Growing up in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 60s presented some formidable challenges to my future mental health. I have been able to overcome some of them, have been sideswiped by some, and have learned to live with the rest.
Short of a shooting war, times don’t get much darker than Communist Prague a few years after the war. In a short period, the Communists jailed thousands, sentenced thousands to hard labor in uranium mines, and staged various show trials, the most notorious being the Slansky Affair. Rudolf Slansky was the General Secretary of the Communist Party, who along 13 other high functionaries, was charged with being a Titoist and Zionist (Communist Party speak for Jewish) and taking part in an international capitalist conspiracy to undermine the socialist regime. The accused all “confessed” to the trumped-up charges and were executed in early December 1952. Understandably, growing up Jewish in the shadow of these events did not instill one with a sense of security. How could it? My parents, less than a decade after the Holocaust, were confronting a new wave of official anti-Semitism. I was born three months after the Slansky trial executions. I cannot imagine my mother’s pregnancy was stress-free. The atmosphere eased somewhat in the late fifties and the early sixties but the anxiety about the future, worries about the present and unending memories of my parents’ tragic past could never go away.
Whatever the nature of the regime, children in Central Europe were not raised with leniency, or any kind of real attempt to understand their needs. I’m certain the saying “children should be seen, not heard” was first coined in Germany. The Teutonic approach to child rearing was the default method where I grew up. It was softened somewhat by our Jewish cultural background, nevertheless, you did what you were told or else the Hand of God (your father’s palm) would repeatedly strike your posterior for any and every imaginable infraction. Even more effective was the finely tuned, passive aggressive reprimand: “This? This is the grade you got? This is the result you dare to bring home? Do you realize the opportunities I have been denied just so we can have a nice, warm home, perfect conditions to do your homework and excel? Shame!” The word “shame” had both an immediate effect (loud bawling) and, with enough repetition, long term consequences (years of therapy). Another method to make you toe the line – which almost always had to do with school performance – was the denial of privileges, augmented with a proper face rub: “Come here, look out the widow! See those kids with their skiing gear? You could have been on that trip. But no! You had to bring in a failing grade in history. Feh!” “But dad,” between sobs, “I didn’t fail, I got a C!” “Oh yeah? And what do you call that if not an out-and-out failure? I got straight A’s, not just through grammar school and high school, but university too. And I didn’t have a father around to coach me and help me, either. I was all alone, living in a tiny, unheated room!”
Luckily, when it came to general mischief, misdemeanors for which other kids got their stuffing knocked out of them, like kicking a ball through a window or shoplifting a lollipop, my parents were lenient. They’d just say: “Go apologize to the nice man in the store. Here, give him a crown and say you won’t do it again.” In a Jewish family, school, books, and excellence in education were everything. The rest was small stuff, not worthy of sweating over.
For that side of my upbringing – the scolding, hectoring, clasping hands in horror and gnashing of teeth, I had my staunchly Catholic nanny, Maria. It wasn’t easy to be staunchly Catholic under Communism, but Maria managed it. She never missed Sunday church where the flock was evenly divided between the devout and the secret police. I think she was in her 60’s. Everyone looks old when you’re in grammar school and she never revealed her age. At any rate, she was old enough not to give a damn about the amount of floppy-hatted, trench coat-clad men in her church. What were they going to do to her? She was childless, lived alone in a cold-water apartment, sharing her bathroom with two other lodgers. She had been born in a small village south of Prague, close to the Austrian border in the 1890’s, when the country was still firmly ensconced within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She had experienced the Keiser’s secret snitches, World War 1, World War 2 and fifteen years of Communism. She had not missed church during the wars, she wasn’t going to miss it just because the President called everybody “comrade”. Auntie Maria, as we called her, would come in at 7 a.m., get me ready for school, clean the apartment, gossip with neighbors, cook lunch, pick me up from school and make sure I did my homework, then start dinner and leave as soon as my mother came home. She often said: “I like to get out of here before the Mister comes home. I don’t like man-smell!” While my parents made sure I felt guilty for not studying hard enough, and shameful for bringing home anything but straight A’s, Maria made sure I felt guilty and shamed about everything else. When a neighbor’s daughter and I played “doctor” under the table once, and she lifted the tablecloth and saw us “examining” each other, she nearly fainted. She yelped about ten “Jesus, Mary and Josef’s”, clasped her hands together, ordered us to wash our hands immediately, then paraded us both over to the girl’s apartment, where she breathlessly related our depravity to the mother. The mother started saying something rational, like “Well, they’re just kids, you know, there’s no need to call the Pope!” Auntie Maria cut her off: “Don’t you be blaspheming and invoking the Holy Father. I know sin when I see it. It must be nipped in the bud! You had better start teaching your daughter proper decorum!” She grabbed my hand and dragged me back home where she served sauerkraut soup for lunch. I normally liked it but was too upset to eat and so was rewarded by the customary lament: “I stood in the kitchen all morning making this for YOU. Better gulp it all down” But I couldn’t and so I got the silent treatment for the rest of the day. That night she waited till my dad got home. She told him about my unforgivable wickedness. My father was totally unimpressed, which got her even more upset. She slammed the door behind her, muttering darkly “I won’t set foot in this house of shame ever again...” My father looked at me and made the universal gesture of circling his right temple with his index finger. He laughed and hugged me. And of course, Maria was back the next morning at 7 o’clock and the “doctor” incident was never mentioned again.
I think you will understand, when you put all these stories together, and crown them with a massive Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968, which put an end to my life in the city I adored, tore me away from my friends and killed all my plans with the barrels of Kalashnikov rifles, why anxiety has been my lifelong companion. The medical description used today is “GAD” – generalized anxiety disorder. I prefer the previous designation of “free floating anxiety”. It is much more poetic and more precise. The anxiety truly IS free floating. It is not necessarily tied to an event or a memory, or a task. It just is. It floats, or more exactly, I float in and out of it for no discernible reason at all. It’s part yearning, part dread, sometimes part disgust. Jean Paul Sartre’s “Nausea” is partly about just such undefined fear. My own free-floating anxiety is akin to a mental dizziness, disorientation. I have done the “analysis to paralysis” thing: on my own and with therapists for decades. The best analogy for people to understand is “phantom pain” Somewhere on the body (the soul, in this instance) there used to be a part, a limb, that is now missing, though you do not remember what the part was. You just know that it’s not there and, in its place, you feel this obsessive trepidation.
Like most amputees, you adapt and learn to live with your phantom pain. In fact, through personal growth you learn to use the pain as a motivator. You learn coping strategies and techniques. (I recommend listening to the sound of tropical rain as you’re falling asleep) You learn that the most important thing is not to fight it. Every action has its equal and opposite reaction. What you fight, will fight back. Acceptance is the great healer and it’s not impossible. I have a standard reply to people who express respect or admiration of my music and my guitar playing. The same principle applies here: “the first thirty years are the toughest”