Let me briefly sketch out my parents’ lives between 1939 - 1945. I will tie it to my main point towards the end of this missive.
Both my parents were born in the small Eastern Slovakia town of Humenne. Their families were part of a large Jewish community. My paternal grandfather was a shoemaker and leather merchant and the family was quite well off (though still far less well off than the African American gent in the house next door to me who works as a truck driver, drives a new Lexus, has a couple of TV’s and all the silly accoutrements of 21st century life) My maternal grandfather - whom I was lucky enough to know for a few years - had a much tougher time feeding his seven children. He was a glazer, working from sun-up to sundown, standing on rickety scaffolding, replacing broken or leaky window panes.
In 1939, when Slovakia became an independent fascist state, Jews were declared personae-non-grata. Father had just turned 18 and was drafted into the Slovak army, where, as a Jew, he was subject to all manner of humiliation and degradation. He managed to get away from his unit, along with a couple of friends and lived in hiding for the rest of the war. He had fake papers and slept in fields, in forests, on park benches and who knows where else. Somehow, by the grace of God, he avoided capture and in the last year of the war he served with the partisans in the foothills of the Tatra mountains, attached to a unit of the Red Army, chasing the Wehrmacht as it retreated. When he got back to Humenne, he learned that his whole family, save for brother Martin and sister Zsuzsi (Suzan), had been killed in October 1944 in a train station bombing.
My mother’s fate was far worse. At the age of 18 she and her sister Leah were dragged out of their home and put in a cattle car - destination Auschwitz-Birkenau. They were in the very first transport (here I highly recommend you read Heather Dune Macadam’s book “999” which deals with these events in amazing detail: https://tinyurl.com/ninenine9 ) My mother somehow survived Hitler’s human abattoir - Leah wasn’t so lucky. Three full years in hell, including the infamous “march of death” in January 1945.
After the war, both my parents settled in Prague and started to build a life when - just three years after the end of WW2 - the Communist party of Czechoslovakia staged a coup d’etat. Twenty years of hardcore communism followed, including anti-Semitic show trials in 1951 - 1952. Martin, my father’s brother was arrested and held without charge for two years. His arrest was never explained to him, nor was he ever awarded any restitution.
I grew up in post-war Prague, under a strict communist regime. We had our first phone (party line with neighbors) in 1963, our first tiny black and white TV in 1964, our first car (a Fiat 600) in 1967. We also never had a refrigerator until the early 60’s. In the winter perishables were kept on a tiny 3d floor balcony - shared with neighbors. In the summer, food was always bought and consumed the same day. My mother would be up at 5am and standing in line for fresh milk and fresh baked rolls at 6am. After breakfast both parents took the streetcar to work and I walked to school. Mother would stop at the grocery store on the way home, buy whatever was available (a pork chop on a good day, gristly beef on a bad day). After dinner my parents listened to the radio (one station only, of course) and very often we would have guests over for coffee and home-baked pastries. The mood was always jolly - no matter what was going on politically. When a bunch of Jews get together for coffee, there’s a lot of kvetching and a lot of joking and the two are often indistinguishable. Here’s one joke I recall from those days:
Ivan is walking down the Nevsky Prospekt in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg again) and he runs into his friend Oleg. “Ivan, where have you been? I haven’t seen you in ages” “Ah, my friend, I was in jail for ten years!” “Ten years! My goodness, what for?” “For laziness!” “What do you mean ‘for lazineness’? What happened?” “Well, ten years ago I’m walking down the street, coming home from work, just like now, and I run into Ilya Alexeyevich. We start chatting, you know, small talk, about work, family, kids. After a while we shake hands and say good-bye. And as I walk away, I’m thinking to myself: ‘should I denounce him…or shouldn’t I denounce him?’ It was a cold night and I was hungry, so I rushed home. I was lazy. He wasn’t!”
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Despite everything, despite the war, the life in hiding, Auschwitz and the post-war anti-Semitism, my parents NEVER thought and NEVER told me we were somehow “underprivileged” or, God forbid, even “oppressed” - despite the fact that my parents HAD actually been terribly oppressed, persecuted, despised. I swear I never heard the word “oppression”. I did hear the word “privileged” as in “You are privileged to have food on the table when you come home from school. You are privileged because we can afford music lessons. You are privileged because we will make sure you’ll get a good education and will start a good career. You are privileged because we have many doctor friends” And on it went. When we lived in the Prague district of Vinohrady (today quite chi-chi, back then basic middle class), we had a large bachelor apartment. No bedrooms - just a big living room, mud-room, bathroom and toilet and a good size kitchen. Both the kitchen and the living room had pull-out sofas on which we slept. Me in the kitchen, my parents in the living room. And yet, every time we came home all together, my dad would turn on the living room light, look around, smile a big smile and hug me and my mother: “Look at this beautiful apartment we live in. I am a king!” He would light a cigarette, sit down on the pull-out couch and put his feet up on a little hassock. Mom would brew a mug of Turkish coffee and looking at them, you’d think they owned a palace. They considered themselves privileged to have the little they did have. Objectively, the conditions were bad. We only had the very basics - until 1965 when our lives drastically changed for the better - but that’s for another Substack.
A child of lower-middle class parents who survived unimaginable horrors, I was brought up to think of myself as a child of privilege - despite the fact that my parents had every right to “play the victim”. They never did. They knew that “playing the victim” is a blind alley, a road to nowhere. Thinking yourself lucky, on the other hand, to have a nice small clean place to live with no phone and no TV but with a will to work, to learn, to progress, to make something of yourself even in somewhat dire circumstances - that is a road to success and contentment.
Playing the victim, stomping your feet and bitching about lack of privilege is moral suicide