“That’s not the border I’m worried about,” Leonora said. “Our boy should be at the Protective Rampart, keeping the Germans out. Let the Russians take care of their own business.”
Those words were dangerous. And more and more, Judit heard that kind of language everywhere, waiting in line at the fabric store, along the river promenade where her youth group volunteered to prune the bushes, even at school among students whose older brothers were in the JDF. Since Judit could remember, the Judenstaat Defense Force was kind of a joke, with their badly fitting uniforms and Soviet rifles from the ’40s. Maybe if those officers in training had returned from Moscow, or if the soldiers had something to do other than sit in their little watchtowers by the Protective Rampart, they would have been ready for Prague. But the young men—those hapless boys straight out of secondary school—to thrust them into Soviet-made tanks and turn them loose against civilians—
“They’re not civilians,” Judit insisted to anyone who made those claims. “They’re Czech Nazis. They’re fascists. Don’t you listen to the radio?”
Still, even at seventeen, Judit knew that news came from a hundred other sources. There had always been a push and pull between those sources and the facts. How could anyone trust rumors? Yet people did trust rumors, maybe even listened to the badly blocked transmission from abroad, and those who understood English sometimes received a faint whiff of the BBC.
Another rumor: soldiers had deserted. They’d crossed the border on foot and were hiding all over Judenstaat. It could even be that the widow downstairs had a nephew sleeping in her husband’s study, but it wasn’t a good idea to talk about those things.
Sometimes, Judit would think she saw him, a tall young man, too tall for that tiny study. He’d smoke a cigarette on the fire escape late at night, not too far from Judit’s window. She knew she ought to report him to the Stasi, and knew she would never report him to the Stasi, and this felt like the first conscious contradiction of her life. She’d watch the orange end of the cigarette, and the long shadow he threw, and be amazed at her own awareness of his vulnerability.
Maybe it was in October that the first pashkevils appeared. There were always a few of them scattered around the garment district, notices about this or that event only of interest to black-hats, but those were dense wall-posters full of religious obscurities. This one was in Yiddish too, but it was just one line long:
There were dozens of them, plastered on the wall of the train stations in the Altstadt and the Neustadt, and on the sides of buildings, black block Hebrew letters, cheaply stenciled on a square of newsprint. Supposedly, no one could read that language anymore. Yet people slowed down when they saw the pashkevils, and if they were a certain age, they’d stop. They’d whisper something to a neighbor. The next day, there was a new one:
They were everywhere you looked. By afternoon, they’d all been whitewashed, but the next morning found three times as many plastered in those same strategic places:
And more were glued to the broad avenue by Parliament, the blackened sandstone façade of the Opera House, the National Museum. They were soon whitewashed or blackwashed, but someone replaced them even before sunset, dozens more, lined up in rows. At first, the messages were one line long. Then, students began to tell their parents that they’d seen longer pashkevils at the Dresden Polytechnic, whole paragraphs of Yiddish. Soon young people led their mothers and fathers to wall-posters with eyewitness dispatches from the soldiers in Prague. When those pashkevils were blackwashed, more were pasted over them.
Whitewashed, blackwashed, night after night, somehow more of them appeared on top of old ones every day until the day—Judit remembered—when a teacher at her school took her aside and said, “A group of us are meeting tonight, Judi. It’s important.” Judit spent the rest of the day wondering how she’d tell her parents that she had to go out after dark. Getting the two of them entangled felt at cross-purposes with everything else she was feeling. The teacher who’d spoken to her was her algebra instructor, and Judit was no particular favorite of hers, but the glamour of the invitation made her breathless.
In the end, she didn’t ask her parents for permission. She just climbed out the window and down the fire escape—all the while hoping she’d startle the nephew in the middle of a cigarette—and walked to the designated place, an alley just off Bautzen Strasse.
The teacher was there. Five other students stood around her, most of whom Judit knew from her Bundist Youth Group. She held a paint-pot. A second pot of black paint was open at her feet, and the students all held brushes. She nodded towards Judit, neutrally, and gestured towards a brush already lying cross-wise over the mouth of the pot.
Of course, Judit picked up the brush and dipped it in black paint, but even as she erased each new pashkevil, she read it. This time, they were in German.
For twenty years, this country has labored under a master with a whip. What we produce is exported to the Soviets. What we consume is imported by the Soviets. The free press of our early years has all been broken. The artists of our early years have all been tamed.
We have been told our country is a monument to those who perished in the Churban, and in that name, everything is permitted. Yet is it permitted to deceive ourselves?
WE DEMAND a full investigation of the truth behind the order to suppress the uprising in Prague.
WE DEMAND the truth behind the death of Leopold Stein.
WE DEMAND the right to form independent unions and an end to press censorship.
WE DEMAND nothing less than a full historical reckoning.
That was the month when the television played endless loops of the children’s show Miss Heidi’s House, the one with the hand-puppets. Dresden suddenly felt provincial; history was taking place somewhere else. In railroad junctions, workers refused to load shipments of coal crossing Poland to the Soviet border. In Halle, the Stasi tracked down twenty deserters who’d been found hiding in a mineshaft, but the miners blocked their van; five miners were crushed in the fray. The University of Leipzig was shut down after a group of professors were arrested, and fifty more resigned in protest. There were rumors that every industry and college in Judenstaat had called a general strike.
Judit’s secondary school was shut down, but not because of a strike. It was closed because there was no heat and only sporadic electricity. Leonora’s great fear was that the Protective Rampart would be compromised, and Germans would invade. Rudolph spent a lot of time calming her down and telling her that Steinsaltz would never let that happen. In fact, that month, the country was under martial law for the first time since the ’50s. Saxons were not allowed out of their homes. If there was no threat of treason, Leonora insisted, why would that be the case? Why would there be a curfew, and why would the radio keep playing that awful, slow version of Eisler’s national anthem?
A week later, Judit’s school would be re-opened. The electricity was on a generator, as they were understaffed at the plant, and coal was in short supply. Everyone wore a winter coat indoors. The algebra teacher was still there, though she never paid Judit any special attention. The physics teacher was gone. His class was assured that he hadn’t been arrested. He’d simply taken a leave of absence to take care of his son who had just returned from Prague. Judit was never sure if the physics teacher came back; she never passed his old classroom, and by the time she graduated, no one talked about him anymore.