A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [75]
11
In Czechoslovakia
JURAJ STERN'S EARLIEST MEMORIES WERE FROM underground. When he was four years old he was crowded into a small dark bunker with his parents, his grandmother, and his brother. The opening to their underground hiding place was concealed by a woodpile and a potato bin. He remembered the thwack of bullets being shot into the bunker from above while they huddled below, motionless, and braced themselves not to cry out or move if hit. But no one was ever hit. There were only those sickening dull noises.
Juraj also remembered a time when he was hidden alone, and a Slovak man would come several times a day and bring him food. The man would put an index finger against his lips and say, “Not a word. You have to be very quiet.” After two days Juraj's father came and took him to another hiding place.
Juraj‘s fondest memory was of a Romanian division that came through the town on horseback. A Romanian soldier lifted little Juraj onto his horse and galloped him around a Slovak village. He wasn't hiding anymore. Juraj Stern's childhood had begun.
Jews and Jewish life had vanished from their village during the war. The Sterns went to Bratislava, where Juraj's father resumed his prewar work as an accountant in a factory. The small groups of Jews who remained moved to centers that still had communities. Only a few Orthodox Jewish communities remained in Slovak villages. Most of the surviving Jews went to Bratislava, Brno, or Prague, where there were still Jewish communities.
Less than fifteen miles from the Sterns’ village was Nitra, whose Jewish community, though greatly reduced, had survived. Only about one hundred Jews were left in this town of forty thousand people, yet there was a synagogue, a kosher butcher, and a traditional religious slaughterer. The Jewish community in Nitra dated back to the eleventh century, in a part of town called “Jewish hill.” In 1947, Zuzana Simko was born into a Nitra family whose background was seldom discussed. At the time of her birth her father v/as 44 and her mother 41. They were widow and widower. Her mother had had another family before the war, from which only a daughter survived. In 1946 the daughter, then 18, married and emigrated to Israel. Zuzana would be an adult before she would meet her half-sister and learn what had happened to her mother's other family during the war. Her father had also had another family, all of whom had been sent to Auschwitz. For Zuzana's parents, she was their new life.
Zuzana grew up in a building with six other Jewish families. Their household was kosher, like those of most of their neighbors. Her father remained an Orthodox Jew, clean shaven, but always wearing a hat. He had his own locksmith shop, which he would open up each morning after wrapping tefillin and saying morning prayers in the nearby synagogue. After closing the shop at the end of the day, before the last light was gone, he would go back to the synagogue to say his afternoon prayers. He would return again after dinner for his evening prayers. From Friday sundown to Saturday sundown he permitted no work, electricity, or sparks of any kind. Except for the smaller size of the community, Zuzana was being raised in a world very similar to the one her parents had lived in before the war.
The Slovak region, as always, was poorer and more anti-Semitic than the Czech lands. Aware of this, the government in Prague advised Slovak Jews not to push too hard for restitution of their property. In a number of violent incidents Slovaks resisted the return of Jewish property. But in general, Czechoslovakia was again a favorable place