The fact that Čapek was published and praised in the Soviet Union somewhat befuddled those who were determining what was admissible in literature and what was harmful. Finally, his book The War with the Newts was allowed to be published with only minor censorship, and I decided to write my seminar paper on it. Čapek’s political utopia entranced me so much that I decided to study his work further, and I began regularly visiting the university library reading room. Surprisingly, during a time when all “ideologically harmful works” in the area of politics, history, economics, philosophy, and social science, that is, all non-Marxist works, had disappeared from the libraries and bookstores (it was as if authors such as Camus, Hemingway, Sartre, Faulkner, and Kafka had never existed), in the reading room I could request any journal from the polemical anticommunist Nebojsa to anti-Semitic and Fascist tabloids such as Arijský boj or Vlajka.
I spent hours and hours poring over volumes of prewar Lidové noviny, Přítomnost, and dozens of other journals to which Karel Čapek had contributed.
Eventually I was given permission to write my thesis on Čapek, which was supposed to address the antifascist elements in his work. But the works that were imprecisely designated antifascist, as far as I understood them, simply consummated Čapek’s lifelong efforts to warn against any form of totalitarianism, whether it was a technological civilization or the Nazi regime. In the end, my thesis treated Čapek’s entire oeuvre.
*
The Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party took place at the end of February 1956. The press wrote about the congress in the usual spirit. The Communist Party members proudly reviewed the successes achieved as they were rebuilding their war-ravaged land and offered dizzying glimpses into the future. The people were following closely behind the country and a Leninist government of the party and the country. But there was nevertheless something astounding: a criticism of Stalin’s economic mistakes! The Soviet Communists also admitted that capitalism might temporarily achieve better economic results than Socialist economics. The congress concluded with elections in which the recommended candidates were unanimously approved.
A short time after, late in the evening Father called us together to the radio, which he’d acquired when he was released from prison. It was usually tuned to the news from Vienna rather than Prague. Although I was slowly forgetting my German, and although the radio was sometimes mostly static, I understood that at some sort of secret and closed meeting of the Central Committee in Moscow, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had delivered a heretical speech in which he spoke of his predecessor as a criminal who had on his conscience the illegal persecution of innocent people, the torture of prisoners. According to Khrushchev, this all led to mass murder based on lists drawn up by Stalin himself or at least approved by him. Stalin had also apparently underestimated the danger of a German attack, and owing to his military ignorance he was responsible for a nearly hopeless situation on the fronts during the first months of the war. It wasn’t the content of the speech alone that struck me as unbelievable; it was that something like this could be said at the Congress of Soviet Communists, moreover by its highest member.
Shortly thereafter, Aunt Hedvika, who had spent so many years in the Soviet Union and was well-informed, came to visit. She seemed extremely agitated. Not only was everything we heard true, she assured us, but this was only a small part of it. And she, who had never said a single bad or even critical word about her time in Russia, began to talk. When she was working in Czech broadcasting at the Moscow radio station, people she was working with would be there one day and then gone the next, and no one dared ask where they were or what had happened to them. No one even dared pronounce their names. And if one of the disappeared had happened to write a book or an article, not a word of it could be cited, and the book was immediately removed from the library and destroyed. Merely cracking a stupid joke or just laughing at it was enough for the security forces to come for the unfortunate person. Sometimes the police would come that very night and sentence him to ten years in a camp in Siberia. Or he would disappear completely, and at most his family would receive a package containing his clothing.
I asked why she’d never told us about this, why she hadn’t warned us after she’d lived through it.
She explained that she couldn’t precisely because she had lived through it. No one was watched more than those who had lived in the Soviet Union and could testify to these horrors. No one would have believed her anyway
A few weeks later at a party meeting of the department, excerpts of Khrushchev’s heretical speech were read.
I was surprised that a lot of people had not heard about the speech, or, if they had, thought the whole thing was an invention of the enemy. Now they were stunned. Some of the women started sobbing, and I remember hearing the hysterical cry: “You deceived us.”
*
It appeared that things were actually starting to change. At meetings and previously boring seminars on Marxism-Leninism, people started speaking more freely. If innocent people had been condemned in the Soviet Union, what had happened here? Wasn’t it necessary to reconsider all the political trials? Shouldn’t the Communist Party, which had apparently deceived its members, step down?
At a party meeting we resolved that an extraordinary congress would convene to undertake rectifications.
Like so many other people, I still believed in the possibility of rectification, or, deceived by the sudden feeling of freedom, I unreasonably and senselessly placed my hopes in it.
It was in this atmosphere of intoxication that we began to prepare for the student Majáles — the traditional May celebration (whose origin is centuries older than the garish May Day festivities). We constructed masks and trudged singing from our department along the bridge in the direction of the exhibition ground where we planned to choose the king of Majáles. I don’t remember who came up with the idea that I don a crumpled broad-brimmed hat and tattered coat to represent an unfortunate and persecuted kulak. Along with the others I sang “Gaudeamus Igitur” and was proud to be a student of one of the world’s oldest universities and that I was helping to renew the venerable tradition of so-called academic freedom.
When I got back to the department, two men stopped me at the entrance, showed me some sort of document, and demanded my identity card. They led me behind the porter’s lodge into the Youth Union committee room and began their interrogation.
Where was I coming from?
A procession.
What did I mean by procession?
At that moment I recalled Father’s recent advice not to say anything about what you were doing. Even if you were doing nothing at all.
It was a procession of students.
Who had organized it?
I answered that I didn’t know, but they could certainly find out. (Everything was always organized by either the party or a Youth Union committee.)
They yelled at me not to tell them what to do. They wanted me to tell them who had invited me to the procession.
I really didn’t remember.
What had I been disguised as?
I hadn’t been disguised. I’d never possessed a disguise in my whole life.