*
Helena and I got married, and at twenty-seven I finally left home. (My father thought it was high time, my brother rejoiced because now he could have his own room, and Mother was worried I’d miss living there.)
Although I truly loved Helena, I was not in a very celebratory mood. I was worried about how I would hold up in my role as husband, how I would fulfill this new obligation that I considered inviolable.
On our honeymoon, we took a small plane to Poprad in the High Tatra Mountains, but on the way back (and for a long time Helena did not forgive me for this) I sent Helena home by train, while I took off in the opposite direction for Trebišov, where Mirek and my bicycle were waiting for me. Literární noviny was planning to publish our reportage from eastern Slovakia in installments, and I wanted to undertake another trip to the Uličská valley.
Along with a life companion, I had acquired some new relatives. My in-laws were very quiet and kind people. They welcomed me as their own and generously allowed us the use of one of three rooms in their large apartment. (At the time, apartments were impossible to come by.)
My mother-in-law had likewise been in Terezín during the war, but only for three months — her husband had not yielded to the pressure of the Nazi authorities to divorce his Jewish wife. Something unimaginable had happened there, something that had nearly cost her her life but had saved the life of her sister.
During the final days of the war, as well as maintaining the existence of the Terezín ghetto, the Nazis started bringing in prisoners from other camps, which they had to hastily clean out before the approaching allied armies arrived. I remember the new prisoners welclass="underline" men and women wearing light blue striped prison uniforms who had been in the worst camps. They had been forced to travel a great distance by foot or by train crammed into boxcars, where they were locked up without food or water. Then they were unloaded, dead or dying, and left to sit for hours on the grass near the rail tracks.
My mother-in-law knew that her sister had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, and even though it would be almost impossible to find her, she set off looking. (We had also tried looking for Father at the time.) A miracle occurred — she found her sister: emaciated, at death’s door, half unconscious, and burning up with spotted fever. She loaded her on her back and brought her to the overcrowded camp hospital, where she visited her until she herself became infected. It was already the end of the war, and doctors were coming from Prague to help save the sick. After many months, both sisters recovered.
I met Aunt Andulka thirteen years after these events. She was an exceptionally elegant and cultured lady who had mastered several languages. From our very first meeting, she came to hold for me a special significance. She mentioned a book by Isaac Deutscher that might interest me, concerning the battles between Stalin and Trotsky, that is, the brutal and bloody way Stalin achieved power.
Of course the book was in English, and at the time my knowledge of that language was hardly good enough for the most primitive conversation. My new aunt offered to translate for me, and so I would visit her small flat in Pankrác carrying a thick notebook in which I would copy all the important passages. This is how I first became acquainted in detail with Stalin’s diabolical dictatorship. For the first time I read about the monstrous show trials, Stalin’s betrayal of his former friends, his collusion with his recent enemies to achieve absolute power.
This bloody tale liberated me from my illusions concerning what had actually happened in the “first Socialist country” and helped me to see what I had been afraid to admit until then. I finally realized that in a society in which all means of expressing disagreement are suppressed and every word of doubt is considered grounds for prosecution and subsequent execution, only the despotism of the leader comes to power.
*
At the beginning of the new year, my father showed me, as if embarrassed, a piece of paper with the heading:
Communist Party of Czechoslovakia
Central Committee
Notice to appear on Wednesday, January 14, 1959, at 8:30 a.m. at the Committee of Party Control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Prague, Příkopy #35 to Comrade Hasík, who will inform you of the decision by the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia regarding your membership in the party.
Because the date had already passed, I asked my father how it had turned out.
He told me to turn over the paper.
On the other side of the austere invitation — or, rather order — Father had written in his large and clear handwriting:
I was informed that upon my return from prison, I had participated in few political rallies, and therefore the Secretariat forbade the renewal of my membership. I responded by pointing out that I had dedicated myself assiduously to my scientific work, which was certainly more important for society than any May Day agitprop activities.
At first I wanted to say that everything had actually turned out fine, but then I gathered that he saw this rejection as a continuation of the injustice that was being perpetrated upon him. So I merely said, “They certainly gave you an idiotic excuse.”
Essay: On Propaganda, p. 481
11
After the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, the leadership of the party, of which I was still a member, decided once again to silence even minor hints of criticism and issued an order to “change” the editorship of the Československý spisovatel publishing house. The purge, which fortunately this time was not a bloody one, replaced the more enlightened editorial party members with less enlightened and more obedient ones. I was still far removed from the activity of writers or even party circles and thus heard almost nothing about the changes.
However, the new editor in chief, Jan Pilař, knew about me from Literární noviny, which he had directed up until then. He had treated me kindly and even managed to secure me a special fee for my eastern Slovak reportage. Now he called me into his office and told me the publishing house had great plans. He wanted to initiate a series devoted exclusively to prose and reportage dealing with contemporary matters and call it Life Around Us. He was intent on including my little book about eastern Slovakia and asked if I’d like to be in charge of the series.
Working as an editor for a publishing house was not a job that enticed me. It struck me as less challenging than writing reportage, but I had no other offers. I could imagine what was written in my cadre file after I’d been fired from Květy, and I couldn’t really expect another magazine or newspaper to take me on. So I accepted the offer.
The offices of Československý spisovatel were located in the very center of Prague in a marvelous art nouveau building. It was listed as a national monument, and this designation certainly helped preserve its splendid façade. Inside, however, it had been disfigured by partitions and fittings. I was placed in a tiny, dimly lit room that served as a passageway with a window looking out onto a gallery. The proofreaders in the staff room behind me had it better than I did simply because no one could walk through their room.