My years 1946-1966 in Czechoslovakia.
“...that socialism (in Czechoslovakia) was not as bad as described by you”...
This remark was added by somebody to one of my blogs (in Slovakian language) after I had cast some (mild) aspersions upon the so-called socialism. Not entirely undeserved in my opinion.
It prompted me to rake over the ashes of my memories of the years 1946 to 1966. I beg your forgiveness for the jumble of memories that follows; there is tragedy behind each of the shards.
The Schwarzes, Stajners, Stahls & Grosmans: Jewish Returnees
In 1946 Mr Štefan Schwarz, a future member of the Slovakian Academy of Science, lived in the same part of our housing bloc as my parents - Nová doba No. 3, bloc D - only a floor or two higher up. Mr Schwarz was reputedly recent returnee from a concentration camp. They were the first people I met who had returned from a German concentration camp.
On the same floor there lived a family called Tatarka. I’m not sure if their father’s name was Dominik; of him I remember only his black mane.
My father used to visit both families. He was a clerk in the Taxation Office and perhaps he was helping them with their tax returns. I was 10 years old and used to play with their children but was not interested in the grown-ups. Obviously, these families had other friends and visitors as well.
There were other children there, too, like the Bubelínys, whom my mother used to visit, for they were Czechs and these she preferred to Slovakians.
An aside about my father.
My father was a bit of a bookworm and even translated a few cheap thrillers (called ro-do-kaps) from Hungarian into Slovakian.
Once he brought home a painting by Mudroch, an exceedingly ugly creation in brownish colours, resembling a woman with her face leaning to a wall. He was the butt of family jokes for a long time after that. Mudroch, later a big name in Slovakian art, was at the time but an unknown youngster making pictures for a few bob (or for a tax return?)
Back to the Returnees
There were other people I met who were also Jewish returnees from German concentration camps, Mr and Mrs Štajner for example, whom I met again a long time later in a faraway country. They originated from the Rimavská Sobota district and both had spent several years in those camps. I saw numbers tattooed on their forearms. After 1968 they settled abroad, he as a medical doctor who, despite being over 60, managed to learn English, of which he had until then been completely ignorant. Their two adult children also learned to speak English and gained University degrees.
During the war we lived in the small flat at Nová doba and I remember we had a beautiful dining table and chairs that we crammed into the tiny living room. After the war our pre-war friends, Mrs and Mr Stahl (he was a Jew, about her I am not sure), have turned up.
After the Schwartzes and the Štajners, the Stahls were the third Jewish returnees I was aware of. Their son Peter later became one of the first bosses of the new Slovakian television broadcasting service. During the war we were minding their large heavy diner table and chairs in our fairly small lounge, until their return.
The Grosmans were the fourth Jewish returnees I was aware of. They were a married couple who after the war turned up on our street (Racianska) and lived in a small house. They converted one of the front rooms into a grocery shop selling bread, milk, vegetables, butter, lollies and such.
Mr Grosman had black curly hair, black beard and a largish and well-curved nose. To me he looked like one of the Jewish caricatures which used to be shown in papers and magazines during the war. He walked upright with a determined gait. Mrs Grosman was probably a bit taller than her husband, slightly stooped, quiet, and (to me) melancholic looking. I am not aware if they had any children. Both looked to be between 40 and 50 years old. They operated their little shop until around 1950 when Mr Grosman disappeared, allegedly to the Jáchymov (uranium mines), in line with the government decision that shopkeepers were exploiting the working class of people.
Mrs Grosman continued in her shop, quieter and more melancholic than before. A few years (3 or 4) later Mr Grosman returned. He looked like a skeleton with grey hair, skin hanging lose all over his face and hands, and he died a few months later.
The Uranium Mines (Jáchymov)
Another family called Václavík lived on the same street. Their daughter married a man who spent a few years as a prisoner in the uranium mines, allegedly for something he said while drunk. They had a son who developed a kind of tumour above his left eye when he was about 3 years old. It turned out to be cancer and the boy died before going to school. His father died soon after and the mother followed them both a few years later, surely because of grief.
How could we allow all this to happen?
In 1994 I was visiting some people in the distant part of the country. “Lojzík”, a little over 50, has recently retired from his work at the mines around Příbram. After an exchange of greetings, we sat around the table in their living room, and the first thing Lojzík did was to put a pistol on the table! Lovely looking, lovingly polished.
“This is yours while you are here with us”, he announced.
He kept insisting, despite my protestations, and, by way of assurance he added, “Don’t be shy, I have another one here”, which he also pulled from his pocket. It took some convincing to get him to remove the guns from the table. One of them ended up back in his pocket of course. I inquired as to why he needed the protection of such an arsenal, and it came to light that they were for his personal use. In the Příbram uranium mines he had been one of the guards and he was constantly in fear that somebody might be plotting revenge on him. Of his work in the mine he was quite proud and he liked to talk about it. He said he came across it, together with a few of his relatives by chance.
They all came from a small village in central Slovakia and after the completion of their national service duty found themselves without work and without any meaningful qualifications. After a period of bumming around somebody pointed them to a Labour exchange with the remark that there was good money to be earned in the mines. Thus, their careers were launched.
Lojzík worked as a guard in the Příbram uranium mines. His job was to take charge of a few dozen ‘cattle’ (i. e. prisoners) from the prison guards, take them to their place of underground work, for the hardest and backbreaking work underground was performed almost entirely by prisoners. Remarkably, the inscription on the entry gate to the Příbram Concentration Camp (for that is what it in reality was) reads the same as the inscription on the entry gate to the German Concentration Camps "Arbeit macht frei" (= Prací ke svobode):
Lojzík and his fellow guards had to make sure that everybody was working as hard as possible, and at the end of the shift take them to the surface and hand them over to the prison guards.
Sometimes he would beat somebody up, but he remarked that many of the other guards were much crueller than he. He only used beatings ‘when it was deserved’ (in his opinion).
Some of these “cattle” managed to die here and there, either from natural causes (as much as death in such conditions can be natural), or as the result of an ‘accident’. According to Lojzík a certain percentage of deaths were acceptable without any investigation (I think he said 15% on few occasions). In his own words:
“The dead were taken up on the surface, buried, and the show went on...”
Lojzík’s opinion of these people was not much different from his opinion of cattle. He was aware, of course, that the majority of them were so-called ‘political prisoners’ as opposed to ‘real’ criminals, but that did not influence his opinion the least.
This was obvious from the epithets he used to describe them: ‘scum’, ‘good-for-nothings’, ‘swine’, ‘sewage’, ‘dirts’, ‘shirkers’, ‘cattle’ and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
I don’t think he named even one of them by their actual name! They were
only numbers to him, with perhaps additional characteristics:
“The tall number twentyfour”
“The bald one, with the number seven on an angle”
“You crooked seven, break this rock, on the double, you bald sonofabitch!”
I heard this kind of verbal sewage a lot of during my army service, so I am able to imagine it quite vividly.
I haven’t seen Lojzík for a few years now and have no intention to either. Raking over dying embers is not in my nature. It is sad to ruminate over the social impact of that sordid and sorry saga.
Postscript
● The story is based on what
‘Lojzík’ and one of his brothers have told me.
● ‘Lojzík’ is not his real name.
● The Příbram uranium
mine forced labour camp has been preserved as a museum.
● http://www.muzeum-pribram.cz/cz/pamatnik-vojna-lesetice/z-historie/
Who were these "political" prisoners?
A wholesale social experiment was introduced after the communist coup in 1948. Various groups of people were labelled according to their real or perceived relationship with the new political system: those who were ‘sympathetic’ and those who were not.
The slogan of the day was, “Who is not with us is against us.”
The ‘sympathetic’ groups were members of the Communist Party, together with some of their relatives. Others were members of the state security service, high-ranking officials in the police, army, government, and so on. All these were rigorously checked and approved according to their faithfulness towards the new system.
Those who were deemed ‘unsympathetic’ were all other members of the general public, to a higher or a lesser degree.
The ‘somewhat less unsympathetic’ were those groups of people who had something to do with money: owners of factories, shops, workshops, etc. Special groups consisted of people from agriculture: landowners and rich peasants in particular. Another group of the ‘unsympathetic’ was the so-called ‘intelligentsia’: scientists, professors, artists, lawyers, clergy, clerks and so on.
The most unsympathetic were those who had anything to do with the administration of the previous political system, or those who were deemed to be its "helpers."
A simple and highly successful formula was employed to damn the most unsympathetic: accusation equals condemnation.
PTP Units.
These units were part of every larger military complex or barracks. The abbreviation PTP stood for Auxiliary Technical Units.
They consisted of people who in one way or another were considered to be enemies of the system. I, myself, witnessed one such unit and their barbed wire compound during my army service at the air base at Bechyne in 1956-57.
Dressed in greyish-coloured military uniforms, with dark epaulettes, these people were usually housed on the perimeter of the complex, behind the barbed wire fence and under guard.
Their barracks were of a shabby timber construction. During the day they had to perform the hardest and most difficult manual jobs within the complex, such as digging, concrete mixing, building various concrete structures and so on.
Their treatment was brutal and often we could see or hear them being chased around by some bored commander, especially late in the night. Often times they were forced (alternatively) to run and crawl (with heavy backpacks on their backs) until they began to collapse with exhaustion.
Personally, I never spoke with any of them, for it was (1) prohibited, and (2) we were afraid. In those days everyone was afraid of everyone else, and, as I later found out, with justification.
Dynamitka, another place for the ‘un-sympathetics’.
Dynamitka was the common name for the chemical factory on the eastern outskirts of Bratislava; the original name was Dynamit-Nobel.
In 1959 it was officially called ‘Chemické Závody Juraja Dimitrova’ (after a Bulgarian communist leader) and the word ‘Dynamitka’ was slowly fading, being replaced by the new word, ‘Dimitrovka’.
I was employed there as a labourer from early in 1959.
Only a few years before I started there, they employed a number of these so-called political prisoners (perhaps others as well).
Armed soldiers patrolled the gates and on the factory’s perimeter there were guard towers in which stood armed soldiers with (I think) purple epaulettes on their shoulders.
Many of the prisoners were also housed in wooden barracks behind barbed wire fences, located between Račianska ulica and the vineyards, immediately behind the railway bridge past the tram terminus Gaštanový hájik. The compound was some 300-400 metres long and around 200 metres wide.
We children used to come and watch the prisoners, and sometimes we took a letter, thrown to us over the fence by an inmate, to a mailbox.
The factory compound was not guarded any longer when I started my shovelling career there, but the wooden guard towers were still visible here and there. And the prisoners were still there! Instead of armed soldiers they were kept in by a paragraph in the Labour Law, according to which the companies deemed as vitally important for the country’s well-being were not obliged to release their employees if they did not wish to. I do not remember the exact words, but the end effect was the same.
My father spent three years there as a labourer in the mid-50’s, only a couple of years before me. Once we were in the factory on a school excursion, and I saw him there. I was ashamed of being the son of a lowly labourer. I pretended not to know him, and I am ashamed to this day for having been so ashamed then!
How did my father become an ‘un-sympathetic’?
My father worked for many years as a clerk at the Taxation Office situated in the once plush palace on Štefánikova ulica, right next to the presidential garden.
Around 1950 the new “communist” government declared the Taxation Office to be “the tool of capitalists used for exploitation of working class” and all its employees were demoted to positions of manual labour, usually in chemical factories, or, if unlucky, in mines, sometime coal mines, more often uranium mines.
My father managed to wriggle out of Dynamitka after some 3 years, but he was forced to spend another couple of years in exile at the railway station in Komárno, some 110km southeast of the capital of Bratislava.
In Dynamitka I met some of his former colleagues, still working as the lowliest labourers.
Mr Gešaj for instance, was working filling paper bags with phosphate fertiliser. Mr Darin worked with a shovel around a furnace. He had once been an editor in some publishing house, St. Vojtech, I think. At home we had a few books with his name on the cover. Both men were at least 50 years old and in fragile condition.
It being a chemical factory the environment in the Dynamitka was excessively dirty. Apart from various odours it was filled with phosphate, silica, and other types of dust. Apart from coarse acid-resistant tunics we had no protection of any kind. No masks or goggles, and we were constantly covered in a thick layer of this dust. While showering after each shift the floor was covered in mud, the same mud we were blowing from our noses as well.
There were others, of course, apart from Mr Gešaj and Mr Darin. There was Mr Filipovič “small”, a one-time student of medicine or theology – his Latin was quite good. Mr Filipovič “big” used to be a clerk in the previous “capitalist” government, as was Mr Karlovský. Mrs Ciglanová, also at least 50 years old, was also a shoveller, and used to have a little shop, selling milk (I think).
Who were these ‘un-sympathetics’?
The ‘un-sympathetics’ were mostly educated and able people. It is an essential flaw of socialism (and all other dictatorships) that large proportion of the population, consisting of able, talented, enterprising and hard-working individuals must be oppressed, even eliminated and all that brainpower replaced by one person at the top. This preposterous idea deprives the nation - and the world - of its intellectual engine which leads to stagnation and eventual misery, chaos and eventual revolt of the masses. The following wholesale civil collapse is a fertile ground for picking by various scavengers...
Before WW2 Czechoslovakia was one of the leading countries in the world, in economy, in culture, in politics, in everything I can think of.
After 1948 the Communists (that is, the Russians and their local collaborators) continued on in the German footsteps, and were doing it on a much larger scale, more systematically and much longer.
From the standpoint of the Germans and the Russians it was a convenient way of getting rid of competition, especially economical, but also scientific and cultural.
This is not a new thing for the Czechs and Slovaks, millions of whom are descended from generations that were over the centuries murdered, robbed, and culturally and educationally oppressed. Just think of the Turkish occupation, three hundred years of the Habsburg-Catholic “darkness” and nearly a half-a-century of the Hungarian oppression in Slovakia.
Today’s level of misery in the two States, and the low level of social culture is the direct result of those centuries of robbery and degradation.
Speculation about the long-term effects of such negative eugenics on the future generations of Czechs and Slovaks belongs to people better qualified than me. It is obvious to me that the effects were not beneficial, and its footprints are likely to be visible on generations to come.
The low degree of social culture is nowadays obvious to everyone with a modicum of common sense and obvious to anyone with the opportunity to compare the two countries with any other country that did not suffer a similar ‘disturbance’.
I recently found a poem written sometime in mid-19th century by a Slovakian poet, Jonáš Záborský.
This is its verbatim translation:
- The Slovakians.
- Why are the Slovakians so scared?
- Being milked they stand still!
- Walking like sheep behind a ram,
- Coming to the table only after the lunch.
- They vote for anyone offered to them,
- Once without shackles they put them
- on themselves.
- Is it for ever? Can’t they take advice?
- Who is unable to be noble cannot
- become a good master.”
Chance witness to the internment of my teachers Daniš and Čakánek.
During the first year at the Gymnasium on Kalinčiakova ulica the subject of religion was taught by Padre Daniš. He was a Salesian from the nearby church at Miletičova ulica. He was an unconventional teacher.
Instead of learning by rote, “learn everything from page x up to page y”, which was customary in schools at the time, he used to tell us stories from the bible as if they were happening in modern times. He also encouraged participation in debates and played football with us on the field next to the church, sometimes even in his long black buttoned-up dress! We laughed at him, and he used to laugh with us.
I was kicked out of that school for “bad behaviour”.
Before that, however, I was soundly beaten by professor Ján Hučko, using a wooden board borrowed from the school bench, allegedly for me uttering something unflattering about him.
The week after being expelled, I was admitted to the gymnasium on Grösslingova ulica. From that school I was also kicked out during one of the many school reforms, and the next couple of years I spent in the famous Masarykova School at Tehelné pole. The subject of religion was taught by Padre Čakánek, also a Salesian, I think. He was also popular, although I do not remember why.
I never liked religion, and I was glad when the entire subject disappeared from the system one day.
After a while I saw both Padres, Daniš and Čakánek, sitting in a special bus, which was full of similar types of people. A very long time later I learned that those buses were used to take them, and other people, into forced labour camps.
Being only 13 or 14 I was not mourning at the time, nor did I ascribe that moment any special significance. It was only much later that I realised that I was a chance witness to one of the communist regime’s many crimes. People like these two padres were sent to forced labour camps; to mines, forests, and chemical factories. Sent without any court decision, without any formalities – just because they belonged to a group of people declared by the government of the day to be decadent, undesirable, criminal, harmful, whatever…
Be careful what you say at work: Mr Bažány and Mr Žilka.
In the 1960’s I worked at the Area Air Traffic Control Centre in Bratislava. Despite our office being located there we had very little to do with the airport itself. Our responsibility was for the control of air traffic over Slovakia. Of course, we knew our colleagues who worked at the airport tower, which had responsibility for air traffic at the airport and to a distance of about 30 km around it.
Among those colleagues, and there were about 12 of them, were two, Comrade Žilka and Comrade Bažány (“Comrade” was the compulsory way of addressing each other in those days).
I did not know them very well personally, though they were both my shift leaders at various times during my first few months at the tower, but they both seemed like normal and decent people.
One day, around 1965, both of them disappeared.
Upon inquiring why, it was intimated to me that I should refrain from asking to avoid “unpleasant consequences”.
At the nearest compulsory meeting of the local Trade Union I publicly asked the same question – why were these two kicked out of work? After all, a variety of rumours were floating in the air at the time.
The response was that, allegedly, they had uttered some disparaging remarks about local politics and, moreover, Comrade Žilka had some French or British magazines in his drawer.
I said that we, the trade unionists, should vouch for them in order to bring them back. All present, Trade Union officials included, earnestly studied their shoelaces and my suggestion got nowhere.
A few years later I bumped into Comrade Bažány in the street. He thanked me for supporting them. Sometime later, during a similar chance meeting, Mr Žilka told me that he worked as a truck driver.
A hero for the ‘wrong side’ - František Loucký.
I was told about this gentleman by a friend, Laco Křivda from Nitra. Laco’s father perished during WW2 in Great Britain. Shortly after take-off in their fully loaded Wellington bomber that had to return to base because of some fault and they did not make it.
Laco knew Mr Loucký, who was a well–known fighter pilot during WW2 (that was not known to me at the time!). He was sent by the post-war communist government to perform manual labour in the forests and after some 15 years there he was pardoned in the 1960’s and allowed to return to aviation. What was his ‘crime’? That he, like hundreds of Czechs, helped to defeat Germany by fighting on the "wrong" side.
Mr Loucký was about 60 years old when I met him for the first time, when he came to the Nitra airfield to test the pilots. His title was Inspector of Aviation or something of the kind.
The aero club in Nitra was not allowed to keep certain types of airplanes and I (and some others from Vajnory) used to bring them from Bratislava. An Ae-45, an L200, whatever they needed at the time.
They were practising their flying skills and I used to fly with those who needed to upgrade to these types of planes and Mr Loucký conducted the theory examinations and signed off on their Licences. In our spare time we used to sit and talk, but about what I no longer recall.
Towards Laco he behaved in a fatherly manner, for he knew Laco’s father from his Great Britain days.
Laco died in 1994 of heart attack. His grandson Martin is finishing his studies in mechanical engineering (this is written in 2008), and on occasions he comes to tell us the latest news or show us his newest girlfriend. He will be a good citizen of the world.
A note to future generations.
I am sure that many of my generation have similar – if not worse – memories of the times and places described herein.
It is up to us all to ensure that these memories are not covered in dust; just as memories of other horrors are not forgotten. The Turkish occupation, White Mountain, the Time of Darkness, the Time of Hungarian Oppression (the Hungarian word for it is “osszetiporni” or “crush the Slovakian elements under the jackboot”, sufficiently descriptive in itself), and the horrors of both world wars.
And the horrors of our own people, in service of foreign interests, inflicted upon us, must also not be forgotten!
So far, no poet or writer has been able to coin fitting and clear words for those times.
Maybe he or she will be born one day, the victims are richly deserving.
And the nation must not be allowed to forget, lest the horrors be repeated. Willing servants are never hard to find!
Addendum
A few minor details are easily forgotten by the people who pine after
‘socialism’:
● - that the nation was robbed wholesale;
● - that an entire social layer of people had been disabled, persecuted, jailed, tortured, and even murdered – slowly or fast.
Their guilt? That they were members of the proscribed groups of people - clerks, peasants, small businessmen, priests, members of “intelligentsia”, poets, businessmen, etc., etc., or simply found, in the eyes of some high-ranking official, ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘unsympathetic’.
People mentioned here are by far more numerous than the people similarly ‘disabled’ in Bohemia during German occupation, or in Slovakia during the WW2. People who wish for ‘socialism’” to return, tend to forget this debasement, this degradation, this intentional destruction of the nation. So what, when one million of our relatives were tortured and killed – the bread rolls were but a few cents apiece, admission to movies was almost free, everybody had employment. We were (supposedly) overtaking the "west" every few years.
For those who find it hard to understand: to put side by side wholesale robbery, torture, degradation, destruction of a nation with the price of bread rolls, admission to movies, etc. It is sick, it is immoral, bordering on madness!
Human life is worth more than cheaper prices.
On the credit’s side, though, it seems that the nation is beginning to
feel that there is something wrong somewhere. That society is not sick from a
lack of ‘socialism’ but that it is sick from the effects of ‘socialism’ (and
all the sewage the nation lived in for centuries before that).
I recall a friend, who around 1961-2 spent a couple of years as a
prisoner in a forced labour camp near Kuřim. He worked in the
manufacture of concrete panels for the highly popularized “mass production of
panel houses”. He told me about the conditions in that camp (long hours,
shortage of food and sleep, etc.), that were on the verge of slave labour (&
similar to work presided over by my relative Lojzík above). It stands to reason
to think that the construction of such housing was invented to hide the hardest
part of it (and the slaves) away from the public eyes. By the way, if somebody
claims that the conditions in such slave camp were not known to the government
– his father was the speaker of the Slovakian Parliament at the time…
That leads to another thought concerning the so-called Buildings of Communism in the Soviet Union. Construction of new factories, railways, canals, dams, cosmodromes (and surely of panel houses as well), was in large part the done by slave labour, as it came to light after 1989, after the disintegration of the Evil Empire, as it was aptly named by the then American president. It was very gently alluded to in the books of various soviet writers, Prišvin, Šolochov, Pasternak, less gently in the works of Solženicyn and others. The Soviet Union’s economy was based on exploitation of slave labour!
Finally
I was born in 1936 and left the Czechoslovak (Soviet) Socialist Republic in 1968, together with my wife and two small children, ref. my blog (78) Renegade
I had lived mostly in Bratislava for those entire 32 years and during that time the country was conquered and variously chopped to pieces by Germans, Poles, Hungarians and Russians
During the WW2, even part of my hometown, Petržalka, found itself in Germany, for example!
These neighbouring countries, willingly and ably assisted by local quislings, managed to inflict unimaginable material and psychological harm on individuals and the country, and continued assiduously a centuries-long tradition of degrading, debasing and murdering.
It was not until I began my new life in the British political environment that I fully realised what I was deprived of: of a healthy social life; of the duty to speak the truth; of the knowledge that the State and all its institutions are here to serve me; of the knowledge that my state will not tolerate anybody to do me any harm; of the knowledge that my country is behind me exactly as it is written in my passport; of the knowledge that I am Citizen of the World.
I was robbed of a peaceful and uninterrupted life.
People living in countries like Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand simply do not know what we were living through.
People, living in these countries, are not forced to obey orders from abroad, nobody forces them to speak a foreign language, or tells them who to kowtow to. They are not told which idol to admire, and nobody forces a foreign culture upon them. Nobody steals their life savings or their superannuation. Every citizen is able to pursue their chosen career, and, to top it all, has a feeling of safety, based on the knowledge that nobody is foolish enough to even contemplate threatening their countries.
When we Slovakians look at these countries and have feeling of
inferiority, of being but poor cousins with limited horizons, ill at ease in
the world, we must ask ourselves why? And when those countries know very little
or even nothing about us, ask ourselves why?
