A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [117]
Dubcek offered a Communism that might have taken hold with Czechs and perhaps East Germans and Hungarians and possibly even with Poles. That was what the Soviets feared. Dubcek seriously pursued things that in the past had only been proclaimed in speeches, such as economic reform based on decentralization, de-stalinization to remove the infamous monsters from the power structure, and liberalization, which included free speech, a critical and uncensored press, and freedom to travel abroad.
For the few thousand Jews who were left in Czechoslovakia, Dubcek was a reprieve. The exact number of Jews is uncertain, because after the Slansky trial in 1952 the majority of Jews who stayed did not openly show their Jewishness. The fifteen thousand Prague Jews who were registered with the official Jewish Community were thought to constitute only a third of the Jews in Prague. “Anti-Zionist” persecution had considerably eased since the years immediately after the Slansky trial, but after the Six-Day War, the press once again felt moved to run a steady diet of anti-Zionist opinion. “Spontaneous” anti-Zionist demonstrations were organized. Jewish Community plans for a celebration of one thousand years of Prague Jewry were canceled.
The politically astute saw that the anti-Zionist campaign was simply a desperate attempt by the ruling conservatives to outma-neuver Dubcek and his emerging reformers. Most Jews were not aware of this. They only knew that words like cosmopolitans and Zionists were showing up in the newspapers. But once Dubcek gained control, everything changed. Foreign travel, religious activities, and open criticism of government policies were suddenly commonplace. People who had never been political in their lives were drawn in by the excitement. Karol Wassermann, who had limited most of his conversations to antiques and art history, was talking about political reform in the pharmacy where he still worked. He had completed his studies in art history at the university up to the doctorate level. Just as he was starting to write his doctoral dissertation, he was informed that “the proletariat will not finance two degrees.” He was already a pharmacist, and he would not be given an art history doctorate.
So art history remained his hobby. Among his other new interests was theater. He regularly attended rehearsals of new plays. Although he had always avoided politics before, he now became fascinated by the young absurdist movement in theater, which was clearly political. He was particularly enamored of the young playwright Vaclav Havel. Wassermann also studied at the state-operated Jewish Museum. When the Nazis had occupied Prague, they developed a ghoulish obsession with the Jewish Museum. They selected a team of Jewish experts to carefully catalogue all the antique Judaica that was found in the homes of Jews who were deported to the camps. Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi who established the first ghetto and was the first concentration camp administrator, wanted to create in Prague a definitive collection of relics from what he hoped would soon be an extinguished culture. The Jews who were made to work on this project painstakingly catalogued each article, because they thought the Jews would come back and their property could be returned. Most never came back, and the collection ended up in the hands of the Communist state.
BedrTch Nosek's son, also named Bedrich, became a historian for the museum. As an undergraduate at Prague's Charles University, he studied Czech history. Then he discovered, to his amazement, that a Hebrew course was offered in the state-run modern language school. Even more surprising, the course had been taught for years by an Israeli woman who was married to a Czech. She had been