A Journey of a Bouncing Czech
(or Who Says You Only Live Twice)
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Natasha Novotny on Smashwords
A Journey of a Bouncing Czech
Copyright © 2010 by Natasha Novotny
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A Journey of a Bouncing Czech
Chapter I
I have 49 photo albums, some small ones, some medium size, most of them huge tomes, which used to fit several vacations plus a couple of birthdays. Even with the digital photography available now, I still sit in Blacks Cameras after every vacation and spend hundreds of dollars to have prints made – that is for the event of my retirement when I will, as my mother used to, go through them one by one and reminisce.
Occasionally my friends want to peruse these and I am more than happy to oblige. The other day, a relatively new acquaintance of mine remarked how happy and smiling I always looked and what an enchanting life I must have had. Well, she was right in a way, since pretty well most of our photographs were taken at Christmas parties, lighting birthday candles, hugging friends, or casually leaning over the railing of a cruise ship in a bikini with blue water or palm trees in the background. And this is truly how I would prefer to remember my life, in blissful forgetfulness of other realities.
We came across a particular picture of me, which struck my friends’ curiosity. I am sitting at a fountain in front of Buckingham Palace in London. I am 21 years-old, wearing, totally inappropriately, a pale blue brocade skirt suit and white high-heeled shoes. It is 10 a.m. and I am about to witness the changing of the guard. At this precise point I was a happy young woman who had arrived four days prior from Prague to spend the next 14 days with her Uncle Walter and Auntie Rosie.
The date was August 21st 1968. That day my life changed forever.
That morning I was sitting in their spacious kitchen in a huge apartment so much more luxurious than the one I shared with my grandparents and my mother in Prague. The TV was on, broadcasting the BBC news. This did not particularly interest me since my knowledge of English consisted of a few basic sentences. I always loved languages, but because my mother taught English and German as a second job, the last person who wanted to learn anything from her was this bratty kid.
I took French in high school; Russian was compulsory anyway and German I already knew from home from my grandparents. This way, I thought in the infinite wisdom of youth, my mother wouldn’t be able to check on my homework and criticize my possible errors, as a typical teacher would. I was wrong – my mother, as usual, was way ahead of me and started to take French lessons to keep up with me.
At this point, my “Uncle Walter” (the expression uncle and aunt is used in many European countries for elderly acquaintances not related to the family, it just makes everything a little easier than calling them Mr. and Mrs. So and so,) walked in excitedly. He had been listening to the news in another room and came in to tell me that Czechoslovakia had been occupied by the Soviet Army. Being a typical product of a socialist system and brainwashed for all 12 years of my schooling, I answered with cool assurance that these were the manoeuvres of the Warsaw pact, that we have these friendly armies of our sister states in our territory every summer about this time. He just shrugged his shoulders and walked out.
That same evening, my uncle and aunt took me to a prom concert at Royal Albert Hall to hear David and Igor Oistrach play. That alone would have made for one of life’s unique experiences. We were seated in the loge – of course I had no notion how expensive this was. One of the few advantages of living in a socialist state was that culture was extremely inexpensive in order to make it available to every factory worker. Therefore I had been lucky since my very early childhood to visit every theatre, ballet or concert performance available, mostly with my mother, sometimes with my grandparents and often with my school.
In Central Europe, regardless of the political system of that era, we always dressed up for just about anything. I had beautiful clothes, made periodically by various seamstresses in the area. There was not much to buy in the shops after the war and it was also unthinkable even for less fortunate people to wear something off the rack.
Furthermore, I had attended, again as most generations before me, three years of ballroom dance classes and for those my mother arranged to have several ball gowns made for me. It seemed totally necessary to us to have a couple of them packed into my luggage together with a couple of chic business suits and a couple of little dresses (should I be meeting the queen, perhaps.).No casual clothes of any sort, after all - I was going to London and for that I needed all my finery.
So, here I sat, in a pale blue mid-calf Swiss lace gown in the loge, totally shocked and surprised watching the British youth below lying about on blankets wearing whatever must have fallen out of their closets. I did not understand the word “prom”, or promenade meant this was a casual occasion for the Brits.
I had already felt many glances upon me, mostly from elderly Jewish ladies who turned out to be acquaintances of my aunt and uncle’s. I was still wallowing in my blessed ignorance. Then the old ladies came over to hug me and they appeared to have been crying over me. All I could get from it was that I was a poor homeless child with no country to go back to. The realization that I already knew this but had chosen to ignore it that very morning suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I was standing like a pale blue fairy princess without a castle to go back to. Was that really true?
My mind rushed back to the night of August the 16th, the night before I left for London.
I was standing at the bottom of Wenceslas Square, my Wenceslas Square to make this perfectly clear. It was a five-minute walk from my home. It was a centre of all sorts of activities, hotels, cafes, cinemas, bars in the, so-called New Town (only in respect to the Old Town -- a few hundred years its senior). We used to walk just about anywhere from my home, it was so central, so close to everything that mattered. We could even walk to the Castle, to the various beautiful hills of Prague. We could sit in one of the cafes on the river, or simply stroll around. The streetcars were right there and trolley buses as well.
The night of the16th, my friends took me to Hotel Savarin for a few glasses of wine. We used to go there for dinners, dancing, or for a few drinks, often running into my mother and her friends. From there we strolled toward our homes. It was one of those perfect summer nights; the lights of the National Museum on top of the square were beaming in the darkness. One of my ex-classmates leaned over and said to me, “By tomorrow this time you will be in London and maybe you will stay there forever.” I turned sharply to him and said with total conviction: “I am already living in the most beautiful city in the world, why on earth would I want to stay somewhere else?”
The following day my mother took me to the downtown air terminal. She was apprehensive, yet excited for me. She always wanted me to travel, but it was always difficult under the socialist regime. I had flown to Yugoslavia the previous year with 20 colleagues from Czechoslovak Television, but this was only the second flight of my life and the very first one to a Western Country. When I walked up on to the first step of the bus, I apparently turned back to my mother with a wave and said to her “I’ll see you one day, somehow, somewhere.”
She later told me those words stayed in her mind forever...
But at this point she was not too worried. The year was 1968 and after 20 seemingly hopeless years when my country was thrown into a goodie-bag with the other Eastern European countries and pushed behind the Iron Curtain, when just about anybody gave up on freedom or what was left of it after 1948, the Prague Spring arrived. Every day the streets were full of young people, especially toward the evenings. People were jumping up on orange crates, benches or chairs and speaking like nobody had dared to speak for a long time. At least, not in my lifetime. This was what freedom tasted like, we all thought. And suddenly it was so simple. Everybody just said what they wanted to say. And people listened and people were suddenly happy. We didn’t have any more money overnight but I cannot remember anybody complaining about that. We could say pretty well what we wanted and nobody got arrested. And, oh yes, we had a new president - Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak man who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, but very quickly gained the confidence of the nation. He was our hope.
The older generation was not necessarily so enthusiastic. They were full of hope, but more than that, they were scared beyond belief. They had experienced things like this before. And then something always happened. For hundreds of years my country has been beaten up by somebody bigger, stronger, pushier. The Germans, the Nazis, the Communists, the Soviets have always made sure we did not get too big for our boots. People like my grandparents who were Jewish on top of this, were used to double whammies. I remember that spring of ’68, arguing with my grandmother to have faith -- that the time had come to have a new hope. No, my generation was not going to bend the way they used to. And my grandmother, a concentration camp survivor, kept saying, “Please God, let there not be a Jewish president, so the rest of us don’t have to pay for it.”
I was working for Czechoslovak Television at that time. It was the second job I got after a relatively cushy but boring job at Artia, a publishing company, conveniently located at the bottom of the street I lived on, thus I was able to go home to Grandma for lunch every day and since my grandma’s most heartfelt wish was to fatten me up, she made sure to cook all my favourites. Much to her chagrin, neither my mother nor I were very big eaters. My mother, I think, actually detested food in general and had a very hard time finishing a full meal, while I had enough stamina to swallow whatever food she put in front of me, mostly to get grandma of my back and also from a deep-felt pity for her efforts. As much as I was not a big eater, there were few recipes my grandma took to her grave that I could never find anywhere else in the world: Her fruit dumplings, big and fluffy like clouds, her cheese cake, so firm, yet crisp, and the best of all her poppyseed cake, baked and sliced in the middle with chocolate cream on the inside and chocolate sauce on top. It was just as well that she died with her recipes, since both my mother and I became diabetics later on – an inheritance from both her father and my father as well.
Well, as I mentioned before, my life at Artia could have only been described as boring, working first in a small department, which exported food labels to neighbouring countries. Nothing could have been farther from the mind of a recent high school graduate who was thinking of this as just a temporary step before she was ready to take another step toward be accepted to the university. I did however, transfer to a much more interesting department after a few months, where the export of art books was the business of the day, where my colleagues were a lot of fun and they mostly regarded me as a cute little blonde, always anxious to please, even make coffee and bring the mail. As I was always a very restless soul, sitting on the same chair eight hours a day filling out invoices, was not what I was planning to do for the rest of my life.
But, before I go any further, let’s see where it all started – my life that is….
I was born in March 1947, barely two years after World War II. My grandparents on my mother’s side – the only ones I had, came from very different backgrounds. The only thing they had in common was the fact they were both Jewish. My grandmother came from a small town called Roudnice, the very same place where, as the lore teaches us, the great-great-great grandfather of the Czechs, whose name – guess what, was Czech.
After some schlep from the East he had apparently separated from his two brothers – Russ, yes – the grandpa of the Russians and Lech, grandpa of the Poles. So grandpa Czech came upon this cute hill, got tired, put down his very long walking stick and said to his clan, “That’s it, this land looks fertile and I ain’t goin’ any farther.” So, give or take a few hundred years later, my grandma was born to, what I gather was an elderly childless (well, childless until then) couple who had no other relatives in this world. Since my grandma was probably quite a handful for them by the age of 15, they shipped her to a finishing school for young maidens from good families, where she spent three years being educated in the art of sewing, cooking, regular school subjects as well as German and English. (German was wildly spoken in the border areas, referred to as Sudetenland.) So, here was my grandma, very pretty as the sepia pictures from that era tell me, with reddish-blond hair and perfect posture, which she kept till the day she died.
One day, just shortly after her 18th birthday and upon completing finishing school, she walked into a pastry shop and there was an elegant and handsome officer of the Austro-Hungarian army (at this point, however Czechoslovakia had been established by President Masaryk). It was love at first sight and what made this event even more exciting was the fact the young man was sporting a prosthetic arm covered in a fine kid-skin glove – hence a hero from World War I.
I must admit so many years later, that I was so very proud of my grandfather’s terrible handicap and for one was very fascinated by the endless stories my grandfather exchanged with a few of his buddies, explaining over and over again how the bullet had gone through his upper arm, how the field surgeons (they sounded more like butchers to me) had to amputate right then and there with a bit of help from some locally- produced slivovitz. However, they were not able to dislodge the bullet from my grandfather’s torso, where it landed happily -- fortunately, not causing any more harm. I, for one was always under the impression that grandpa stayed and fought in the fields of Bosnia-Herzegovina for years and years, and was disappointed to find that the total length of time he spent fighting the war was just three weeks.
Well, there was a very rewarding benefit to a little school child. I had an edge; I had something special at home nobody else in my class could compete with. When grandpa took his daily after-lunch nap and took his “arm” off, I brought my little friends in, tiptoed into the bedroom and proudly pointed to the arm-prosthesis with its several leather straps and covered in a single leather glove slung over the arm-chair next to him! My friends were in awe -- they had nothing on me that could have even vaguely competed with this!
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My Grandfather
It turned out my grandfather came from the German-speaking region, my great-grandparents originally hailed from Bavaria, but nobody at this point remembered what made them leave those fertile lands to exchange them for the Czech version. Again, with some exaggeration I understood they purchased a huge farm and an inn; these had shrunk quite a bit by the time I came to visit the area about 80 years later. My grandfather was one five boys and lost his mother after the fifth was delivered. My great-grandfather did not waste a moment and married a widow with two young daughters. Obviously, he was a very diligent man, since he accomplished all this and managed to provide higher education to most of his children before he succumbed to diabetes by the time he reached 36 years of age. My grandfather finished what would have been called a business college in today’s terms in the neighbouring town of Pilsen (Plzen in Czech) – yes, you got it – that’s where the beer comes from.
He then went on to become a bank assistant and eventually after several promotions in the hierarchy of that era, he became a bank manager in the small–this time German speaking town of Most (meaning Bridge in English). Truth be told, he could not have conducted business in Czech, which he never ceased to attack to reach perfection, which several tutors my grandma hired for him had tried to teach him and which, finally, my grandpa, learned to write to perfection (with his left hand, of course), but his spoken Czech remained so pathetic, that I was forever too embarrassed to let him speak in front of my buddies (even though I had the fake arm to make up for it). My poor grandma, in the meantime and with great ease, had mastered a fluent German.
My grandparents married the same year they met and exactly a year later, my mother was born. Her name was Charlotte as this was the year after the new Czechoslovak Republic was born under the new presidency of Thomas Garigue Masaryk, a man, whose name till this day is spoken with utmost respect. His middle name, Garigue, was the last name of his American born wife, Charlotte Garigue and Thomas Masaryk proved to be such a modern, progressive man for his era he actually took his wife’s last name as his middle name. Thus my mother, born just after this event in 1919, was called Charlotte.
I think the first 15 to 20 years must have been quite lovely for my family...
I listened endlessly to my grandmother’s description of their social life. They were well off; there was music, opera, concerts. My grandma had “jour” on Tuesdays for the ladies and my mother, who was a very athletic little girl played every sport possible. She skied (this is a very mountainous region covered in snow for several months in the winter) and she was a particularly good tennis player. My mother actually beat the woman champion of her day, when my mother turned 13. My wild guess was that the poor lady was not taking the game very seriously playing with just a child.
My grandfather always loved horses. Because he could not ride, having the handicap of one missing arm, he wanted my mother to make up for it. All along, I suspect, he wanted my mother and then later on me, to be boys. Never did he say this to anybody, but he always encouraged us to wear pants and in my mother’s case bought her a pair of beautiful riding breeches. The riding boots were to follow; he had already had them made by the local shoemaker. My mother was beaming with anticipation. Then, suddenly, my grandfather changed his mind. He realized this was a small mining town. Half of the children she went to school with were children of poor miners. They were lucky enough to have one pair of leather shoes. He stopped the process, took my mother’s boots back and that was the end of her riding. Yes, he was a very strict man, my grandpa, but always a man of principle.
My mother was very fortunate to have a Czech-speaking mother, who taught her a fluent Czech and was very particular that it should be a grammatically perfect Czech. Other than the maids and the cooks of the house my mother would have had very little exposure to it. The only schools in her town were German-speaking, they had a few hours of Czech tuition, but that would not have been sufficient. It was my grandmother, who kept up the culture, who embroidered tablecloths with Czech national motifs, who knew all the old Czech songs, who draw lovely Czech motifs on every piece of paper she could find.
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Before the War
I suppose my mother’s life would have been just like any average, upper middle class girl’s from that era. She finished high school and prior to that, she actually got her English certificate, as my grandparents wisely anticipated this to be more important for her future than her final grades in geometry. In her late teens she also started to date a nice young German man by the name of Harald , who was a couple of years her senior and was preparing to study medicine and to marry my mother sometime in the future.
Unfortunately, their fate, as well as the fates of millions of others, came to an abrupt halt in the fall of 1938. My mother, apparently always way ahead of her age, went to Harald and asked him to leave her. She knew she spared him the embarrassment of having to abandon his Jewish girlfriend. They all celebrated their graduation together: The Jewish, Czech and German kids together. Up to that point, there was no animosity – they were just kids growing up together.
That was the last time they were all together, before the army of Nazi Germany occupied Sudetenland.
My dear, dear grandfather understood the danger, but did not quite grasp the extent of it at this point. He sent my mother first to Prague to study at the Business academy, then, a few months later my grandmother, with their personal belongings followed. He, the banker, the person, who handled the miners’ wages, had to distribute the last ones personally, as he trusted no one else with this task. He never thought the Germans would hurt him; after all, did he not speak the language as his mother tongue? Well, he was fortunate at this point. He accomplished his task and followed my grandmother to Prague.
In Prague they found a very small, but brand new apartment in the “New city.” They had to abandon the old luxurious apartment where my mother played tennis in the corridor and had a grand piano in the sitting room for a tiny one bedroom, living room, kitchen etc. apartment, but they were safe – for now.
I will not go into the horrors of the Second World War as I, for one, am in no way qualified and secondly, volumes have been written on that subject. I must also explain, that when it all ended, my mother and my grandparents as well as the few remaining friends who came back alive, had only spoken in hushed voices in front of this little child. It took my mother several years before she slowly started to explain and always felt there was so much more she could not let pass her lips and I was afraid to ask. I did find out, piece by piece that my mother and my grandparents were taken to the fortress of Teresinstadt – or Terezin in Czech (an excellent source for more detailed information would be one of the books by my dear friend Vera Schiff, “Terezin, the town Hitler gave to the Jews”). My grandparents were relatively lucky – they stayed together the whole time in Terezin, thanks to the fact that my grandfather was a World War I hero (there you go, the missing arm was good for something), but my mother, being young and strong was selected first for manual labour in a munition factory Oederan in Poland – she used to tell me with so much pride how she and her friends would purposely put through as many ill-fitting bullets as possible--their only way to sabotage the German army. After a few weeks she was shipped to the ultimate destination known world-wide as Auschwitz. Well, all I can say is, thank goodness, my mother survived this hell. Auschwitz was liberated in the last days of the war and my mother managed to return to Terezin. As she walked up to my grandmother, her own mother did not recognize her. With her hair shorn and wearing an unrecognizable rag, a pair of size 42 shoes she had stolen from a dead soldier in the field, she shuffled back to Terezin. Of course, she was totally starved and here my great-uncle Robert (my grandpa’s brother) appeared, victoriously brandishing a bowl of “soup.” Of course, my poor ravenous mother gulped it down – and that was what almost killed her! It was way too much for her poor little body. Thank goodness my grandmother was there to nurse her back to health.
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My Father
And then, yes, of course, I had a father, even though for the first several years of my childhood I was not quite sure whether I was an exception to that rule, but then, when I was about six years-old, my mother took me for “one of those walks” on a Sunday. On Sundays my mother had an unfortunate habit of waking me up even sooner than usual -way too early with an overly-cheerful “Rise and shine!” getting me dressed in something far more athletic than my taste had required (oh yes, I was, even at that early age, far too fashion and proportion conscious). On this Sunday we started a brisk walk to the appropriate street car which took us to the very end of the world, or so the world as it was perceived by this child. Then we continued on foot as fast as my little feet could catch up with her to the highest hill available, the farthest forest to cross and I knew that my poor mother was going to deal with yet another difficult issue. (I think I was about 10 when she decided to inform me about the facts of life and before she started her first introductory sentence, I asked “O.K. mommy, what can I explain to you?”)
So, this time, the very long explanation came. My parents met in an office they both worked in at the beginning of the war in Prague. My father, a young engineer and an architect, left Czechoslovakia after spending the first several years of his career running a company making marble door-frames, entrances to passages in several cities in Czechoslovakia. It came to me as quite a surprise many years later that one of my favourite passages in Prague, one I used to go through on most days on my way from school and also where one of my classmates lived, was entirely designed and built by my father’s company. However, at this point in his life, he became very restless and curious about the goings- on in Palestine, where quite a number of European Jews had started to move. He immediately got a job as an engineer. One of the very few things I have inherited from him is an album of various structures, bridges and factories he had a hand in building. He met a young Sabra, a girl from a Polish-Jewish family, whom he married and with whom he had a son. They named named him Richard (They called him Risha.) Unfortunately, for reasons rather unknown, I am only guessing, perhaps it was the climate of the Middle East that my father could not bear and possibly he was missing the culture he was brought up in – unbelievably, my father chose the unfortunate time of the year 1938 to return with his wife and 13-year-old Richard to Czechoslovakia. At this point, he also became a colleague of my mother’s and a friend. To the best of my knowledge, my parents were just that then – a couple of friends.
I think you can see where I am going with this. The transports to the concentration camps began...
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My Parents’ Reunion
When my mother came back from the camps in 1945, she met Leo, my father, again. He was a broken man, who had survived pretty well the worst hardships one can imagine. He had lost his parents almost at the beginning, and his two brothers fairly quickly thereafter, as well as his young wife and his 13-year-old son. He lost numerous relatives, pretty well everybody from the Bachner family that he knew of. He was broken physically and I am sure, to a great extent mentally, knowing he was suddenly alone in this world.
I can barely imagine what the circumstances of my parents’ marrying were -- of course, they looked happy and smiling in their wedding pictures as all the other happy couples in this world usually do, with my beaming grandparents in the background, my auntie Lisa, who also came back from the camps as the only survivor of that part of the family (She also lost her parents and her brother – she still lives in Montreal and is my one and only blood relative from the Epstein side.). I would like to think that my parents loved each other at that point, but, I am quite certain they mostly found comfort in each other. It must have been quite difficult for the two of them -- my perpetually bubbly mother of 27 and my perpetually serious father of 41, who was now even more serious than ever.
My parents divorced when I was 2 months-old. When my mother was telling me all this on that Sunday “Hill of talks,” she told me basically all she knew, but added the fact that my father re-married a year after that and left for Palestine, which became the State of Israel in 1948.
My mother’s family also wanted to emigrate – somewhere, possibly to Israel, possibly to Montreal, Canada, where one of my great uncles had lived since the 1920s. The reason was that Czechoslovakia had been taken over by the Communist regime in February of 1948. They did not leave the country, they got cold feet. I was 11 months-old, my father was gone with another wife, my mother got a good job and my grandfather, no longer a bank director but a mere clerk, however still a bank employee, somehow decided that handing everything over to “the people” just might work.
My grandfather even became a member of the Communist party – God knows, he was not an opportunist, but really believed this new system was going to be good for everyone, equally. He did not listen to my grandmother and proudly came home with a red Communist identification card. The poor man, he had been through so much and how disappointed he must have been day after day. My grandfather had a cousin, Rudolf Slansky, who had been with the victorious Soviet Army back in 1945. He was treated as a hero. On his 50th birthday he received 50 red roses from the president of the Czechoslovak Republic. The next day he was dragged into the infamous Prague prison of Pankrac and hanged with his 12 equally heroic comrades.
This was a very dark time for my country, my family, for practically everybody around me. Even though I was such a small child, I remember so many details so vividly. Unfortunately, for some reason I remember everything in black and white. There was not much color to anything then. It’s so puzzling to me how much a child can comprehend from small gestures, little coded words and hushed sentences. My grandmother seemed to be scared of everything. She tried to shelter all of us from the realities of life -- as if she could. Poor thing, in this way she probably made it even worse.
My grandparents had a few friends who used to come and visit. My grandmother always managed to entertain, no matter what the cost, meaning she usually pretended to have a gall bladder attack, so her portion, her cookie, her open sandwich could go to a guest. In addition, she always cooked for an imaginary guest, the unexpected widower she would run into in the street and drag upstairs with, “I cooked too much anyway.” The friends of my grandparents were also scared to talk loudly, my grandmother made sure of it – in case there was a neighbor with a drinking glass listening on the other side of the wall and reporting us to the police and more importantly, so I would not hear, so I would never find out about the horrors of the war, about the camps, what the Nazis did, which of their friends were gassed, who survived and how. Of course, there is no better hearing than that of a child. It’s amazing how a child is able to construct the whole story just from fragments of conversation. My grandmother continued to whisper for the rest of her life. Even some 20 years later when she came to Vienna to live with my mother, she still whispered to her coffeehouse friends, looking carefully over her shoulder, just in case somebody might be interested in what my grandma had to say.
After the murder of Slansky, I woke up one night and saw the light on in the bathroom. I tiptoed over. I started to watch my mother, whose bedroom was the couch in our living room, shredding a lot of letters and then taking them to the toilet, setting fire to them and flushing them down. “Mommy, what are you doing?” My mother jumped. “You must never, ever tell anybody what you saw!” There she was at 3 a.m., explaining the facts of life to a 5-year-old. No, this was not about where babies come from, but how we were related to this family, Slansky, truly just a cousin of a cousin, but if “THEY” found out, there could be trouble, jobs could be lost, the police could come and give us a hard time.
That night stayed in my mind forever...
From all those whispers, I also learned German, the language I loathed. Did they not kill most of my relatives, and all those other people? Why do they keep speaking that awful language? I could not understand this, but the absurd reality was that, as I mentioned before, it was my grandfather’s mother tongue, it was the language my mother was educated in and one my grandmother got used to speaking. The fact these people had treated my people so badly seemed an unfortunate twist of history. In my family, therefore, I spoke Czech to everybody, my grandparents amongst themselves, alternatively Czech and German, my mother spoke to my grandpa in German and with me they all spoke Czech only, as I made them believe I did not speak one word of German. Hence I became the perfect spy in my own home pretending total ignorance. My mother, to make a further point, used to say “Think of it as the language of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, instead of the language of Hitler”.
Another one of my mother’s favorite adages was “You are a human being as many times as the number of languages you speak”.
* * * * *
Harald & Willie
It came as a great surprise to my family when it turned out I spoke the dreaded German language after all. It all started with a most unexpected letter from Harald to my mother. The year was about 1962, or so I suspect as I had just started high school. Harald, as he wrote, had survived the war. He was a soldier, just a German soldier. He said he never picked up a rifle, never hurt anyone, that he got shot well early on and was shipped back home. After the war he became a doctor, married and had three children and settled in the East German town of Weimar. He said he understood how my mother must feel after everything she had gone through but he very much wanted her to meet his family in Prague. My mother was in an emotional turmoil and discussed the issue at great length with her parents. They all decided that Harald and his family deserved to be at least given a chance, at least for old time’s sake. Innocent, until proven guilty is a very good English law that humanity should live by. They met in the middle of the Charles Bridge in Prague, or so she told me. It must have been an extremely emotional and sensitive moment for the three of them. The friendship was renewed. They talked about the good old times before the world had come crashing down on them and destroyed what used to be a normal life. My mother was very happy to hear that their mutual school chum Willie Partisch was alive and well and living with his family in Leipzig, where he had become a rather famous stage actor. There were no qualms about whether “Uncle Willie” deserved to be seen again. Uncle Willie was unquestionably a hero in my family’s eyes. Even though my mother and my grandparents were walking around with big yellow Stars of David on their coats, Uncle Willie would run up to them and ask if he could come to their home for coffee. Even though my mother begged to be left alone as she knew darn well what the Nazis would do to a fellow German in the company of a Jew, he did not give up. My mother was a school chum and that’s all he cared about.
So, here I was at 15 years-old, having never been out of my country (we were not allowed to travel to the West and there were only a few desirable Eastern European destinations to travel to, but more about that later) and taking a trip with my mother to Weimar. In those days we used to send our luggage ahead, a really old-fashioned European habit when one traveled by rail. It is funny today to think that a week’s trip of 5 hours was such a big deal, but that’s how it was. I have to stress that the silly East Germans had never changed their uniforms since the war including the typical up-turned hats in a drab olive green color. When my mother spotted them first at the border, she started to shake like a leaf. We arrived in Weimar, a beautiful and historic little town, in pouring rain – minus the luggage! We had no clothes to change into for three days and it rained every day.
On the third day we received a very grumpy telephone call that a customs officer from Leipzig was coming in to check our luggage. I often thought of that scene hundreds of times later in life when I dreaded being caught with maybe a bottle of Caribbean rum or an Italian handbag. This was yet another story. This man, obviously pissed off to have to ride a bike from a neighboring town in horrible weather, looking like one of my mother’s tormentors from the camps, was just dying to find something compromising on us. I was clutching an old Kodak camera, probably from the 30s, with a precious roll of film for 12 pictures to be taken at some later point. The bewildered officer yanked it out of my hands, opened it and yanked out the film, of course, destroying it in the process. I screamed, my mother pulled me toward her, terrified – “Don’t say anything!”
This was our introduction to East Germany...
The rest of our stay was pleasant, even though Harald’s mother greeted us kneeling in the doorway and crying, “I swear, we did not know anything!” (about the camps and the gas chambers). Did she or didn’t she? God only knows, God only knows.
The following year I took this trip by myself. I was 16 years-old. My luggage was full of “contraband” goods – children’s’ shoes, men’s white nylon shirts, cotton socks and food. Czechoslovakia was relatively well off, so much better than East Germany. On that note -- we, the people who had the great fortune to be stuck behind the Iron Curtain had to be pretty crafty to make the best of our lives and to obtain goods from neighboring countries. For instance, the Poles used have wonderful “swishy” raincoats, which would pack up easily in a handbag. They only came in navy blue, but were a very hot commodity, if one was able to obtain one. They became almost a status symbol of the era.
I stayed first in Leipzig with Uncle Willie and his wife Lieselotte and their two sons, both my age. They were the warmest, most congenial and loving people one can imagine. They treated me like one of their own. They were ridden with guilt because of the events of the war. Why them? Always the wrong people. Then I continued to Weimar and got a very similar reception from Harald’s family. They introduced me to several young people I had a really great time with. The food was less than plentiful and mostly not very tasty.
A great irony of the Communist system, especially in that country, was that there was really no planned economy. There were no potatoes to be had, but there were tons of strawberries, and champagne flowed freely everywhere I went. It took me years to even be able to look at strawberries and champagne. That however was not their worst problem… There were secret police everywhere. I found my grandmother’s whispering even more widely spread amongst my new friends in East Germany.
I was introduced to a relatively well-to-do dentist’s family whom I stayed with the following year. They too treated me like a princess. There is no point wondering if it was guilt or if they were simply nice people. I sat in their living room one afternoon watching a color TV (!), being awed by the first commercials I had ever seen -- courtesy of West German TV. The dentist and his wife were able to receive a signal from the West and watch this forbidden channel. At this moment, one of my new young friends came to visit. Auntie Gertie, the dentist’s wife, a very brave and tough woman who despised the system and did all she could to fight it, went completely ashen when she realized there was a stranger in the room. He could have reported them and that’s all she could think of at that moment. Fortunately, the young man was a decent person.
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My School Years
I have a picture of myself, standing in front my new school (the school is actually 400 years old) after a few reconstructions. I am wearing a red dress (well, the picture is black and white, but I know it was red), long braids with white bows at the ends of them and I am beaming with anticipation. I almost always loved going to school. I acquired three best friends, one of them was the very best and remained so to this day through thick and thin, in spite the fact we were always, and still are like day and night. Alena was athletic, an Olympic quality basketball player, junior badminton champion and just about everything that I was not. I favored music of all sorts, dance of every kind, I skied and played tennis, but that happened rather because of my very athletic mother. The one thing the four of us had in common was that we all came from bourgeois families; really the opposite of what was good for us living under the Communist regime.
Having parents who used to have just about anything in the form of land, a factory, a large house, (at this point nobody had any private property), we were guilty by just by the sheer fact of having a higher education. It made us quite unpopular in the eyes of the mighty party; therefore they blocked us as much as they possibly could from higher education, or in some cases even from a high school education.
We often talk with my Czech friends during my now frequent visits to Prague, about how very fortunate we were, going to precisely that school in that very part of Prague. Not only it was a beautiful school, just around the corner from my home, but our teachers and later our professors somehow managed to remain human in these turbulent times. Of course, they all had to join the Communist Party, just to keep their jobs, but it was widely known who joined as an opportunist and who just needed to make a living.
I was a pretty good student, at the top of my class till I reached high school, when math and physics and chemistry became a bit of a challenge and unless the exam happened to be in one of these subjects, I pretty well looked forward to every school day and seeing my friends.
One of the usual clouds that came over my school years was the dreaded periodic questionnaire asking about the whereabouts or the very existence of my parents. When the line FATHER came up, I was instructed at home to fill in “unknown”. It was far better, or almost an advantage for the school officials to think that I was an illegitimate child instead of confessing that he was living in Israel.
I honestly cannot claim I experienced any anti-Semitism during my school years...
I have to say that the majority of my classmates and teachers treated me very kindly.
As far as actually being actively religious in those days in Czechoslovakia, this is a very tricky subject to discuss and I am sure that many people would not agree with me. As anywhere in the world it depends so much on the exact area, on the education of individuals and neighbourhood one lives in. Officially, there was freedom of religion in my country but it was truly frowned upon and if you knew what was good for you, it was better to stay away. My family, who were always very secular Jews and basically only kept the holidays of Yom Kippur and Roshashanah out of respect for their ancestors and simply, because that’s what they were used to, did not regard this as a huge problem. My grandmother and my mother, when going to the synagogue on those few days of the year, carried their fancy hats in their handbags and sported the much more acceptable headscarf and changed to the more appropriate head covers inside the synagogue. Kosher was not something my grandmother could even relate to. She had a vague knowledge of the no pork allowed rule, however, she waved this away as a totally unpractical law that should have been left back in the heat of the Middle East a long time ago. Well, of course, what else was she going to serve in a country where “pork, sauerkraut and dumplings” were at the top of every decent Czech menu, in Prague, where the world-famous ham comes from and where pork was, even in the worst of times, always available?
My grandmother was a practical and wise woman...
Most of my friends in school, I am guessing, were from what were originally Catholic families, but this also was not often discussed. We have hundreds of churches in Prague and I remember only some of my little friends secretly crossing themselves, when passing in front of them. I felt sorry for them – at least I did not have that problem.
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Kid Born Into That Era
There was a great advantage to being a kid born into that era. For one, we did not know any better. We did not remember anything better, and except for the previous generations, I think most of us were quite happy with what we had. My grandfather used to walk angrily through the small apartment like a caged lion complaining about the constant lack of space. My grandmother used to lament about how things were before the war. When my little friends would come over, she would open the door emoting huge apologies for the cramped dwellings we lived in. She served them with every bit of finery retrieved from the pathetic remnants which were returned to us after the war.
My grandparents left a suitcase full of our possessions with a Czech couple, the Hromadas who were left alone during the war, but after 1948 had gradually divided their enormous apartment, furnished mostly in art deco furniture, amongst various Roma families and they themselves were left with one little room at the end of the corridor, having to pass the often inebriated newcomers in order to get to their bedroom. However, Mr. and Mrs. Hromada were decent people and gave my grandparents every stitch and a few bits of porcelain they kept for them.
There was another suitcase, however, which was to be guarded by my Uncle Robert and his new wife Fanny. You see, my Uncle Robert, one of my grandfather’s brothers, divorced his wife just before the war started. They had two small children. He re-married a Czech, non-Jewish girl – Auntie Fannie. I think my family had never forgiven him, not because of the new liaison, but the fact that inevitably his first wife and children perished immediately in the gas chambers, while uncle Robert, thanks to his Arian wife was sheltered until almost the end of the war when he was shipped to the camps, but under much easier conditions (he worked in the kitchen, for God’s sake) and stayed only for three months in Terezin. When my grandparents asked what had happened to the suitcase parked with them (it contained half the cutlery, half the porcelain, a matching carpet and a few other things from the other suitcase), they were told it all had to be sold for bread.
As the inevitable and most unforeseen happens in life, Robert and Fannie happened to live in the beautiful city of Marienbad, one of the most beautiful spa towns of central Europe with endless forests surrounding the town. Once upon a time, it was frequented by the aristocracy and royalty of Europe; in the 50s it was frequented by the working class, sent there by the Communist party and sporting old sweat suits to replace the finery of the gentry. Robert and Fannie lived in a modest apartment, but there certainly was much fresher air than we had in Prague, so they used to invite us to spend some of my school vacations with them. How embarrassed must my mother have been when I picked up the tortoise-handle cutlery and said, “Mommy, this is just like what we have at home and the carpet is just like the one we got back from the Hromadas.” Thank goodness; they didn’t have to sell these items for a loaf of bread after all.
Apartment hunting was a sport my family and I practiced on a lot of Sundays. My grandma was secretly called Sarah Bernhardt by grandpa, for her dramatic outbursts as in, “If I spend any more time in this kitchen, I will go blind.” There was the constant worry of what to do with me as I was growing up and still had my little bed in my grandparents room. This, however, was solved beautifully. There was a little “maid’s room” from before the war, when people still had maids. The room, I am guessing, was about 6’x 3’, and located next to the kitchen and when I sat on my bed, my feet were in the kitchen. However, it was my kingdom, I had my bed separate from the rest of my family, I had my books piled sky-high above me and that’s all I needed. I was able to read with a tiny lamp till the wee hours of the morning or till my mother caught me, which happened frequently. However, my family kept hunting for a larger apartment. We never found one. We always returned back home very happy with what we had. When I compared notes with my old friends from those days after so many years, most of them told me how fortunate I was to have had my own quarters.
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All Things Russian
To have the name Natasha was an issue of its own. I have met a lot of people who hate their name. I am not one of them. I always loved my name and think it suits me. And that is in spite of the fact that most people around me hated all things Russian, blindly associating them with the Soviet regime, the Soviet Army, all negative things in their eyes. As my mother used to defend the German language, I defended Russian as being the language of Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov etc. The origin of my name though, was different than anybody realized. It was my father’s dead mother, grandma Nacha (in Yiddish), or Natalia in Polish, whose name I inherited. My father, who wanted to modernize it, changed it to Natasha, which, in fact is a different name, but nobody cared about it, certainly not me.
When we started the 4th grade, the Russian language was incorporated three times a week into our school program and I just thrived. Being basically of a romantic nature, I could envision myself in Tsarist palaces listening to beautiful music, drinking tea from silver samovars and riding in the Troika (a three horse driven carriage). So, I read every piece of Russian literature available to me, even though our school Russian consisted mostly of pathetic proclamations to the success of the October Revolution.
This also made it very difficult for my family as well as others. They never dared say anything against the school system, against the Soviets, the party. Our parents were never quite sure, what we might repeat in school, what might get them into trouble. They could not trust their own children.
I became a young pioneer at the age of ten. These were the “little branches” of the big Communist tree. We wore white shirts, navy skirts (pants for the boys) and bright red scarves for festive occasions and the scarves as such every day for school. I ironed my scarf every night before I went to bed. We stood guard in front of the monuments for fallen Soviet soldiers every May 9th (the Liberation Day of 1945) and instead of the expected 30 minutes, we would bribe each other with a piece of apple in order to stand there longer – rain or shine -- it was such an honor. I once stood there for a solid hour, all the time saluting, of course, trembling in the driving rain, lips purple, but determined, with grandmother running in circles around me with a plastic raincoat, trying to force me to put it on without any success. We walked proudly in 1st of May parades, we sang and danced and performed community service, such as digging potatoes and beetroots in the fields to help the farmers in the fall, usually in miserable weather, very proud to do this for the party. And there was absolutely nothing our parents could do, if they wanted to keep their jobs, and offer us a chance of a higher education.
By the time we reached high school at the age of 15, some of us “more deserving” this honor became the members of “Czechoslovak Youth Union”, where we would get half- way to becoming true blue Communists. However, I do dare to speak for most of my friends from that era that this became a bit of a nuisance, since our young eyes were gradually opened with the goings-on in our State. I remember only donning the newly acquired blue shirt (minus the scarf, thank goodness) a couple of times.
Times were also gradually changing…
The blue shirt issue came up once more, though. At the age of 18 we graduated from high school, the exams of maturity as it’s called in Central Europe. This, for many generations of our families, was a very festive occasion. My mother wore a black dress for this and so did her mother and all the young men wore black suits, white shirts and ties of their era. However, since 1948 everybody’d had to attend the ceremonies in the blue shirts of the Youth Union. Mine, as I mentioned earlier, was a very special school.
We were the only school who addressed their professors “Mr. Professor” instead of Comrade Professor as it was done everywhere else. How we got away with this, God only knows. So, prior to the exams, several of us walked into the principal’s office and simply announced we wished to honor the previous generation by wearing black , but we compromised, wearing white shirts and blouses and black bottoms instead. In my country we have a custom of displaying the photographs of all the graduates from every school in the country in every city in shop windows. My school was the only one and the first one in my city of Prague or anywhere else where the graduating students wore black and white.
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