A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [173]
Three days later, 200,000 people demonstrated. Every day, the crowds grew bigger. From across the crook of the Vltava River in the old Jewish quarter, Tomas Kraus saw police on the other side massing on the high green slopes. They were waiting for orders to move on the city in force. Kraus, like thousands of others, went every day to Wenceslas Square, which is not really a square but a wide boulevard with a grassy mall in the center. A half-mile long and sixty yards wide, day after day it was filled with demonstrators.
One evening, a police car made its way up the street through the crowd. Policeman were in both the front and back seats. Demonstrators jeered as the car forced its way through the crowd. Suddenly, it stopped and all four doors opened. Kraus braced himself—this was going to be bad. The four policemen started hurling something at the crowd. It was newspapers. It was illegally printed underground newspapers. That was the moment when Kraus realized that Communist Czechoslovakia, which was all he had ever known, was about to come to an end.
HAVEL CALLED IT the Velvet Revolution. If a writer leads a revolution, it gets a good name. However soft and nonviolent it was, it wasn't really as smooth as velvet. Lives changed very quickly and kept changing for years. There was Karol Wassermann's favorite playwright as president of the country, and his fellow dissident writers in legislative and diplomatic positions. For that matter, Was-sermann himself, the temperamental pharmacist in an ascot, an outsider who showed up for Sabbath at the Old-New Synagogue and never belonged to anything, was elected president of the Federation of Jewish Communities. Tomas Kraus became the director. The former official Community leadership was removed immediately. Their collaboration with the regime would not be forgiven. Some had cooperated with the secret police monitoring activities from the station across the street from the Jewish town hall. Some had cooperated in the persecution of their own Jewish Community members.
Throughout the country there was a move to purge collaborators. Twenty new legislators were accused of having worked with the state security and were told that if they did not resign, they would be exposed. Ten refused, and they were not only exposed but their hearings were televised live. In the morning the public was convinced of their guilt. By the afternoon the accused had persuaded the public that they were innocent victims of the state security. The next day, it again appeared that they were guilty. The case was never settled, and most of the legislators kept their seats.
In post-Communist Central Europe, rifling through once-top-secret police files and exposing moles, snitches, collaborators, and secret agents became a public passion. Society had a psychological need for the sensation of a purge. But the state records were a bottomless maelstrom, because the system had tried to control people by compromising them. To get the right school, the right job, a good car, you had had to give something. In most cases, all the state wanted was to get your name in a file. All most people really wanted was to live their lives and contribute as little as possible to the state security apparatus. Martin Mandl wanted nothing more than to pursue his career as a scientist and live a modestly comfortable life in Brno with his wife and their two children. He