A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [181]
Life was going well for them. Both their son and their daughter got into gymnasium, the upper-level secondary school that was the required track for university. Then in 1989, the very year that their son Tomas was about to apply for university, a student group approached Zuzana and asked her to sign a petition demanding academic freedom. She wanted to sign, but did she have the right to do this to Tomas? Whatever Tomas might think, her husband would certainly be furious. She told the students that she had to read the petition carefully and sent them away. She thought and talked with a friend and finally decided to sign. Then she went up to their mountain home to join Juraj for the weekend. He was there, pacing in that energetic way he always had when something was on his mind, and she had to confess immediately.
“Juraj, I know this is going to make you angry, but I signed a student petition—”
“Well, I know this will make you angry,” he said mockingly, “but I signed it too.”
Tomas was able to go on to university and medical school after all because that same year, in November 1989, the Communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia. After the fall both religion and nationalism reemerged. They had been linked before. Josef Tiso, the pro-Nazi nationalist, had been a priest, and most of his government had had Church ties. The supporters of an independent Slovak state had to seesaw between assurances that the new state would be nothing like the last Slovak state, and persistent efforts to rehabilitate Tiso because he was the only leader of a Slovak state they had.
Juraj Stern began to see things that he had not seen since his childhood. Walls in Bratislava occasionally had slogans on them such as “Jews go to Palestine” and “Gas the Jews.” He went to a soccer game—Bratislava against Budapest. People shouted the old Slovak fascist cheer “Net strdz” “Attention!” In the crowd, along with the occasional anti-Semitic sign, he saw two flags of the Guardists, the Slovak SS.
SILVIA KRAUS was still in high school in 1989. “November was the revolution/’ she said. “In January came the religion.” Suddenly, students were required to attend lectures by clergy. When a Catholic priest came to the school and lectured on the greatness of Josef Tiso, Silvia stood up and said, “It's not true. All of my family died in the war because of Tiso, because of the Germans and because of the Slovaks.” Most of the other students were angered by this outburst, and feeling isolated, Silvia walked out of the room.
In spite of such incidents, the Jews in Bratislava were seeing more Jewish life than at any time since 1968. There was a wide range of figures on how many Jews live in Bratislava—between five hundred and one thousand. More seemed to turn up all the time as Jewish activities increased. In 1990 a Jewish Forum started offering regular meetings that drew several hundred participants to hear speakers on subjects of Jewish interest.
The new freedom since the fall of Communism meant different things to different people. To some, it meant that they could say “Na strdz” again. To a few youths, it meant they could shave their heads, hang out near the university under a bridge across the Danube, and occasionally find someone to rough up. To some, it meant having a Jewish Forum and filling the largest hall in Bratislava, some eight hundred seats, for a Hanukkah program.
To Fero Alexander, it meant learning for the first time about his country. His parents were Auschwitz survivors. His grandparents had not survived. His older brother was born in Theresienstadt. But his parents did not talk about any of this very much. As he toured with his Slovak folk group in traditional costume, Fero never thought this was an odd thing for a Jew to be doing until after 1989, when he heard a historian speak on the history of the Slovak state at the Jewish Forum. Fero was shaken. “I didn't know. I didn't ask. Now the situation is that I know what happened during the Slovak state, and still I'm here.”
He asked—and repeated