middle age, with blond hair always well-coiffed (her husband had a hairdresser’s salon off Wenceslas Square) and carefully made up, with several rings on her pudgy fingers.
When Otto became proprietor, he did not dismiss Mrs. Maternová. He felt that he was not experienced enough to run the business by himself and thought he could rely on her. What a mistake that was!
Maternová had run the factory for almost two years. She was an ambitious woman, sly and false, who was in cahoots with two of the workers, the cutter and the head of the operation. The extra pieces that Metek now used as bribes had formerly been sold by Mrs. Maternová, who shared the profit with her two accomplices.
Of course, Mrs. Maternová was not happy that Otto became her boss. On the face of it, she pretended to cooperate, showing him the books and letting him make the decisions. But behind his back she did everything she could to undermine his authority. In our naiveté, Otto and I became quite friendly with her, until the Communist coup in February 1948.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A New Political Reality
Three years after the end of the war, the Communists staged a coup in Prague and took over the government. They called a multitude of workers to the Staroměstské (Old Town Square) under the pretext of supporting the labor unions. And then they went to President Beneš, claiming that the people were calling for his resignation. The ruse worked; the Communists came to power.
Suddenly there was a complete change of attitudes. An atmosphere of fear pervaded the lives of all. Former small-time functionaries became all-powerful bosses.
People, especially “capitalists,” were summoned for interrogation; in every building informers were appointed to report on what they overheard from the tenants. There were even cases of previously known public figures disappearing without a trace. Red banners with pro-Soviet slogans hung everywhere. If one wanted to keep a job or send children to study, one had to become a member of the party. New “National Committees” issued “Loyal Citizen’s” documents, without which no one could be employed. All privately owned factories and large businesses were expropriated by the state. They called it “nationalization.”
The Kraus factory was one of them.
A few days after the Communist takeover, Mrs. Maternová called Otto into her office and, in the presence of the rest of the staff, handed him an envelope with a triumphant smile on her face. It was a dekret, a document stating that from that day, Otto Kraus was no longer manager of the Kraus Ladies’ Lingerie Factory and had no authority. The factory was now the property of the state. He was not allowed to have any contact with the employees, neither directly nor by phone. Also, he had to immediately vacate the premises and hand over the keys and was not allowed to take out anything from the factory or the office. (Mrs. Maternová didn’t even allow me to take back my own private sewing machine, which had been temporarily placed in the factory. She insisted that whatever was in the factory belonged now to the state. I was pleased when I heard later that her husband had divorced her.)
Actually, the Kraus factory shouldn’t have been nationalized, at least not initially. At first only factories with fifty or more employees were expropriated. The government later nationalized even small businesses. At the time, only forty-nine employees, including Mrs. Maternová and the office staff, were registered in the Kraus factory. But Maternová falsified the numbers and so achieved her goal to become manageress again.
Yet what Mrs. Maternová was unable to accomplish, although she tried hard and tenaciously, was to have us move out of the house. We had to wait until we were allocated an alternative flat, and there was nothing available. During the war there had been no construction whatsoever. Many newly married couples had to live in the cramped flats of their parents, postponing the birth of children. Adult grandchildren moved in with grandparents, so that when those died, the grandchild would have a right to the flat. Families that occupied more rooms than they were allowed either had to take in lodgers or move to a smaller flat. Everything was registered; nothing escaped the watchful eye of Big Brother. And there were willing informers everywhere, a long-time tradition of the Czechs.
Maternová used all her contacts in the Communist Party to have us evicted, but there just wasn’t anything available. She became hateful and harassed us constantly. She made the employees spy on us and report to her our every move. They told her who came to visit us, how long they stayed, when we went out, and when we returned. She even turned off the main electric switch on weekends, when the offices were closed, leaving us and the baby, who was then just a few weeks old, without light, heat, and warm water.
One night in late February, burglars broke into the storeroom of the factory and stole a large number of fabric rolls. The factory building stood at the back of the villa, and the bedroom window faced in its direction.
We were accused of purposefully allowing the break-in, if not perhaps even arranging it. There had been another attempt at a break-in the previous summer, while Otto was still manager of the factory, but he had heard the noise from the open window, and when he gave a shout, the burglars fled. Maternová argued that we must have heard the burglars like the time before and that we didn’t call the police because the factory no longer belonged to us. But it was winter then, the window was closed, and we heard nothing.
There was no use arguing. Otto was summoned before the court. No lawyer dared to represent him, the capitalist oppressor of the working classes. He appeared alone before the judge, and when he started speaking, the judge shut him up, saying, “I don’t speak to capitalists like you.” However, there was fortunately not enough evidence, and the case was dismissed.
Yet in order to get any employment, everyone now had to present a document called a Declaration of Loyalty to the state. These documents were issued by the local branch of the Communist Party. There was no chance for Otto, the “collaborator with thieves,” to get such a document.
My cousin Jenka came to our rescue.
Jenka was my cousin twice removed. She was a few years older than me and was married to Ivan, a functionary of the party. She too was a member of the party and believed wholeheartedly in the doctrine of social justice. They lived not far away, and the two of us often walked together with our babies in a stroller.
Thanks to her husband’s connections, Otto was about to get the crucial certificate of state loyalty. I was told by Ivan to fetch the document instead of Otto. It was like a scene from a film. He instructed me how to dress, no makeup, not to utter a word, just say my name and wait. I was scared to death. I stood silently at the door of the gloomy office with grim-faced men sitting at several desks. No one talked to me. After what seemed to me like eternity, one of the men motioned to me with his finger to approach. He handed me a small piece of paper, and I left hurriedly, hoping that no one would intercept me. The document said:
CERTIFICATE
The Commission for Internal and National Security
We hereby certify that Mr. Otto Kraus ([date of birth], [address], Czech citizen) is, according to the evidence of the tenants and of the Workers Council, loyal to the Nation and to the State.
Signed: Secretary for National Security
Since Otto was a published author and had many good friends in the literary world, he was accepted at the Ministry of Culture as clerk for English literature. Any book that was published in the Republic had to be approved by the party aparatchiks. Otto liked t
he job, which consisted of reading new English books and writing a recommendation for translation. What aggravated him, however, was that his recommendations were often rejected for being “not politically correct.” Writers of world renown were branded as rightists, imperialists, anti-socialists, or counterrevolutionaries. Otto was proud to be the only person in the “reddest” of ministries who was not a member of the Communist Party.
Jenka was instrumental not only in arranging this important document for Otto, but also in finding a solution for our housing problem. In the high-rise building where she lived was a tiny garçonnière—a bachelor flat—on the ground floor, occupied by an unmarried lady physician. Since the physician also had accommodation at the hospital where she worked, she was actually not allowed to keep the apartment. Jenka managed to have her move out, and the place was allocated to us. To refuse it was not an option.
It consisted of one room and a small bathroom with a toilet, a sink, and a bathtub. When the double bed, wardrobe, table, two chairs, and the baby’s cot were moved in, there was hardly space to move. In one corner of the room there was a shallow recess with a sink and a two-ring gas cooker, above which hung a cupboard for the cooking utensils and foodstuff.
One morning, Jana, Paťa’s wife, arrived at our little garçonnière, lugging two big bags. She had decided we should cook jam. Fruits and vegetables were still in short supply in 1948, three years after the end of the war, and she had acquired several kilos of apples from somewhere. Peeling and cutting them took us three hours, but we had a good time talking and laughing together. While the apples with a lot of sugar were boiling, we played with my six-month-old baby, Peter.
When the fruit was cooked, we poured it into two large ceramic pots, which I had inherited from someone. We carried them to the window to cool, but halfway there, the pots broke from the heat, and the bottoms dropped out. The boiling-hot mess fell on the carpet, creating two steaming mounds and a lake, which the little carpet began slowly absorbing. The top of the mound could be saved, but much of our jam stuck to the fibers of the carpet. On our knees, we began scrubbing to save it. It was our only carpet.
Toward evening, we gave up. The sugar had hardened, and the carpet was like a board, impossible to roll up. But there was one solace: when people came to us, they would sniff and then always exclaim, “Oh, what a wonderful apple fragrance.”
* * *
At this time, some of our friends were preparing to go to the newly created State of Israel. Some had already left, such as Ruth Bondy; her husband, Honza, was about to follow. This was an opportunity to swap flats. We would move to the Vršovice flat, and Honza to our garçonnière. As two adults with a baby, we were entitled to two rooms, and we also wanted to accommodate Grandmother. Only no one must know that Honza was planning to emigrate.
It was accomplished through a mutual friend, a former fellow prisoner of both Otto and Honza’s, who was a member of the Communist Party and had connections.
At last we were able to take Grandmother to live with us, and she was pleased that she could be with little Peter all day long. She was very discreet and never interfered or criticized us, although she must have had plenty of reasons to do so. I was young, not yet twenty, harebrained and incompetent. Peter was already a year old. She would hold him on her lap, sing to him in her quivery voice, and let him put the three pairs of her glasses on her nose, one on top of the other.
The idyll didn’t last long. Honza had left for Israel; our best friends, Metek and Věra Blum, too. The regime became increasingly oppressive; whoever could was leaving. There was an atmosphere of urgency. People sensed that emigration wouldn’t be allowed for much longer.
Otto decided we had to go. He knew that as long as he worked at the “red” Ministry, he wouldn’t get an exit permit, so he quit. The Jewish Community offered him a position, and he readily accepted. In later years, he described himself as being the dismantler of the Zionist Movement in Prague. He was coached by the head of the Aliyah Department, a man who had been sent from Israel to manage the emigration not only of the Czech Jews but also of others, mainly Polish Jews, who passed through Czechoslovakia on their way to Israel.
At the Jewish Community Office, Otto was given a room with a desk, and when he opened the drawer, he found a million Czechoslovak koruna in cash. Agitated, he rushed to his Israeli boss, who calmly took the money and explained that these were the funds for Aliyah. Otto’s work from the first day consisted of burning the evidence of how this and other moneys, which financed the Aliyah (ascent) of thousands of Holocaust survivors to Israel, were acquired. He and a woman secretary fed the little stove day after day with the telltale documents. His other task was to sell the symbolic shekel that every potential emigrant had to buy for ten koruna in order to register for Aliyah.
Otto had been a Zionist since before the war. I already mentioned that he intended to move to Palestine, as the land was called before it became the independent State of Israel. For two years, 1940 till 1942, he went on hachshara (agricultural training) to learn farming and husbandry. He had a romantic relationship to the soil, took Hebrew lessons, and read books about Jewish history and Zionism. He loved the fields and the smells of the cowshed. He dreamed of living in a kibbutz. Otto was influenced by A. D. Gordon, who wrote that the Jews should become tillers of the soil in a socialist land of Israel.
He learned to grow vegetables, plow with oxen, milk cows, and shovel manure in the cowshed. There were a number of such hachshara groups all over Bohemia and Moravia, working on large landowner farms. The farm where Otto had worked with Ruth and Mausi belonged to a monastery order. The monks expected the villagers to go to church every Sunday. The young Jews were a strange phenomenon, and the villagers feared that their liberal ways of life might influence their own daughters and sons. For Otto, hachshara ended when he was deported, together with his parents and younger brother, Harry, to the Terezín ghetto.
Under the British Mandate, immigration to Palestine took place clandestinely: people had to jump off the ship and wade ashore at night; often they were caught and imprisoned.
But since Israel had become independent, Jews were not just permitted but encouraged to immigrate and settle in the land. The meaning of the Hebrew word aliyah is “to go up, to rise”—thus whoever moves to Israel actually rises higher. The young state welcomed newcomers; the journey was even paid for by the Jewish Fund, and ships and airplanes brought Jews from all over the world.
In Czechoslovakia the possibility swept up a wave of enthusiastic Zionists, most of them survivors of concentration camps, to leave the old country and build their new homeland. Those who remained were either tied to non-Jewish partners or were planning to leave later, when they finished their studies.
We had been married for more than two years. I was young and inexperienced and followed Otto’s decisions blindly, because I trusted him. He knew so much, and he explained everything to me, told me about kibbutzim and Jewish history, spoke about Theodor Herzl, the visionary of the Jewish State, and even taught me a few Hebrew words.
Life in Czechoslovakia was growing increasingly unpleasant. The regime was restrictive; people from the middle and upper classes were being harassed, and one could be imprisoned for such crimes as telling a joke about the government. People were fleeing over the border to Germany or Austria, and for us Jews, Aliyah was a welcome solution. The Czech authorities permitted, if reluctantly, emigration to Israel.
Yet the procedure was complicated, and we had to overcome many hurdles the bureaucracy put in our way. The first step was to make suitable arrangements with our flat. Grandmother would not be allowed to stay in it after we left. She declined to emigrate with us, saying, “I am like an old tree. Old trees cannot be replanted.”
Otto’s friend, the poet and artist Jiří Kolář, was desperately searching for a larger apartment. He lived in a one-room apartment with his wife, mother-in-law, and baby. If we exchanged flats, Grandmother could live in his, and he would get our two rooms. Yet
it had to be done cleverly, so that the authorities would not be aware of the subterfuge. The details are too complicated to describe here. In the end, unfortunately, the planned arrangement failed—although we didn’t learn this until after our departure. Kolář didn’t get our flat and had to remain in the one room. Grandmother was not allowed to stay in ours and actually became homeless. Her only solution was to move to Brno, her former hometown, where she was promised a room in the Jewish senior home. While she was waiting for a vacancy, she found temporary accommodation with the Formáneks, her former neighbors. Her sister-in-law Olga, also a Terezín survivor, lived in the senior home, and the two had a lifelong, close relationship. Their fate was also similar in that they both had lost their whole families, except for one grandchild. My grandmother had me, and Olga had Pavel Uri Bass, my second cousin.
The next step in preparing our emigration was dealing with the bureaucracy. To be allowed to leave the country, we had to fill in forms, attach expensive stamps, stand in a queue, and hand them to the clerk. He, of course, demanded a pile of personal documents, among them an affidavit from the tax authorities, confirming that we didn’t owe any taxes. Here arose a new problem.
For tax purposes, Otto’s father had divided the assets among the four members of the family and they were listed as co-owners. The German Treuhänder, of course, never paid taxes for the former Jewish owners, and now the revenue authorities demanded back payments for the entire war period. No matter that all the members of the family, except Otto, had perished, that during the German occupation the Kraus family had no longer owned the factory. The tax people demanded their pound of flesh. And so we had no choice: either pay or forget the Aliyah.