A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [123]
The Mandl family flew back to Prague and from there to Brno, where they met their daughter at the small Brno airport. It was now 1969, and travel restrictions would soon be reimposed. When Milana saw her family, her first words to them were, “I only came back to tell you that I am moving to Israel.”
She did not understand that she had already made her choice. It would be another twenty-two years before she had the chance to return to Israel. In Brno the Jewish life she had known was gone. There were no more meetings for young people or Hebrew lessons. In 1970, Rabbi Feter died, and there was no one to take his place. Martin did not have an opportunity to be a Jewish teenager, as his sister had had only a few years earlier. In 1974 their father was able to visit his brother in West Germany, While he was away, Milana was called in for questioning. Many young people were questioned during the “normalization.” Seated in a room with three very polite interrogators, she was presented with a long list of places she had gone, people with whom she had talked, words that had been spoken, Then the questions began. Milana was supposed to realize that people all around her were informants, and so she might as well be one too. But instead she laughed. All their information and all their questions seemed so inconsequential. Apparently it was decided that she did not make a very good informant. She was never called back.
In Brno, Masaryk Street was renamed Victory once more. But the victory of 1945 was fading. Now when Czechoslovakians thought of the Red Army, they thought of the 1968 invasion.
P A R T F O U R
THE
RITE
OF
PASSAGE
“As a Jew I have been persecuted, as a Jew. Waiki, my beloved, my husband, had been murdered. I couldnt put being Jewish aside, like a dress that had become old-fashioned.
Being Jewish is a fact, but Ym not successful in giving it any content. Not possible without belief in God.”
GRETE WEIL, The Bride Price
20
East German
Autumn
ASIDE FROM A VERY SMALL NUCLEUS THAT KEPT ONE synagogue on Rykestrasse alive, Jewish practice in East Berlin by the 1970s had become largely a death cult. The biggest event of the year at the synagogue was the annual memorial on November 9 to Kristallnacht. One Berlin Jew who attended every year with his two sons was asked if he did anything else to practice Judaism. “I take my sons to the cemetery,” he said. “They know they are Jewish.”
The only functioning synagogue in East Berlin is a large, tasteful, moderately neo-Moorish building on Rykestrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, discreetly tucked behind a courtyard. Most surviving German synagogues are somewhat tucked away. Irene Runge had first walked into a synagogue when she was in her twenties. “It was a Friday night, and I was really in the mood, and it was my step forward.” At that time a handful of young American Jews who were opposed to the Vietnam war had gone to the GDR, and Irene, with her New York English and her hunger for anything American, met most of them. One of them, an American Jew for whom a trip to the synagogue was a banal event, took her to the Rykestrasse synagogue for this major step.
“It was horrible. It was like Germany. No one would say hello or nobody would be friendly, and I thought Jews were like the people I knew and I thought, ‘This can't be Jewish/And I was never going to go there again.” It was, in fact, very German. One hundred people was a huge turnout for a major holiday. Twenty was more typical. The people would file in quietly and take their places in their pews as in a church. There was none of the wandering the floor, debating, match-making,