A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [180]
29
The
New Slovak
Republic
ONE OF THE MOST TRAVELED PATHS IN THE NEW SLOVAK Republic must certainly have been the one between the dining-room table and the coffee table in the Bratislava living room of Zuzana Simko Stern. This was the path she paced on Thursday afternoons after reading that week's edition of Zmena.
Zmena means “change/’ and it was the name of one of the many new Slovak newspapers born in post-Communist liberty. When Juraj Stern came home on Thursdays, his wife had already read the weekly Zmena and was pacing, ready to report that week's assortment of nebulous anti-Semitic innuendo. Zmena was not one of those flagrant neo-Nazi-printed-in-the-U.S.A. hate tabloids. It was respectable in appearance and tone, with a staff of recognized journalists who wrote in Slovak, a linguistic cousin of Czech, in a well-crafted style that appeared to be targeting educated readers.
The Sterns were possibly the handsomest couple in Bratislava. They both crackled with energy. She had obsidian black eyes that glowed a wondrous anger as she told of the latest outrage she had heard or seen in fast-changing Bratislava. Juraj was small, fit, fine-featured and so charged that he could not seem to bear to be motionless, in spite of a painful back ailment
Their home was in an uninspired block of apartment buildings surrounded by similar blocks on the edge of town, where there was room to build and no costly old buildings in the way. But it was a pleasant home, full of paintings and books.
That Thursday, Zmena had published part two of a series called “Vymitene Klamstvo” which means something like “Lie under Duress.” It did not actually say that the Holocaust didn't happen. It simply quoted others saying so. According to some people, Zmena reported, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, only refrigeration units.
Zmena could have been merely reporting on the phenomenon of revisionism. And it could have been merely because Slovak activist Peter Gall had a very classically Jewish face that the cartoonist portrayed him with a face that could have been a poster for the Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude, The Eternal Jew. And what was to be made of an editorial complaining that such a fuss was made over a Jewish cemetery recently vandalized in the Slovak Republic, yet when the Israelis committed violence against Palestinians, nothing was said? Was it significant that when a foreign rabbi settled in the small Jewish community in Kosice, Zmena referred to “internationalism going on there”?
The Sterns were concerned because the new Slovak Republic, the second attempt at Slovak nationhood, was under way. Juraj still remembered the first one, when he had hid in a bunker covered with potatoes. Someone shooting through the potatoes. Little thwacks around him as the bullets missed. All the good Slovaks who had hidden him. All the bad ones who had pursued him. He was thinking more and more about those times. And it seemed as if they had gone through so much —just to arrive back at Slovak nationalism.
AFTER THE INVASION came the “normalization.” The way to live through the “normalization” was to stay out of trouble and concentrate on your career and the opportunities for your children. Children were a great tool for repression. You could risk prison and even feel good about yourself. But how could you destroy your child's future—only in grade school, and already there would be no possibility of a university education because you had opened your mouth once too often.
With Jewish life ended in Nitra in 1964, Zuzana had moved to Bratislava, where she worked as a teacher and met Juraj, who was a prominent economist and an expert on factory productivity—a major, if not the central issue for the government. They married and had two children. She became a research engineer. They built themselves a wooden cottage in the mountains for the weekends, where they could sip the powerful slivovitz made by their neighbors from local