After the Whirlwind: Jewish Absence in Postwar Czechoslovakia

In the final scene of the widely acclaimed Czechoslovak Holocaust film, Daleká cesta (Distant Journey, 1949, directed by Alfréd Radok), the main heroes, Hana (a Jewish woman) and Toník (a Gentile) are walking through rows of crosses near the site of the former Theresienstadt Ghetto that symbolize the Czech Gentile and Jewish communities wiped out by the Germans during the Second World War. The absence of their relatives and friends, and of the wider community, has created a void in Hana’s and Toník’s lives. This final scene was added to the film at the last moment, and was not in the original script, which ended more positively with Hana and Toník returning to work in the hospital from which Hana had been dismissed by an antisemitic Czech assistant in early 1939. Nevertheless, overall, both the script and the final film version emphasize the narrative of the successful survivors’ return to postwar Czechoslovakia, which again became their home after the wartime suffering of Czechs and Jews. Hana and Toník suffer from the loss of their relatives, but both he as a Czech and she, as we come to realize during the film, as a Jewish woman who is determined to assimilate in the Czech nation have found their home back in Prague. ¹ Hana, as one of the few Jews who survived the Nazi racial onslaught, is able to overcome the absences created by the Nazis thanks to her love for Toník and for the Czech nation.

Distant Journey points to two types of Jewish absences that emerged in postwar Czechoslovakia. First, that of the survivors coping with the deaths of their relatives. Second, the film also deals with another type of absence that emerged also thanks to the programme of Jewish assimilation in the Czech nation, it means that of the disappearing diversity of Jewish culture in the country. In fact, the final scene in Distant Journey starts with the camera focusing on a Star of David, which stands on the ground, before the viewers’ attention turns to the left, surveying rows of crosses – the universal symbol of Calvary. Implicitly, the scene points to the post-mortem baptism of the victims of the Shoah, who finally, after their deaths, found their place among the non-Jewish citizens of Czechoslovakia. ²

The concept of absence is often used but rarely discussed in studies on the Aftermath. ³ What do we understand by absence? It is impossible, I believe, to provide a single, all-encompassing definition of the term. We need to differentiate between three main types of ‘absences’ as they were perceived and felt after the war by individuals (the micro-level), by the Jewish community – however defined (the meso-level), as well as by majority society – again, however defined (the macro-level). All three absences were intertwined and interdependent, but to a certain decree also independent. The attitude of the majority population impacted on the perception and construction of absence by individual survivors and by the Jewish community. Obviously, to be able to perceive absence we first need to anticipate ‘presence’. Perceptions of presence and absence are always individual, and are shaped by previous personal experiences and expectations. Even group perceptions of presence and absence are formed by individuals mediating these expectations on behalf of a particular group.

Survivors who returned to their homelands after the war hoped to find their relatives, friends, lovers, neighbours, property, jobs, or professional careers, and wanted to re-establish their social connections. ⁴ They looked for familiar faces and places that would help them with their mental recuperation after the horrific events of the Shoah. Jews needed institutions (destroyed or abused by the Nazis) to be able to function properly. The Jewish Communities needed funds to facilitate the recuperation and rehabilitation of survivors, religious leaders to look after the spiritual needs of the community, places of worship (in many cases destroyed by the Germans or their collaborators during the war), and doctors to look after the frail survivors. Majority societies, led by the postwar governments, also shaped the perception of absence by the survivors – as diverse as they were. Parts of non-Jewish societies did not welcome the return of the Jews (that is ‘their presence’). There were even people, including Government ministers and civil servants, who clearly stipulated the conditions under which the Jews should be allowed to re-join the majority societies after the war. ⁵

In contrast with 1919, when the Paris Peace Conference sanctioned the creation of multiethnic states, the idea that co-existence between various cultures and ethnicities was no longer possible prevailed after 1945. Postwar governments (with the approval of the major Allied powers) employed the method of population transfers to solve the problems of unwanted minority groups. Over 12 million ethnic Germans from countries across eastern Europe – predominantly from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia – lost their homes after 1945 as part of these ruthless efforts to achieve national homogeneity of postwar societies. ⁶ Also other ethnic groups, such as Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians or Ukrainians had to abandon places where they had lived for centuries. In Czechoslovakia, this program of national homogenization (or as Benjamin Frommer calls it ‘national cleansing’ or ‘national purification’) ⁷ was carried out between 1945 and 1947 with the forced removal (odsun, transfer) of over 2.5 million ethnic Germans (identified as such by the Czechoslovak authorities). Though there were few people who in the heightened interethnic tensions of the first postwar months consider it as a loss for the State, the Transfer led to a further brain-drain, and to the expulsion of the affluent middle class, professionals, and an important part of the blue-collar workers. The policies of national homogenization in eastern Europe, and the renewed stress on the quid pro quo approaches in western Europe – full civic rights for minorities with the expectation that they would fully assimilate – further impacted on the survivors’ efforts to start new lives after the Shoah. ⁸ The atmosphere in postwar Europe was not welcoming to ethnic diversity, and in particular groups with rich and diverse cultural backgrounds encountered problems when adjusting to the new conditions.

Focusing more specifically on Jewish themes, the plight of Jewish survivors after the Shoah has been comprehensively analysed by a succession of historians, but it is rarely contextualized with the general political developments in individual countries or with the anti-minorities’ sentiments that prevailed all over Europe. Historians focus on the problematic rehabilitation and material restitution of the Jews, debate the surviving antisemitic sentiments in European societies and describe – in detail – cases of anti-Jewish violence that occurred especially in eastern Europe. ⁹ Yet, as I have argued in my previous work on Czechoslovakia, the fate of the Jews after the war simply cannot be separated and isolated from the fate of the other ethnic minorities. Thus I have posited that the problematic reconstruction of the Jewish life in Czechoslovakia needs to be ascribed to the general anti-minority sentiments and not purely to antisemitism, whatever we imagine under the term. The efforts to transform the multiethnic country into a Slavic nation state – and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans together with the effort to exchange the Hungarian population for Slovaks who lived in Hungary were the main links in the chain of the events – inevitably impacted on the fate of the Jewish community. The significance of this theory is further accentuated if we consider the multicultural character of the Jewish community in Czechoslovakia before 1939 (there were Czech, Slovak, German, Hungarian and ‘Jewish’ Jews – both, secular Zionists and Orthodox). Furthermore, the Zionists, or Jewish nationalists in their majority kept using non-Slavic languages in their daily communication. ¹⁰ In this connection, also the frequently mentioned and celebrated Czechoslovak support for diplomatic and practical Zionism needs to be understood as an effort to solve the Jewish question in Czechoslovakia through the emigration of the nationally minded Jews to the Middle East. ¹¹ Hence apart from the losses sustained during the war, the Jewish community also had to come to terms with the changing socio-cultural character of postwar Czechoslovakia. Not only that there was a noticeable absence of the Jews in the country, the Jewish survivors – as members of an ethnic minority – were further absented from the postwar reconstruction of the Czech society. This was another piece of the mosaic of absences felt by the Jewish survivors after the war.

The purpose of this intervention is to offer insights into how this disappearing diversity of the community, and the looming absence of the formerly culturally diverse society were perceived by Jewish exiles who returned to Czechoslovakia immediately after the end of the war. The incomprehensible magnitude of the six million lives lost in the Shoah prevents us from understanding every single story during the war; every individual fate was simply different. The situation after the war was similar – we are obviously unable to summarize all the experiences of the individual survivors who after the war returned to what used to be their homes and their perceptions of the absences they encountered.

In this article I consider two accounts, written in the first months after the Liberation of Czechoslovakia, by Jewish authors who had spent the war in Allied countries, and just after the Liberation returned to Czechoslovakia either to look for their relatives or, as political activists, to negotiate with the Czechoslovak Government the reconstruction of Jewish life in the country. These are the only available comprehensive impressions of the situation during the immediate aftermath. Both accounts are by men who in the late spring or the summer of 1945 visited Czechoslovakia for the first time in more than six years. Leo Herrmann (1888–1951), born in Lanškroun (Landskron in German), was a leading Bohemian Zionist activist of German cultural background, who left Bohemia and Moravia before the First World War and from 1926 lived in Jerusalem and London. He was a co-founder of the Keren Ha-Yesod (Palestine Foundation Fund), ¹² who frequently visited Czechoslovakia before 1938 and remained in regular contact with Czechoslovak politicians. Herrmann visited Czechoslovakia in the early autumn of 1945, and spent most of his time in Prague, with only a day visit to Lanškroun. He wrote a comprehensive report about his trip shortly after his return to London. ¹³ In early 1946 he published the first impressions from the trip in the New York-based German language weekly Aufbau, in a series of three articles entitled Verwandeltes Prag (Changed Prague). Written in German, the articles aimed at a limited – mostly émigré – audience. Herrmann’s private diary notes, which include a more detailed portrayal of his experiences in Prague and Lanškroun, remained unpublished until the mid-1980s. Overall, the published text focuses on the bureaucratic obstacles – often with antisemitic colouring – the survivors encountered after the war. ¹⁴ It also carries a much stronger Zionist message than his private notes, and needs to be seen in the context of the postwar Zionist campaign to open Palestine for large scale emigration. In this respect, the unpublished text offers a more nuanced perspective on the lives of the Jews in postwar Czechoslovakia.

The second account was penned by the journalist and writer Joseph Wechsberg (1907–83), who returned to Czechoslovakia as a US soldier in May 1945. Wechsberg was born into a German-Jewish family in Moravská Ostrava (Mährisch Ostrau), in east Moravia, on the boundary of Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia and Poland. He attended the Jewish elementary school there and then the German gymnasium (secondary school), graduating in 1925. In 1938, he and his wife left Czechoslovakia for the United States of America. They settled in California. Wechsberg, who began to write as a journalist for The New Yorker, enlisted in the US Army, and returned to Europe as an US soldier in 1944. In May 1945, he spent time in Prague, before setting on a journey to his hometown. In contrast to Herrmann, Wechsberg wrote his account for immediate publication in English, first in The New Yorker and, a bit later, in a slightly amended version, as a book. ¹⁵ When approached in 1947, Wechsberg was reluctant to approve the publication of his book in Czech, because he remained convinced that it was still too soon after the end of the war for his rather critical account to be widely accessible in his former homeland. ¹⁶ Crucially, the accounts by both authors offer a rare opportunity to analyse comprehensive contemporaneous impressions of visits to Czechoslovakia shortly after the Shoah had wiped out over 80 per cent of the Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia (those considered Jewish by the German administration). They allow us to compare the situation in Prague – the capital – with the provinces that had previously been located on a Czech-German ethnic fault line.

Herrmann arrived in Prague in late September 1945, almost four months after its liberation by the Red Army. He was a leading Zionist representative who had access to members of the Czechoslovak Government and Parliament, in particular the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, and vice-chairman of the National Assembly, Josef David. Herrmann arrived on a diplomatic mission and negotiated with the Czechoslovak authorities the reconstruction of Jewish communities in the country. His task was to confirm the disturbing reports that reached activists in London about the predicament of the Jewish survivors and to assess whether there was any future for the Jews in Czechoslovakia. In cooperation with local Jewish activists, he also attempted to revive the organizational structures of the communities and Zionist agencies in Prague. It is also evident, however, that he wanted to visit the place he had been born and raised, and to see with his own eyes the destruction left by the war and the Nazi extermination of the Jews. His unpublished account thus consists mostly of descriptions of political talks, intertwined with snippets of Herrmann’s personal impressions of the absence left by the war. ¹⁷

Already when travelling from the airport to the city centre, Herrmann noted that ‘at first glance, Prague is now a city without Jews’. According to Ines Koeltzsch, Herrmann thus made a reference to the famous catastrophic novel by Hugo Bettauer (Die Stadt ohne Juden), first published in 1922, in which the Austrian author predicted the rise of a nationalist and antisemitic movement that would expel the Jewish population from Vienna. ¹⁸ Even before the war, Prague had predominantly been an ethnically Czech city, with over 90 per cent of the population declaring Czech ethnicity in the census (including many ‘Jews’ or those coming from Jewish families). ¹⁹ There were districts, however, where the concentration of Germans and Jews – the two largest minorities – was much higher, including parts of the Old Town and New Town. ²⁰ Walking in the city centre, Herrmann was desperately searching for familiar faces or people who ‘looked Jewish’ (what authors often refer to as Jewish ‘visibility’), ²¹ but in vain:

After eating I walk down Wenceslas Square, across Příkopy and Můstek, past the Carolinum, to Old Town Square. From Příkopy on, the streets are dark; few people in them, and no matter how hard I look, not a Jewish face is in sight, nowhere is there anyone I could consider Jewish. […] Nowhere do I see a Jew, nowhere a Jewish name plate. If there are Jews in Prague, and I know that there are several thousand Jews here, they are hard to locate. ²² ... [I] continue alone through the late Sunday afternoon through other streets, through streets in which I used to live or in which my friends used to live. Again I see only a few faces that could be Jewish. Previously one could not go through these streets of houses without seeing a Jewish face at every turn. Now it is striking how strongly Czech youth are represented. ²³

Only later, in the evening, did Herrmann encounter Jewish refugees from Poland and Ruthenia. Yet they could not fill the absence he felt when walking through the centre of Prague. Speaking in Yiddish, these ‘wild men’ constituted an alien element in the Czech capital. Late in the evening, Herrmann chose to leave the street, for he preferred to talk to the refugees during the day. In these lines we see the traditional prejudices against Eastern Jews which existed among the acculturated and now bourgeois Jews of central Europe. Herrmann lamented the absence of Jews in Prague, but did not appreciate the presence of Eastern Jews there. For Herrmann, the presence of the Eastern Jews made the absence of the Jews who used to live in Prague more acute. ²⁴

The Prague Jewish town, including its world-renowned synagogues, had been spared the destruction to which the Nazis subjected Jewish buildings throughout Europe. The Nazis allegedly planned to turn the main Jewish sights into a museum of the Jewish race, which had been physically removed from the German Lebensraum. ²⁵ For Herrmann, however, after the war this physical space of the Prague Jewish city was filled with alien people. On Sunday he visited the Old-New Synagogue (Altneuschul), the main symbol of Jewish Prague, but the service was attended by Jews from Ruthenia, Poland, and Slovakia: ‘I do not see a face that I know, no Jew that seems to be of Bohemian or Moravian origin’. ²⁶

The composition of the Jews of the Bohemian lands changed tremendously from what it had been before the war. According to the statistics from March 1939, there were 118,310 Jews in the Nazi-established Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 14,350 of them (over 12 per cent) were non-professing. The community in Bohemia and Moravia had been highly diversified even before the war, but certain parts were far more affected by the Shoah than others. People who lived in mixed marriages and those of mixed origin (in the Nazi terminology called Mischlinge; many of whom did not consider themselves Jewish) were deported to Theresienstadt only in the last months of the war, when the deportation trains no longer departed from the ghetto to the extermination camps in Occupied Poland. In Theresienstadt – where no mass extermination took place – a larger percentage of these Jews were able to survive until the end of the war in comparison to the rest of the Jewish community. According to one reliable source, only 24,000 Jews resided in the Bohemian lands in 1948, with over 20 per cent of them (5031) considered non-professing Jews. (It is impossible to find out how many of those who had been non-professing before the war joined the Jewish community after the war.) Furthermore, 8455 (35 per cent) of the 24,000 were repatriates from Subcarpathian Ruthenia, the easternmost province of interwar Czechoslovakia, ceded to the Soviet Union in 1945. They had not lived in the Bohemian lands before the war and belonged to the Orthodox Jewish communities of eastern Europe, many still communicating in Yiddish. They were never fully integrated into Czech society after the war. Furthermore, as we have seen, the remaining parts of the Jewish community only reluctantly accepted the repatriates, who physically and mentally differed from them and whose presence, in the opinion of other survivors, might lead to an increase in antisemitic feelings in society. ²⁷ We also need to bear in mind that Prague, after 1945, attracted survivors from provincial towns, where often only small groups of Jews had remained alive. They thus preferred to move to the capital, which was the centre of the main communal institutions and humanitarian agencies, and also the only place in the Bohemian lands with a higher concentration of Jews. Although over 40 per cent of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia lived in Prague, a disproportionately high number were non-professing (almost 30 per cent of the Jews of Prague), repatriates from Ruthenia (over 20 per cent of the Jews in Prague), and survivors who had moved to Prague from the provinces. ²⁸ Hence the statistics confirm a complete demographic transformation amongst the Jews, as witnessed by Herrmann in the first months after the Liberation.

Herrmann’s perception of absence (or unwelcome presence) in Prague was further complemented by his discussions with Jewish survivors. As a publicly known figure, he met many, leaders of the Jewish Community, as well as ordinary individuals. In these discussions, he was presented with alarming visions of the future for the Jews in the country. First, Herrmann lamented about the uneven demography of the survivor community, with women forming a disproportionate part of the survivors (‘we have become a nation of widows’) ²⁹ and almost no Jewish children in Prague (‘This tribe [Volksstamm] has no children’). ³⁰ Second, the survivors’ vision of the future of the Jews in Czechoslovakia could not give Herrmann any hope for the revival of Jewish life in the country. He was repeatedly confronted with the radical dichotomy that emerged among survivors, with some people believing that survivors had only two options: radical assimilation in the Czech nation or immediate emigration to Palestine and the fulfillment of the Jewish national dream. In fact, many preferred the latter option as Herrmann was repeatedly asked for Palestine certificates. No middle ground seemed to exist among the postwar Jews he met. ³¹ We can, however, conclude that either solution would intensify the Jewish absence in the country, and the future of the Jews was in doubt several months after the end of the war. Other Jewish activists who visited the Bohemian lands in the summer of 1945 also made similar observations of the sentiments prevailing in the community. ³² Shortly after the Liberation the feeling that the perceived Jewish question needed to be solved in a radical way was shared by the survivors and by non-Jewish Czechs as well.

Another skeleton in the closet that emerged after the war in conjunction with the Czechoslovak efforts to create a homogeneous Slav nation state was the multicultural past of Jews. The forced removal of the German ethnic minority led to the suppression of any public manifestations of belonging to the German cultural milieu, and this affected Jews who had been brought up and educated in the German environment. ³³ Herrmann soon recognized the changed rules of the game, and although his mother tongue was German, he attempted to avoid using the language during his stay in Prague. Several months after the end of the war, few people believed German was a language that could be spoken in Prague. During his stay, he spoke German only in private meetings of Jewish groups, and only after he had been assured it was acceptable. This absence of the cultural diversity that had been so typical of the pre-war Jews of Prague ³⁴ is repeatedly emphasized in Herrmann’s account. Now, when he was walking through Prague streets and talking to people, he could not hear or see any German. The people who spoke German had disappeared from the city, or they had tried to conceal this part of their identity. He saw the first Germans, who had been forced to wear white armbands, as a symbol of their belonging to the nation that was being removed from the Bohemian lands, only during his trip to the former Sudetenland. ³⁵

This absence of cultural diversity emerged in particular in the former Sudetenland, where in some places over 90 per cent of the population had been removed just after the war, and were replaced by new settlers coming from all over Czechoslovakia. ³⁶ During his short stay in Czechoslovakia, Herrmann visited Lanškroun, where he had been born almost 60 years previously. Before the war, Lanškroun had been predominantly German, and was annexed by the Reich after the Munich Agreement. Yet when Herrmann now travelled through the town it had already lost its German character, and, symbolically, the only place he could hear German was at the cemetery, coming from the nearby internment camp for local Germans. He travelled to Lanškroun in a car provided by the vice-chairman of the parliament, Josef David, and was accompanied by David’s chauffeur and a young member of the Hechalutz movement (a Jewish pioneer movement that prepared youth for settlement in Palestine). It was only when they were alone walking through the Jewish cemetery (looking for removed tombstones – including Herrmann’s mother’s), without their Slovak chauffeur, that his young companion was willing to talk to Herrmann in German. German, which had become the main Jewish language in Bohemia and Moravia from the 1780s onward (before being gradually replaced by Czech beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century), was unacceptable to use in public in the heightened tensions of the first postwar months. Lanškroun was where in the first days after the liberation some of the worst excesses against the German population were committed by former partisans with the participation of the local Czechs (24 local Germans were brutally murdered). ³⁷ Even in early October 1945, the remaining Germans of Lanškroun, awaiting deportation, avoided public places – they have been made absent. ³⁸

A similar experience was felt in the cities on the ethnic fault lines between the Czechs and the Germans. One example was the coal-mining and steel town of Moravská Ostrava, the ‘black heart’ of Czechoslovakia, which, shortly after the end of the war, was visited by another Jewish émigré, Joseph Wechsberg. With the discovery of extensive black coal reserves in the mid-eighteenth century and the resulting economic boom in the second half of the nineteenth century, what had for centuries been sleepy townlet was transformed into one of the major industrial hubs of the Habsburg Empire. Economic development attracted migrants from all parts of the Empire, which led to the ethnic diversification of Ostrava. When the Empire fell apart in 1918, only slightly more than 50 per cent of the city was ethnically Czech. The city had a truly multiethnic character. Memoirs written decades after the Second World War attest to the tolerant nature of multiethnic coexistence in Ostrava in the first years after the proclamation of Czechoslovak independence. ³⁹ Living side by side were Czechs, Germans, Poles, as well as Jews among whom many identified with any of the other ethnic and linguistic groups, or, also in large numbers, adhered to the ethnic understanding of their Jewish identity. This was also the time when Wechsberg spent his childhood and teenage years in the city.

As in many localities across Czechoslovakia, the end of the multiethnic co-existence was accompanied by an increasing and devastating violence. The rising tensions of the pre-Munich period led to public demonstrations by the local supporters of the irredentist Sudeten German party (SDP) of Konrad Henlein and clashes with Czechs. The large Jewish population was caught in the middle. The first expulsions of people designed ‘undesirable’ by the Czechoslovak Government, primarily Poles and Polish Jews, followed immediately after the Munich Agreement. The local Czech authorities were desperate to find flats for Czech refugees from the Sudetenland and the region of Teschen (Cieszyn) annexed by Poland, and Polish nationals, including many Jews, were the first to fall victim to ethnic cleansing. ⁴⁰ The German occupation, beginning on 14 March 1939, completely and irrevocably destroyed multicultural Ostrava. All the Jews who had not escaped were deported to camps and ghettos. About 8000 Jewish and 800 non-Jewish Czechoslovaks from Ostrava were murdered during the war. ⁴¹ In Ostrava the postwar ‘orderly and humane’ expulsion of the German Czechoslovaks was accompanied by violence, with over 231 local Germans beaten to death or executed, and others raped or otherwise mistreated in the infamous Hanke internment camp in the centre of town between 10 May and 13 June 1945. ⁴² The victims did not belong to the ruling elites of the Nazi regime; those had already fled – together with their families – shortly before the arrival of the Red Army. Of the 16,500 Germans who used to live in Ostrava, only 6000 remained after the Liberation and most of them were expelled to Germany by late 1946. ⁴³ Immediately after the Liberation, local police in Ostrava imposed restrictions on the German population. All Germans had to wear a white badge with the letter ‘N’ (for Němec, German) on their clothes; they were not allowed to use public transport, enter parks and other public places, and, under the curfew, they were not allowed to be outside after 8 pm. If they met a Russian or Czechoslovak military officer in the street, they had to take off their hat and walk around them holding their arms close to their sides. ⁴⁴ The resemblance between the restrictions and the previous Nazi anti-Jewish laws was hardly coincidental.

The main symbols of the German presence in the town were demolished. The ostentatious Deutsches Haus und Theater, built in the late nineteenth century by the German-Jewish architect Alfred Neumann, was damaged during Allied air raids in 1944 and 1945. Shortly after the Liberation in late April 1945, the local Germans were forced to demolish the house and remove the rubble – erasing the memory of the German presence and making Ostrava into ethnically and culturally Czech city. ⁴⁵ The Germans themselves had to help with the removal of the main symbol of their national and cultural presence in the city and thus completely alter the city space. A small park and square, bearing the name of Dr Edvard Beneš, the postwar President of Czechoslovakia and the main architect of the expulsion, today marks the place where the symbol of the German presence in the town once stood. The empty space now, perhaps inadvertently, symbolizes this cultural absence.

The decrease in the Jewish population in Ostrava and in other regional towns was even more extreme than in Prague. There are no precise estimates of the size of the Ostrava Jewish population before 1938, but sources usually state that it hovered between 9000 and 10,000, including foreigners. After the war, between 630 and 720 Jews registered with the Jewish Community, among them the so-called ‘B-Jews’, an administrative category of those who did not belong to the religious community, but had been considered Jews by the Nazis (after the war this category was used only in the Jewish community affairs). There were also those who did not associate themselves with Jewish institutions, though that meant they could not benefit from social support provided by Jewish associations. ⁴⁶ According to the official Czechoslovak census of 1 March 1950 – after the transfer of the Germans and the peak of the Jewish emigration from the country – 98 per cent of the Ostrava population was Czech or Slovak, with the Poles, as the largest minority, forming only 0.7 per cent of the population (with the number of Jews somewhere around 250). Multiethnic Ostrava was a thing of the past. ⁴⁷ The key industries in the town (like the Vítkovice Ironworks), previously owned by German or German-Jewish industrialists, were nationalized, that is, Czechified. ⁴⁸ All the census data are of course a very problematic source of information and particular nation groups cannot be taken as solid categories. We will never know how bilingual people or those from ethnically mixed families decided about the particular nationality they registered. Their decision was influenced by a whole range of situational factors. Before the war, those coming from Jewish background could register as Czechs, Germans or Jews. ⁴⁹ We can assume that after 1945, even people who came from the German culture, but wanted to stay in Czechoslovakia, rather registered as Czechs, to manifest their loyalties to the new state and because they knew that the new state expected this behavior from its citizens. It is evident that those who lived in Ostrava after the completion of the transfer had to accept the new ethnonationalist character of the country and – at least externally – ‘behave’ as Czechs.

Wechsberg travelled to Ostrava several weeks after the Liberation. He had belonged to the German-Jewish cultural group there and his father, who served in the Austrian Imperial army, was killed in the First World War. Wechsberg’s mother, who was initially deported to Theresienstadt and from there to Auschwitz, had also remained attached to German culture and Vienna, the former centre of the multinational Empire. While at university in Prague, Wechsberg began to reorientate to Czech culture, yet to the end of his life remained nostalgic about the multiethnic character of Ostrava in the early decades of the twentieth century. ⁵⁰

Wechsberg longed to return to his birthplace. He also wanted to see where his mother had lived prior to the deportation. With his non-Jewish in-laws still living in Ostrava, he also went in search of his loved ones. Wechsberg, however, had probably not gone to Ostrava in search of home. His wife was in the United States of America, and he was already a naturalized American. He visited the city out of nostalgia.

After finally reaching the city in a Soviet army convoy, Wechsberg soon realized that the place he used to call home no longer existed. This feeling is symbolized by the scene when Wechsberg, shortly after arriving in the city centre, walked to the building where he once resided, only to find out that it had been damaged in the last months of the war – either by US air raids or Soviet artillery: ‘what once had been our dining room now seemed to be floating in mid-air’. Standing in front of the building, Wechsberg reminisced about his childhood, his family, and the past. Despite his strong desire, Wechsberg could not bring himself to enter the abandoned building. He could not return to the past, ‘the gap was too large’. ⁵¹

In search of the main buildings that had formed the Jewish space in the city before the war, Wechsberg set off on a walk to the main Ostrava synagogue. Before the war, there had been four synagogues and two smaller prayer rooms in Greater Ostrava: in Přívoz (Oderfurt), Vítkovice, an Orthodox synagogue, and the main synagogue at Hviezdoslav Street, both in Moravská Ostrava, and smaller prayer rooms in Zábřeh and Hrušov. Wechsberg walked across the centre of town and turned into Temple Street:

I turned into the street and walked half a block – and stopped. For a moment I thought I had taken the wrong turning. There was no synagogue there. Perhaps it had never been there. The house that I remembered to the right of the synagogue was still there, and the print shop on the left side. In between, where I remembered the synagogue – no I couldn’t be wrong – was a vacant lot, covered with scattered clumps of weeds and bush grass. Scraps of paper and rubbish lying around. The grass and weeds looked as though they had been there for ever. Or at least for five years. ⁵²

The Nazis destroyed synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia first during Kristallnacht in November 1938, for example in Troppau (Opava) near Ostrava. ⁵³ Those were the places of worship located in the Sudetenland, which was annexed by the Third Reich the previous month, in early October 1938. In Moravská Ostrava, local Nazis, most likely working with local Czech fascist groups, set all six synagogues and prayer rooms ablaze in several separate (allegedly spontaneous) incidents during May and June 1939, several months after the occupation of the city began. ⁵⁴ This was a systematic attempt to redraw the city space. The buildings were completely destroyed and the rubble removed. Only empty spaces reminded passers-by about the once flourishing community. ⁵⁵ After the removal of the Deutsches Haus, the Polish House (Dom Polski) remained the only big symbol of the erstwhile ethnic coexistence in the city.

The empty space left by the demolished synagogue in the centre of Ostrava reminded Wechsberg about the Jews who used to attend services in that House of God, but who vanished together with the building. The disappearance of the building symbolized the disappearance of the community. In recollections published immediately after the war, Wechsberg rarely differentiated among the people of Ostrava based on their ethnicity. Although he did not write about Ostrava Germans (or Jewish Germans – he did not feel comfortable enough to return to the subject until writing The Vienna I Knew in the late 1970s), it is evident that the now purely Czech character of the city deeply troubled him. The vanished vibrant community (and the local Ostrava identity that had transcended ethnic boundaries) he had longed for had been created thanks to special conditions in the city, with the affluent middle class comprising mostly local Germans and Jews.

For Wechsberg, pre-war Ostrava with its nightclubs, neon signs, and people promenading in the streets in the evening, resembled the USA. It was the way the community had been created in the nineteenth century, with diverse cultures living side by side, which allowed most of them to maintain their individual characters and created the bubbling cultural life before the war. Wechsberg explicitly writes about Hotel Palace and its Bal Palais Boccaccio bar that before the war had been the sites where people came to see and be seen. ⁵⁶ The hotel was aryanized, and what was not stolen by the Germans during the war was later removed by the Soviet liberators, who ‘cleaned the joint out good. Didn’t leave a nail’. ⁵⁷ For Wechsberg, it was this absence of glamour, of cultural life, even of decadence, that alienated him from his hometown: ‘There was nothing to see now in the cellar room that once had been the Boccaccio nightclub. I was getting tired of walking through ghost halls’. ⁵⁸

Wechsberg felt like a stranger in his hometown. Walking in the streets of Moravská Ostrava, he described his uneasiness about the apparent unfamiliarity of the place:

I looked at all the faces I passed, hoping to see someone I had known, but there wasn’t a single familiar one. It gave me a shock; I had spent my childhood in Ostrava and had known hundreds of people there. [...] I wandered aimlessly, for I realised now that the people I wanted to see probably were not there any more. It was like being a foreigner in my own yard. ⁵⁹

In this way he experienced first-hand the feelings of thousands of survivors or refugees who after the war returned to their former places of residence. But at the same time, his sense of dislocation was unique to his specific wartime circumstances. It was because he had left in 1938, that Wechsberg felt uncomfortable in Czechoslovakia. He did not know how people had behaved during the war, and soon realized that some of his pre-war acquaintances later collaborated with the Germans, and it was not advisable to talk to them in the street. At the same time, he did not know how to talk to people who had survived the war in Ostrava or in the camps. As he wrote, ‘What can you say to a man who has come back from hell? There are no words for that. […] What do they feel about a man who has never been in Dachau or in any other camp?’ ⁶⁰ It was his absence from Europe during the war that further estranged him from his hometown.

After failing to locate his former friends and experiencing the alien nature of postwar Ostrava, Wechsberg decided to leave. When portraying his encounters with people in Ostrava, he repeatedly notes his wish to be back in California. Leaving the city, he was parting with his mother-in-law:

I’m so glad that you came,’ she had said. ‘I always knew you would come. You had to come. To find us – and because you had to learn the truth. It’s better for you to know.’ It was better to know. Get it over with and know the whole story. No doubt left. No hope and no doubt. Everything clear now. This trip had made everything so clear in my mind. I had met nine people in my home town. Nine out of a thousand whom I had once known. I had discovered that there was no bridge leading from the past to the present. No way back. Nothing left but the dingy houses, the grimy streets, the coal dust, the fog. The grayness and sadness. Nothing else was left of the town I had known, and I knew that I was really going home now. Home to America. ⁶¹

Although we need to keep in mind that Wechsberg wrote the story for a US audience, it is evident that for him, Europe had simply changed too much in a mere six years. Gone was the national and cultural diversity and tolerance, however complicated, of interwar central Europe. Gone were familiar faces, relations, buildings and property. That was also the story of thousands of people in postwar Europe, who searched for a place they used to call ‘home’, and returned to what Anna Cichopek-Gajraj usefully refers to as ‘no home’. ⁶²

Such feelings of alienation were conveyed by a Theresienstadt and Auschwitz survivor, Ruth Elias, in memoirs written many decades after the war. After her liberation, Elias lived in Prague together with other former camp inmates. She decided to visit Ostrava, where she was born and raised. Arriving late at night, she was not even able to find a place to sleep, and ended up standing and crying in the middle of the main square of Ostrava, ‘feeling like a complete stranger in my native town’. After being housed by a former family friend, she visited the Jewish Community office the next day, only to find out that nobody from her extended family had survived the war, and she thus soon left her ‘hometown where [she] was now a stranger’. The family business was now dilapidated. Their former employee hosted her in a living room filled with Elias family furniture. The homes that used to be owned by her family members were now occupied by strangers. She moved back to Prague, where she stayed until emigrating to Israel in 1949. ⁶³

Herrmann and Wechsberg’s accounts offer only partial insights into the situation in the Bohemian lands. Although these are the only comprehensive contemporaneous accounts that we have available, it is evident that they present the view of two people, who had come from non-Czech background, who had economically stable positions overseas and did not intend to stay in Czechoslovakia. In Herrmann’s report we need to acknowledge his Zionist views – in particular in the much shorter and more politically loaded version published in Aufbau. Future research on the perceptions of absence will need to focus on other types of sources, including minority press, as well as survivor testimonies, though it is evident that a completely different methodological approach – taking into account the decades that passed between the end of the war and the time the testimonies were collected – would be necessary. The complexity of the situation in the country was manifested by the efforts of Arnošt Frischer and Kurt Wehle, key Community activists, who after the war spent more than two years fighting for the reconstruction of the Jewish life, whilst at the same time preparing for their own emigration overseas. They attempted to recreate Jewish presence in the country, whilst at the same time intended to deepen the absence. ⁶⁴

To stay in Czechoslovakia after the war, and then especially after the establishment of Communist rule in February 1948 and the creation of the State of Israel in May 1948, meant that survivors had to renegotiate their position in the country. Apart from their personal grievances and losses of family members, property, and career opportunities – they had to accept the absence of the multicultural past, and adhere to the Czech cultural environment and the new socio-economic system in the country. There were those who found this impossible and they preferred to leave the country as soon as possible. Among them were German-speaking Jews, who throughout 1946 and 1947 were desperate to leave for Germany. In a curious twist of events, however, their organized departure was obstructed by the Czechoslovak authorities, who were concerned that any deportation of German Jews from the country would elicit international criticism. ⁶⁵ The other groups were committed Zionists and the Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia. Later, in 1948–9, almost 20,000 Jews – half of those remaining – seized the opportunity to leave for the new Jewish state, before the Czechoslovak Communists closed the door to any further Jewish emigration in mid-1949. ⁶⁶ We can only speculate how many Jews were driven by the desire to fulfil the Zionist dream, by family and psychological reasons, or by the effort to escape the emerging Communist dictatorship in central Europe, a region that, once the Iron Curtain was in place, seemed about to become the main theatre of another global military conflict. There was also an unknown number of those who left for various countries in western Europe and North America. This extensive emigration further reduced the size of the Jewish community.

Yet, as Herrmann observed, there were those who tried to adjust to conditions in Czechoslovakia. Their efforts further intensified the absence. They abandoned or suppressed parts of their identity which had formed a special type of Jewish community. Some of them had to abandon the German cultural milieu. They changed their German-sounding names, learned or perfected their Czech, and sometimes even tried to rewrite their past to fit in to the now purely Czech society. ⁶⁷ They were driven not only by a desire to fit in, but also because people not fluent in Czech or with a ‘problematic’ past could face problems getting their ‘national reliability’ and citizenship rights officially confirmed. In 1946, Pavel (Paul) Eisner, a distinguished translator, literary critic, and linguist – who for a long time advocated the idea of complete Jewish assimilation – articulated this vision, which fully comported with the view of the authorities in the renewed Czechoslovak state: ‘If you are unable in speech, feeling, resolution, and action to merge completely with the nation of the Czech lands, leave! […] A Jew is a Czech, a Czech without reservation and without exception.’ ⁶⁸ The Czech-Jewish Assimilationist movement also renewed its activities in 1948, with the efforts to pursue their ideal of Jewish assimilation in Czechoslovakia, and thus help find a solution to the perceived Jewish question. ⁶⁹

Yet although we can see similarities in the construction of the absence at the macro, meso and micro-levels of the society, we can also identify significant differences. To stay in Czechoslovakia as a survivor meant to accept the absences created by the war, Occupation, and the Czech expulsion of ethnic minorities (to accept that the Jews were made absent). It also meant trying to create presence in this absence. The Council of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, the umbrella Jewish organization, worked hard for almost three years to reconstruct the communities in the Bohemian lands and thus ensure the continuation of Jewish life – their presence – in the country. Individual survivors created new bonds, continued friendships established during the war, which not infrequently became marriages. ⁷⁰ Herrmann in the published version of his account noted that the Jews did not speak too much about their future in Czechoslovakia, about the future of the ‘shattered… small tribe’ left in Central Europe, but they definitely wanted to live as a ‘community’ (‘als Gemeinde leben’). ⁷¹ The Shoah had recreated the bonds among those of ‘Jewish blood’ and even Eisner felt obliged to address the survivor community in the name of ‘us Jews’. ⁷² Thus although at the micro and meso-levels the survivors (if we can generalize) accepted the way in which they were absented as an ethnic or national group, they still wanted to stay – to be present – as a community. It was a community bound by the survived suffering, but also by particular socio-economic needs caused by the demographic structure of the survivor community.

The idealized depiction of the Czech-Jewish community and co-existence, as depicted in Distant Journey (shot exactly at the same time as the main wave of Jewish emigration was leaving from Czechoslovakia to Israel in 1948–9) was a vision embraced by a part of the Jewish survivors in Bohemia and Moravia, a fact that was manifested by the disproportionate number of survivors coming either from mixed marriages or those who had not belonged to the religious communities (mainly because of their mixed background) even before the war. Although many Jews wholeheartedly embraced this new model, others preferred to seize existing opportunities to leave the country forever. Either decision meant that the absence created by the war was further deepened. After 1949, only somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 Jews lived in Czechoslovakia, in comparison with almost 55,000 survivors in 1945. Although we cannot talk about any clear-cut categories, we can hypothesize (though I am aware that it would be difficult to prove this theory) that a large part of those who left were Zionist-inclined and those who stayed were willing to seek full assimilation and integration in the Czech or Slovak nations. The idea presented in the Distant Journey took real form in postwar Czechoslovakia. Yet this is not to say that the Jewish community completely disappeared through emigration and assimilation. ⁷³ The community continued to exist, even if it fundamentally differed from the multicultural, multifaceted Jewish society of 1945, not to mention the community in 1938.