A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [80]
At the time of the Slansky trial Bedrich Nosek was an engineer in charge of a section of a factory that built engines for the Soviet Union. One day Soviet agents came to his home and took him away. For four days his wife and son did not know what had happened to him. After being questioned about his loyalty and being told that since he had “Jewish blood,” there was some doubt about his willingness to produce for the Soviet Union, he was released. After that he was no longer an engineer but a construction worker. Years later, when the climate softened, he was able to get a job as an instructor in a technical school.
12
From Moscow
to Warsaw
NINEL KAMERAZ LEARNED ABOUT STALIN AND JEWS AT an early age. Her name, fashionable among her parents’ generation of Communists, is Lenin spelled backward. Ninel always called her name “a hunchback Fve carried through life.” She was born in Moscow in 1937, and that same day, after her parents gave her this name, her father was arrested. The next time she saw him, she was 11. Ninel calculated that between her father's eleven-year term, his sister's eighteen, and the terms of various others, her immediate family had spent sixty-four years in Stalinist labor camps.
The Kamerazes were rebels, or perhaps even true revolutionaries. Ninel's grandfather was an illiterate wagon driver from a Lithuanian shtetl who became involved in the anticzarist underground. An army deserter, he bought the family name along with Lithuanian papers from a man named Kamerazov. Her grandmother came from a rabbinical family that disowned her because she went to a university. When she first left to attend her classes, they announced, “You are no longer our daughter.”
Under the czarist system the child of a small-town wagon driver had no opportunities except to also become a wagon driver in the same Lithuanian village. But once the Communists came to power, Ninel's father was able to study and after seven years to become a philosophy professor. His brother became the conductor of Moscow radio in the 1930s. Ninel's mother was in the music conservatory.
Thinking back on her parents decades later, Ninel said, “They had no chances in life. The Communists gave them a chance to be normal people. They could do whatever they wanted. They could do this, they could do that. They were talented people. They believed in this. They wanted to be normal people. They didn't only want to be Jews. They wanted to be people. This was the new religion. They threw everything aside, and they believed in this. And they paid the highest price for it. I understand them. I really do understand them. It was such a chance to take. To live. To be. But the price was—they didn't know. It seemed so pure, so right. It was—diabolical evil.”
In 1948 her father was released but was told that he could spend no more than twenty-four hours in the European section of the Soviet Union. He moved with his family to a Jewish neighborhood of Warsaw, in the 20 percent of the city that was still standing. They found a prewar Jewish apartment building—an odd combination of baroque ornamentation and the streamlined curves of early art deco that had been built in 1914 by a leading architect of the day. Next to the building was a synagogue, and behind the synagogue was a mikveh, a ritual bath. Next door was a Jewish school.
Jews in Warsaw at the time were trying to live near other Jews for safety. When the Kameraz family moved to Warsaw other Jews warned them, “A Jew alone is a dead Jew.” Though her father had never been a practicing Jew, he was so Jewish-looking that everyone in the building urged him to stay in the neighborhood at all times. The trams were not safe for people who looked Jewish. Bullies would throw them off. Trains, especially on the