We did not get back to Bratislava until the end of June 1945. From mid-April until our return to Bratislava we lived in the eastern Slovakian town of Košice, where my father worked for the provisional Czechoslovak government and I—after a hiatus of nearly one year—attended school.
People were still trying to figure out who had and who had not survived. The sight of former concentration camp inmates tracing their way back to their homes was common. There were shortages of everything. But we lived once again in a free democratic Czechoslovak Republic, and among the survivors there was initially widespread optimism that things would improve.
Once back in Bratislava my parents began to piece their life together. We were able to rent a spacious apartment in an early-twentieth-century three-family home in a pleasant villa district, not far from the center of the city. We even recovered some of the furniture and Oriental carpets my parents had left with non-Jewish friends and acquaintances for safekeeping.
Kalos, our poodle, had survived the war. My father had asked our former cleaning lady to care for Kalos, which she gladly agreed to do. My mother and I came to claim him after returning to Bratislava in the summer of 1945, but the woman started crying, saying that she could not imagine life without Kalos. By then he had reached the ripe age of thirteen and, sadly, he seemed indifferent to my mother and me. We did not put up a fight, deciding it was probably best to let Kalos live out his life with his new mistress.
My mother once again hung out a shingle, using one room in the apartment as her ophthalmology office. My father recovered his position in the company that emerged after the war as the successor of Hand-lovské Uhoľné Bane, the Handlová Coal Mine Company. In the fall of 1945, I was admitted to the third grade of a gymnázium, even though I had missed most of the second grade. I became a boy scout and made some friendships that have lasted to this day.
One of my lifetime friends whom I met as a boy scout is Robert “Bobby” Lamberg, a Holocaust survivor from a German-speaking Jewish family. The friendship with Bobby was unusual because he was four years older than me. When I told my mother about my new friend, she was worried that having a seventeen-year-old friend at age thirteen ran the risk that he would drag me into activities for which I was not ready. However, when I introduced Bobby to my mother she reconsidered; later she told me she had realized that if anyone was going to be a bad influence, it would be me on Bobby.
Bobby had had a difficult life. His parents were well-to-do when they lived in their home in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The Lambergs fled their home before the annexation of Sudetenland by Germany sanctioned by the Munich Agreement, and eventually ended up in Bratislava. Bobby and his parents survived the war by not registering as Jews, but Bobby’s two older brothers were caught and they perished in concentration camps. Bobby’s father had a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna and he was a veritable Renaissance man. He spoke at least half a dozen languages, though Slovak or Czech were not among them. By the time I befriended Bobby, the family was quite impoverished, living in two rooms of a communal apartment they shared with two other families. In his seventies by then, the only income Mr. Lamberg had came from giving private lessons in French and English. German was Mr. Lamberg’s first language, but no one in those immediate postwar years was interested in learning German.
One of the benefits of my friendship with Bobby was that I relearned German. Although it was the first language I acquired as a child, I had heard little German and had had no opportunity to speak German since age five. As Bobby’s parents spoke no Slovak or Czech, I had to communicate with them in German. To my surprise, my German returned quickly. Another benefit of our friendship was that through Bobby’s family I became exposed to an intellectual environment I had not experienced before. Though sparsely and modestly furnished, the two rooms inhabited by the Lambergs overflowed with books, all neatly covered in protective off-white paper wrappers, affixed with adhesive labels featuring the handwritten name of the author and book title.
Mr. Lamberg spent most of the day reading, actually studying, the books in his library, which ranged from classical German poetry to tracts on history and philosophy. My mother and I too liked reading books, but for Mr. Lamberg, books were the essence of his life. And the books Mr. Lamberg was reading—Goethe, Leibnitz, and Kant, among others—were quite different from the more popular type of literature I was used to at home.
Through my friendship with Bobby I also became exposed to classical music in a way I had not experienced in my own home. One of Mr. Lamberg’s favorite activities, besides reading, was humming or whistling classical tunes of his beloved composers. He was partial to Mozart and Schumann; later nineteenth-century composers, such as Brahms or—god forbid—Wagner, he liked less. My parents enjoyed listening to music, especially of the more popular genre, but their musical tastes in classical music were not particularly discriminating and neither one of them could carry a tune. My own musical talents are not better. I like to listen to music—classical, opera, and jazz—but my ability to discern subtleties of music is limited and I can’t abide karaoke bars.
Bobby’s parents passed away in the early 1950s and in 1957 Bobby defected. After his defection, Bobby spent several years wandering the globe, eventually becoming a successful correspondent for the most prominent Swiss newspaper, Neue Zürcher Zeitung. After more wandering around the globe as a correspondent, he is now living in retirement in Buenos Aires with his Argentinean wife. We still speak on the phone regularly and see one another when the opportunity arises.
In addition to relearning German, courtesy of the Lambergs, I was also taking lessons in English. My mother at first arranged for me to take private lessons with a native Englishwoman who had married a Slovak man. Apparently, I was lax in doing my homework and not making enough progress. After a few months my English teacher called my mother. “You are wasting your money,” she said, “your son will never learn English.” Undeterred, my mother found me another English teacher.
After the war, Edvard Beneš, the exiled president, once again became president of Czechoslovakia. All Soviet troops departed from Czechoslovakia by early 1946, raising hopes that the country would be able to stay its course toward a free democratic future. Immediately after the end of the war there was a tilt toward a more restrained form of capitalism. Some large companies—including the coal mine company my father worked for—were nationalized and farms owned by large landowners were parceled out among smaller farmers. In general though, most forms of private ownership and private businesses were initially left intact. In 1946, the first free elections were held after almost ten years.
Though they did not win a majority, the Communist Party emerged as the strongest political party in the country—though not in Slovakia—and they ended up dominating the central government. The head of the Communist Party, Klement Gottwald, a faithful disciple of Stalin, was named prime minister of Czechoslovakia. The Communists wasted no time in manipulating the system to place their own people in positions of power. Over the years that followed their manipulations escalated, until they took over the government completely and imposed yet another totalitarian system in February 1948. The circumstances surrounding these events are extensively documented in many publications, including the illuminating memoir Prague Winter written by the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who was born in Czechoslovakia.
By the time the war ended I was old enough to formulate my own political views. My political leanings were initially unsettled, as were those of my parents. We had some sympathy for the Communists, because during the war they strongly opposed the Nazis. I was also attracted to the idea of social justice that was, at least on paper, at the core of the Communist ideology. When it became clear that the Communist Party was more interested in usurping power than in promoting social justice, my views changed. I kept a diary for a while, and in it I remember expressing my strong opposition to the February government takeover, dubbed “victorious February” by the Communists and “Communist putsch” by the opposition. But then, worried that my diary might be discovered by the authorities, I burned it in our coal stove.
Like the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the Communist takeover precipitated a wave of emigration. (Charles Simic, the Serbian-born American poet, famously observed, “Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents, if they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born.”) Some of our acquaintances who were politically active in parties opposed to the Communists decided to leave during the first weeks after the takeover, while the borders were still open. Soon, however, the government clamped down on international travel, forcing people who were desperate enough to leave to cross the border to West Germany or Austria illegally—a feat that would become increasingly more risky as border fortifications along the emerging Iron Curtain were erected.
As an accident of history, for the few Jewish people in Czechoslovakia who survived the Holocaust the window of opportunity to legally emigrate stayed open a little longer. The Soviet Union strongly supported the establishment of the State of Israel, hoping to thus counter the British influence in the Middle East. When Israel declared independence in May 1948, the Soviet Union was the first country to officially recognize the new Jewish state, and Czechoslovakia became one of the major suppliers of arms to Israel. In view of the good relations, the Czech Communist government initially allowed Jews to emigrate to Israel. Two of my father’s cousins who had survived the Holocaust decided to emigrate. I was quite close to them then, because during the summer of 1947 I had spent several weeks at their home in the south Slovakian town of Levice. My mother’s best friend Lilly Wertheimer also decided to leave for Israel, with her gynecologist husband and teenage daughter.
For a while my parents considered emigration to Israel, but, like in 1938, they could not make up their mind. At one point in the summer of 1948, we all sat down and started to prepare a list of belongings we would take with us to Israel, but not even that effort progressed very far. From what I can remember, I too could not make up my mind whether I would rather stay or leave. The easiest solution was to do nothing.
What was it like to live in Communist Czechoslovakia after 1948?
People active in political parties opposed to the Communist takeover were subjected to persecution. Once again there were political prisoners, people who were sentenced to harsh prison terms for being on the wrong side of the political spectrum. If you were on the wrong side—or even if you were not—you might be denounced by your neighbors. (The worst was yet to come in the 1950s when political show trials inspired by Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union would get underway.) People who owned businesses, large properties, or larger farms were also likely to experience the “iron fist of the working class.” Because the country had yet to recover from the destruction of the war years, and, because the Communists grossly mismanaged their nationalized economy, there were shortages of almost everything, from food to clothes to toilet paper. In sum, life was pretty miserable for the majority of people, excepting, of course, the Communist bosses who were awarded special privileges. (And perhaps a few black marketers, provided they managed to avoid being caught.)
My family was fortunate to avoid the worst excesses of the Communist system. Unlike many other members of the upper-middle class, my parents were not forced to move into the countryside and take up manual labor. It helped that we did not own a business or even a family home, which someone in the Communist Party hierarchy might covet, so we were less of a target.
As an ophthalmologist, my mother was allowed to practice her profession, although she could no longer continue her private practice and instead had to move to a state-run ophthalmology clinic. Her workload (though not her compensation) increased dramatically, but my mother liked her work and felt appreciated by her patients. My father continued to work for the now-nationalized coal mine company, and, even though he no longer commuted to work by chauffeur-driven car as he used to before the war, he too felt appreciated.
The full-time maid we hired after moving back to Bratislava in 1945 had to leave because maids were considered a “bourgeois anachronism,” and because our family’s financial situation deteriorated so that we could not afford a maid in the first place. But my parents were still relishing the fact that they had survived the war. It helped that all along they had a relatively relaxed attitude toward money and material possessions—something I believe I inherited from them. When they realized they would not recover much of their prewar wealth or when they lost money during numerous “monetary reforms” carried out by the Communist government, my mother would repeat one of her favorite expressions: “It’s only money.”
When, in September 1945, I started attending the third grade of gymnázium in Bratislava (equivalent of eighth grade in the US), people were still preoccupied with rebuilding their war-torn lives. To obtain food and other basic goods required standing in lines, often for hours. In this atmosphere many people did not view education as the highest priority.
The quality of education also suffered as a result of changes that were being introduced to the curriculum. For example, German language instruction was replaced with Russian, but there were very few qualified teachers of Russian. Our teachers were literally just one or two lessons ahead of their students.
Within two years after the end of the war, life in general and the standard of our education had started to improve, but in February 1948, the Communist takeover once again threw life and the system of education into disarray.
In many of our classes, there was an emphasis on memorization. Remembering the years of a monarch’s reign or of historic battles was more important than learning what influence a king or queen had on history or why certain battles mattered more than others. It is not surprising that we were not led to independent thinking; encouraging students to form critical opinions and ask probing questions could have gotten both our teachers and us into trouble, especially after the Communist takeover.
Even though I have thankfully forgotten much of the memorized material, I still remember some useless information I learned at the gymnázium. Unlike my mother, I took no classical Greek language classes because they were no longer offered, but I did study Latin for four years—which was useful because the Latin vocabulary and grammar helped with learning other languages. My studies of Latin have also enabled me to understand simple written and spoken Italian, even though I never studied Italian. But what good does it do that to this day I can recite Latin prepositions used with the accusative case—all twenty-one of them?
I was a good student, but I never strived to achieve the best grades in the class because I didn’t want to be perceived as a bookworm. I don’t remember any subjects I really disliked, but in general I enjoyed less the science subjects—math, chemistry, physics—and preferred languages, literature, history, and geography.
When the putsch marking the full Communist takeover occurred in early 1948 I was a teenager attending the fourth grade of the First State gymnázium in Bratislava, corresponding to ninth grade in the US. Changes at my school occurred fairly gradually and some were more symbolic than substantial.
In June 1948, the democratically elected president, Edvard Beneš, resigned and Klement Gottwald, the Communist leader, succeeded him. I, with a couple of my classmates, was tasked with removing the portrait of Beneš hanging on the wall of our classroom and replacing it with one of Gottwald. When we opened the frame we found that hidden under the portrait of Beneš were pictures of other former presidents, including that of Tomáš Masaryk, the founding president of Czechoslovakia, and of Jozef Tiso, the cleric who was president of the Fascist Slovak State, later executed as a war criminal. We followed the apparent tradition, and, with an impish delight, we inserted Gottwald’s picture into the frame but left all the former dignitaries tucked under it.
Most of us in the class were united in our opposition to the new regime. Even though we could not express our political convictions openly, there were subtle ways in which we let everyone know where we stood. Until the Communist takeover, our teachers would be addressed by the pupils as pán profesor or pani profesorka, the equivalent of “sir” and “madam.” After the takeover we were told that these titles were bourgeois anachronisms, and from now on all teachers are to be called “comrade professor.” In a display of passive resistance against the regime, 90 percent of us continued to address our teachers by their old titles. Only once, when I was already at the university, did a teacher admonish me, “Please address me as comrade professor.” He was a former Nazi collaborator who may have been worried that I was testing his loyalty to the Communist regime.
People, especially young people, found other ways in which to express their distaste for the Communist system. One was music. The musical form preferred by the authorities was Czech, Slovak, and Russian folk songs along with some contemporary popular music with overt ideological messages. Jazz was not banned—after all it originated in the music of oppressed African slaves—but it was barely tolerated by the regime. We adored jazz and listened to it or played it on our phonographs as often as possible.
Another way of expressing unhappiness with the regime was through clothes. Communist, especially Soviet, dignitaries were not known for wearing sharp clothes. Despite the unavailability of quality ready-made clothes, the young used creative ways to imitate the latest Western fashions. In the 1950s it was extremely narrow, short pants and striped socks for boys, tight sweaters with skirts and nylon stockings for girls. My own efforts at expressing rebelliousness through fashion were rather subdued, but a few boys at our gymnázium became really good at it. The authorities took note of the trend, and official media wasted no time in criticizing these expressions of “Western decadence.”
There were many forms of political indoctrination. We were required to enter the ranks of the organization ČSM, an abbreviation for Československý sväz mládeže (“Czechoslovak youth organization”). One day all of us gymnázium students were sent to distribute applications for membership in the Society of Czechoslovak-Soviet Friendship; a written report mentions that sixteen streets were covered by us and that all students and professors had also signed up. There were “work brigades,” days when instead of attending school we were sent to do manual labor, such as helping with the harvest of potatoes or planting new trees. There were compulsory marches and celebrations, especially on May 1, the International Holiday of Workers, or when Communist dignitaries from the Soviet Union or other “fraternal Socialist countries” were visiting town.
In the annual report for the 1949–50 school year, there were over fifty events of “civic and political education” listed that we had to attend, including a visit to an exhibition, Stalin—Our Teacher (attendance compulsory for all pupils); a lecture, “How Did Stalin Improve the Life of Women?” (attendance compulsory for all female teachers and pupils); or another lecture entitled “The Soviet Union’s Fight for World Peace,” followed by the screening of the film In the Glow of the New Day.
With the exception of about three kids—all of them sons or daughters of Communist dignitaries—no one in my class converted to Communist ideology, at least not before our graduation in 1951. Most of our teachers also did not believe the Communist propaganda. We could tell because when communicating to us some piece of official propaganda, they—unlike the believing Communists—would do so without any trace of enthusiasm. Yet the teachers had to be even more circumspect than us in hiding their true beliefs because any overt display of political opposition would result in a dismissal. Only one teacher and the gymnázium director were outspoken, convinced Communists, but even our hard-line director was rumored to have trouble with her daughter, whose tastes in music and clothing were of the “decadent Western” type.
Not everything in my gymnázium years was oppressive. During winters the entire student body was taken on a ski holiday to the mountains in central Slovakia. I enjoyed the ski trips and became a reasonably good downhill skier. I also recall a detail from one of these trips. We traveled by train at night; in the darkened passenger compartment, I used the time to make out with the only Communist girl in our class.
By age fifteen I experienced my first, entirely platonic love affair (no stolen kisses on a train this time). Eva was fifteen, the same as me, and much more mature. We did go to see a few movies together but, to my dismay, she soon grew tired of my youthful affection.
I also became friends with my classmate Alex “Šaci” Vietor, who was two years older than me, because I gained a year skipping fifth grade, whereas he lost a year when he immigrated to Czechoslovakia from Hungary and had to learn Slovak in order to pass admission requirements. Šaci had spent his childhood years in Budapest. He lost his father in the Holocaust, and his mother subsequently married an attorney from Slovakia who was hiding in Budapest during the war. After the war they all moved to Bratislava. Like Bobby, whom I befriended a few years earlier, Šaci became a lifelong intimate friend. (“Šaci” is a phonetic Slovak spelling of the German nickname “Schatzi,” derived from the word Schatz, meaning “treasure.”)
Šaci and I would share the same twin school bench for three years. From time to time our Slovak language teacher would give us writing assignments that we were required to complete by the end of the fifty-minute-long class. Šaci was born in Budapest, his mother tongue was Hungarian, and his ability to express himself in Slovak, especially in writing, was at the time still lacking. I knew that in order to cement our friendship I had to help Šaci complete his essay before I could even begin thinking of writing mine.
Just as the Communists were unable to convert us to their ideology, they also failed to do away with teenage parties. Šaci had friends his own age, one grade ahead of us, who were old enough to organize parties with girls. The parties were referred to as čurbes (the original Czech word means “a mess”). Here is how it worked: When parents of one of Šaci’s friends were out of town, a party would be organized in that friend’s home, to which an equal number of boys and girls would be invited. Šaci and his friends were popular boys, so the girls who participated were also attractive and popular. At the party, there would be some conversation, music, and dancing. Alcohol was served too—usually some wine or sweet liquor—and soon the lights were dimmed, with boys and girls, now paired off, finding a quiet place in some corner. I don’t think that the intimacies ever progressed that far, but it was a lot of fun. I yearned to be invited to the čurbesses, and at times I was. At other times, Šaci’s friends protested that I was too young and, to my dismay, I would not be included. To this day—and I am over eighty as I am writing these lines—as I recall those times I reexperience the disappointment of being excluded.