IN OCTOBER 2006, while I was immersed in Kasztner’s Train, the CBC sent me to Budapest to be part of a documentary commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. We visited plot 301 in the Rákoskeresztúr Cemetery, the burial ground of people killed by the state after Soviet troops put down the uprising in 1956. In the country I had come from, there was once a revolution and our prime minister had been betrayed, imprisoned, and executed.
We walked through the House of Terror, once headquarters of both the Hungarian fascists and their successors, the Communist state police. My grandfather had been held in its underground cells pending his trial on trumped-up charges. I walked, again, the old streets of what had been the Jewish ghetto, where so many died that the dead had been stacked up like cords of wood in the small square where now children play.
I had been curious about how my former country was dealing with its newfound democracy, how it was weathering the shift to capitalism and consumerism. How was it dealing with its horrific legacies of the Holocaust and of the Soviet occupation? How did it deal with the perpetrators and what justice could it bring to the victims?
This experience is what led me to write my next book, The Ghosts of Europe. I wanted to explore how Central Europe was adjusting to its present realities twenty years after the end of the Soviet era. I wrote about Solidarity in Poland, the famous Round Table meetings that ended one-party rule and brought in free elections, about the Czechs and Slovaks deciding to put an end to Czechoslovakia, about the Library of Prohibited Books in Prague with its twenty-seven thousand books banned under Communist rule. Jiri Gruntorad, then the custodian of these books and periodicals, proudly showed me the packed shelves of Slovak, Czech, and Polish writers, including dozens of Josef Skvorecky’s novels, Vaclav Havel’s plays, Milan Kundera’s novels, Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry, Bohumil Hrabal’s scripts, and Ivan Klima’s novels and scripts. Now there was a free press, yet it was Ivan Klima who had remarked, “We asked for freedom and you gave us the market.”
I interviewed former Polish prime minister General Jaruzelski, Hungarian prime minister Gyurcsány, legendary Czech resistance hero and first elected president Vaclav Havel, and former Slovak prime minister Vladimir Mečiar. After one of my visits to the Czech Republic, I brought Josef Skvorecky greetings from his old friend, Vaclav Havel, who told me he wished Josef would “come home” again.
“I am already home,” Josef told me. Here. In Canada.
Josef and Zdena were further estranged from their former home when a group of overzealous Czechs decided that more had to be done to punish the Communist regime’s informants and the collaborators. The Státní Bezpečnost, or StB as it was usually referred to, had been dispersed quickly after the fall of the old regime and little was done to retrieve its files. Havel believed that his people would be best served by moving on from the past. “Take care when judging history,” he said. “Otherwise you can do more harm than good.” The past is never black and white. No one was untouched by the system.
However, the group of citizens published a list, an enforced “lustration” of StB informers, and Zdena’s name appeared on it. Devastated, she sued the Ministry of the Interior and won, but she felt from then on that her name had been muddied, that she would “never get rid of the dreadful suspicion.” Her health, Josef said, never recovered. The zealots who had compiled “the list” had shown as little regard for the truth as they did for the consequences of their actions.
That was the story behind Josef’s novel Two Murders in My Double Life.
Adam Michnik, one of the heroes of Poland’s resistance to totalitarianism, once said that it would be well to remember that in 1989 Central Europe came “as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance but also of hatred and intolerance. It is here that the last two world wars began.”
I finished writing Ghosts of Europe in 2009, twenty years after Central Europe joined Western Europe. I have been back to Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest since, and I am saddened at the turn away from some of the principles of democracy that led to the creation of the European project. I fear that too many of us have become so comfortable with democracy as a backdrop to our daily existence that we no longer see it as an ideal worth fighting for.
Douglas & McIntyre published Ghosts and, as I discovered later, persuaded Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s to buy US rights.
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THROUGHOUT THE WRITING of Ghosts and my next book, Buying a Better World: George Soros and Billionaire Philanthropy, George Jonas was my sounding board.
For some years, George and I used to meet in the Coffee Mill, a Hungarian restaurant in Yorkville run by the very hospitable Martha, who had been married to a Hungarian wrestler called Laci Heczey, another Jonas friend. I had met Laci for the first time at one of Key Publishers’ annual Christmas parties that stretched through the warren of offices all the way from Front Street to The Esplanade. Laci, one of the grand unpublished stories of the decade, walked through the somewhat inebriated throng with two tigers he kept as pets.
Over endless coffees, George talked about his own experiences with fascists in Budapest, and we debated his lingering appreciation of Hungary’s wartime governor, Miklós Horthy. He often accused me of being influenced by left-leaning writers and politicians, and he forced me to defend and sometimes rethink what I had written. I can almost hear him talk to me when I reread some of the passages about George Soros in Buying a Better World. Soros is, indeed, a left-leaner, one who has had the opportunity to influence world affairs, though, as my book posits, might not for long. He had spent about $16 billion, most of it through his Open Society Foundations, by the time my book was published. “He could have become the most hated man in Central Europe for a fraction of that,” George Jonas opined, “but he didn’t ask for my advice.”
Being a true Central European, George Jonas could recite Heine and Goethe in German, Apollinaire in French, and Pushkin in Russian. Both of us had learned Russian, unwillingly, in school in Budapest, and both of us admitted that when reading Russian literature, it was not altogether useless. When the refugee or migrant (depending on your point of view) crisis began, he had dire predictions for Europe’s ability to survive. The year Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (he had succeeded Gyurcsány) built a wall and called in the military to guard Hungary’s borders, George was the only columnist in Canada in Orban’s corner. In one of his last columns,I he said that a country “cannot accept foreign countries imposing an immigration model on it that would dramatically change its cultural composition.” Being a realist, however, he charted the downslide of Europe’s aging and shrinking population and the inexorable march toward a new Eurobia, a Europe ruled by Muslims.
During the last months of his life, George wanted to hear Eugene Onegin again. He had, of course, heard it many times before, knew the melodies and the words in Russian, and he sang (very croakily) along with the soprano during the Letter Scene. We assembled his last book, Selected Poems 1967–2011, with the unusual method of my reading each poem from his collections and George indicating, sometimes impatiently, which ones he wished to leave out.II
When a few of us gathered to celebrate George’s poetry at Harbourfront in 2015, my choice was “Landmarks,” about his arrival in Canada. These are its last lines:
with cardboard trunks, torn clothes, needing a wash,
an evil-smelling strange boy, tall and thin,
had asked to spend the night. And god knows why
they took me in.
I remembered the handleless blue suitcase with all my worldly possessions, and like George, I was grateful that Canada had taken me in.
I. September 22, 2015.
II. The book was published by Marc Côté of Cormorant, with Margaret Atwood’s introduction.