A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [78]
At the time of the Communist takeover, Karol Wassermann, the pharmacist who had been liberated from the hospital at Sachsen-hausen, was married to a Protestant woman, and they were both working in a little pharmacy outside Prague. He had kept his oath to never again live in his native Slovak region. Living outside Prague, he was still close enough to have contact with other religious Slovaks at the Old-New Synagogue. When the new regime closed the pharmacy, Karol's wife went to medical school and became an eye surgeon. The Communists were opening up opportunities. But Karol, although he was not a political man, suspected that he would not do well in the new system. For one thing, it seemed humorless to him. In 1950 he had been sitting in a movie theater watching a Soviet movie about Stalin, and he could not stop laughing. He was told to leave the theater. He tried to explain, sputtered out something about Joe Stalin, and then his body heaved and he was convulsing in laughter once again. This ridiculous heavy-handed artless propaganda seemed so funny—no doubt it was fine for the Russians, but here it seemed so… well, so silly. He broke into more wheezy laughter. Wassermann did not have a jovial laugh; it was angry, and it pulled tight the features in his face, so that he didn't even appear to be really smiling. He was shown to the exit.
Wassermann's wife found him a job in the largest state-run pharmacy in Prague, where he was one of thirty-six pharmacists. Then he had a revelation: He hated pharmacies. He had never wanted to be a pharmacist. It had all been his mother's idea. What he really wanted to do was—he wanted to be an art historian.
NEITHER THE COUP nor the nationalization shook the Jews of Czechoslovakia the way the events of 1952 did. Until then, there had been no association between anti-Semitism and Communism. On the contrary, the Communists had been the great adversaries of fascism and had taken in hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis in Poland and Germany, at a time when the United States, France, and Great Britain were not letting them in. Communists had championed the cause of Israel, campaigned for passage of the UN resolution, and armed and trained the Israelis at a desperate moment when the United States and Great Britain were refusing them weapons. But there were other things going on in the Soviet Union that Czech Jews had not been watching. Stalin had always shown anti-Semitic tendencies—it was an undercurrent in his hatred of Trotsky. But after World War II, according to many in the Kremlin, including Nikita Khrushchev, anti-Semitism became a growing obsession, a hatred that consumed him. Stalin, who had probably been mentally disturbed from the beginning, was going mad. Those few psychiatrists who were so foolish as to venture a diagnosis—paranoia—were killed on Stalin's own orders.
Czechoslovakia got its first taste of Stalin's lunacy at the end of 1951, when he ordered the head of the Czech government, Klement Gottwald, to arrest the number-two man in his government, Czech Communist party chief Rudolph Slansky. He was accused of being an agent of Israel and Zionists. This was not even plausible, because Slansky had always opposed the Soviet policy of supporting Israel. Indeed, the nascent Israeli government regarded him as their only high-ranking adversary in the Czech government.
Nevertheless, for one week in November 1952, Slansky