Jiří Holý

The Jews and the Shoah in Czech Literature after WWII

1.

            In Czech literature, this theme is not as intense as it may perhaps be in Hebrew,
German or Polish literature. This is understandable given that the Jews were oppressed, the German
Nazis were the guilty party and the extermination camps were located in Poland: Auschwitz,
Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. In addition, the majority of the victims were Polish Jews
and even today the question is still controversial as to how much anti-Semitism on the part of the
Poles contributed to their fate. We find testimonies about their fate in works such as Henryk
Grynberg’s Żydowska wojna (1965) and Zwycięstwo (1969) [The Jewish War, The Victory, translated
into English by C. Wieniewska, 2001].

            Czech literature has obviously produced several unique works as well and some of these
are more documentary in nature, while others have a stronger fictional side. In the 1960s, the
Shoah became one of the main themes of both prose and film (this theme occurred very rarely in
poetry and drama). The traditional anti-Semitism which the Jewish victims of the Holocaust directly
experienced after the war in Poland and in certain places in Slovakia (leading to pogroms which
were officially concealed for the most part) did not occur in the Czech milieu. This aspect from
the past has now become a subject of controversy today in these countries, even influencing the
political sphere. Pogroms never took place in the Czech lands. Disputes concerning the Holocaust
have been limited to Czech Fascist and skinhead sub-culture fringe movements. Nevertheless, it is
important to remember that occasional anti-Jewish provocations have been incited. Due to the age
factor of the actual witnesses of the Shoah, first hand testimony is gradually dying. Aggressive
anti-Semitism is not characteristic for Czechs; instead, indifference prevails towards their fellow
Jewish citizens.

            The Shoah theme went through various phases within Czech literature. Immediately after
the war, it primarily centered on documentary accounts of those who had lived through the Nazi
camps. From the dozens of works, the book about Auschwitz Továrna na smrt (1946) which has been
translated into the world’s main languages (The Death Factory, translated into English by S. Jolly,
1966) by Ota Kraus (1909–2001) and Erich Schön (later taking the name Erich Kulka, 1911–1995) is
especially famous. The designation of Auschwitz as “the death factory” became a part and parcel of
Holocaust terminology, even though Kraus and Schön were evidently not the first ones to use it.
They concisely describe the link of racist ideology to the manner of segregation and the
liquidation of the Jews, emphasizing the impersonal role played by the bureaucracy and the most
up-to-date technology.

            Such worthy publications as The Death Factory or the somewhat-later published novel by
Jiří Weil (1901–1959) Život s hvězdou (1949) [Life with a Star, translated into English by R.
Klímová and R. Schloss, 1989) not only presented the horrible brutality of the Shoah, but also its
seemingly banal, even mundane side. Život s hvězdou is considered the most important work on this
theme in Czech literature and has inspired a multitude of other books.

            Jiří Weil incited his readers with the very manner in which he wrote his novels, in
particular with Život s hvězdou. He gained inspiration from modernist theories which shunned both
traditional psychological analysis and structured plot and instead re-established prose on facts
and factual reality. The bearer of meaning is not the dramatic story of the hero or any authorial
commentary, but much more often factual life situations, a record of daily life which is described
in a “dry,” seemingly disinterested manner.

            The protagonist Josef Roubíček is part of “small history,” not heroic History, as
sought by Communist critics and thus, this book resembles the majority of those about the Shoah.
However, Jiří Weil’s art lay in his purposeful choosing of non-heroic heroes who went about living
their daily, commonplace life, avoiding all that was considered “socially relevant.” Roubíček lives
alone during the war in a hut on the edge of Prague. Like the rest of the Jews, he goes to work and
must check in regularly at the various offices. He dreams about a cup of coffee which he cannot
hope to ask for and recalls how he went riding in the mountains with his girl-friend Růžena and to
the cinema and to cafés.

            The hero speaks with his friend Pavel about the loss of his human identity as they
discuss the upcoming transport:


                        (...) ‘There’s no other way but to become a number.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘A number – hanging around your neck, attached to your suitcase, glued to your rucksack. Then I’ll
load myself with fifty kilos and go. (...)’

(Weil 1998, 99)


            Throughout the entire narration, Roubíček almost never meets with either Germans or
Nazis. They are office workers from the Jewish community which organized records of the people,
confiscation of money, property, transport preparation, etc.

            The novel captures human degradation on a normal level, yet made more conspicuous by
Nazi despotism. This degeneracy is all the more convincing precisely because it was “normal” and
rationalized – its absurdity also lay in that its victims accepted this fate. One of the most
important scenes in the novel describes an Aryan wife who forces her Jewish husband to commit
suicide, thereby “making the situation easier” for her and their daughter; he chooses to accept her
argument.


2.

The Stalinist regime, which was implemented in Czechoslovakia after the takeover in February 1948
and climaxed at the beginning of the 1950s, was marked by flagrant anti-Semitism, just as the other
Communist regimes of that period. Publications about the Nazi regime and their concentration camps
emphasized the Communists’ heroic fight in all the Eastern-block countries, while the systematic
extermination of the Jews was only mentioned in passing or not at all. Even in the cogent literary
works of that period the Judaism of the main heroes is suppressed or marginalized. The filmed
version of the well-known novella by Jan Otčenášek (1924–1979) Romeo, Julie a tma (1958; Romeo and
Juliet and the Darkness, translated into English by I. Urwin, 1960) describes the tragic story of
the love of one Czech boy and a Jewish girl during the Protectorate. It was filmed by director Jiří
Weiss whose entire family had been murdered in Auschwitz. In 1959, however, the film was censured
by Václav Kopecký who was the minister and a party functionary at the time. The final scene was
considered subversive: the Czech inhabitants of the home where the young Jewish girl was hiding
sent her directly into the hands of the Nazis, out of fear for their own lives.

            In Czech literature, the theme of the Shoah was increasingly developed only at the end
of the 1950s, when the Stalinist system was being dismantled, and later especially in the 1960s as
the culture underwent great liberalization. The first prosaist to enter the scene in that period
was Arnošt Lustig (b. 1926) who survived both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Thus for him, the Shoah
became the theme of his life’s work. His first works belong among his best: Noc a naděje (1958)
[Night and Hope, translated into English by G. Theiner, 1962) and Démanty noci (1958) [Diamonds in
the Night, translated into English by I. Urwin, 1962, new translation of Diamonds of the Night by
J. Němcová, 1977). These stories by Lustig inspired two of the most exceptional films in the Czech
“New Wave” movement of the 1960s – Zbyněk Brynych’s Transport z ráje (1962) [Transport from
Paradise] based on the Theresienstadt stories from the first book and Jan Němec’ Démanty noci
(1964, the filmed version of the story “Tma nemá stín”) [Darkness Casts No Shadow translated into
English by J. Němcová, 1976)]. Similarly to Jiří Weil, the author makes use of an intimate, inner
perspective (even though he narrates in the third person) and works especially expressively with
the subjective observation of time. His heroes are not heroic figures, outsiders, children or older
people. Lustig also distinguishes himself by his non-conventional picture of the war and the
concentration camps usually depicted in terms of active resistance against the Nazis. Despite all
the bleakness which these people must repeatedly undergo, donning an outer shell just to survive,
the majority of them try to maintain basic moral values (for example, the story “Sousto” [Morsel]
describes a boy who extracts his deceased father’s golden teeth in order to exchange them for a
lemon urgently needed by his ill sister).

            In 1964, Josef Škvorecký (b. 1924) published his prose work Sedmiramenný svícen [The
Menorah] which sources Jewish themes by its very title. This work was structured as a cycle of
seven stories integrated by a type of literary chorus where a young Jewish girl, Rebecca, and her
boyfriend Danny (the author’s alter ego and the protagonist of Škvorecký’s prose) reminisce seven
years after the war about their youth in a small Czech town in eastern Bohemia. Some of the
situations recounted are particularly moving. For example, Rebecca describes the moment when she
must board the transport for Theresienstadt alone and leaves for the train station with her
suitcase. On the way, she runs into her schoolmate who absent-mindedly greets her and then passes
quickly, since she is in a hurry to get to the cinema or perhaps for some date. The story “Eine
kleine Jazzmusik” features several student larks and a jazz concert in a provincial Czech city
during the occupation. Young musicians considered jazz (which was strictly forbidden as “degenerate
negro art”) as a protest against the Nazis and against the caution and traditional taste of their
fathers. However, after the concert, a certain Czech collaborator denounces them and the students
are subsequently expelled from high school, while one of the participants, the half-Jew Paddy
Nakonec, is arrested and executed. According to the author, moral lines are not to be drawn among
people because of nationality, since you can find Czech, German and Jewish cowards, heroic people,
frightened people and finally, those that are united.


3.

For Škvorecký, the Shoah becomes a metaphor for man caught in the machinery of the totalitarian
regime and for the functioning of evil at large (Rebecca and Danny’s meeting takes place in 1952
when the mass-scale unlawfulness and executions of the post-February regime were taking place).
Other prose also emphasized this parallel in the 1960s by using a more complicated approach to
styling. Such is the case with Ladislav Fuks’ (1923–1994) novel Pan Theodor Mundstock (1963) [Mr.
Theodore Mundstock, translated into English by I. Urwin, 1969], his collection of stories Mí
černovlasí bratři (1964) [My Black-haired Brothers] and the novella Spalovač mrtvol (1967) [The
Cremator, translated into English by E. Kandler, 1984]. Based on Juraj Herz’s script (on which Fuks
himself cooperated), an excellent film version was made starring Rudolf Hrušínský and Vlasta
Chramostová in 1968. Fuks belonged to a group of writers who did not have Jewish roots nor any
personal experience from the Shoah, however they often wrote about this theme in the 1960s.

            Based on elegant repetition and variation, Fuks’ prose smoothly fuses realistic
tableaux with fantastic ones. Pan Theodor Mundstock allows us to observe the main character in
detail, however he himself lives at least half the time in his own head. For example, he converses
with his friend Mon about items which the reader finds out are only figments of his imagination
half-way through the book. Otherwise, Mundstock is an discreet character who was employed as an
office clerk before the war, but who now lives, similar to Weil’s Roubíček, in complete loneliness
in an empty Prague flat waiting to be summoned for transport. He tries to think up something which
can save him. He comes up with an apparently faultless method of how to prepare himself for the
concentration camp by training himself for the future hardships to be endured, including
uncomfortable sleeping on wooden planks, being beaten, going hungry, etc. Eventually, he dies in a
tragicomic manner at the very moment they come to take him away for the transport: based on his
methodology, he must switch his suitcase from one hand to the other so that he will not become
overtired, yet as he does so while crossing the street, he does not notice the German car which
runs him over.

Ladislav Fuks understands the fate of the Jews as that of helpless people who have succumbed to a
fanatical, systematic hate and to their own personal fears. He purposefully describes the horror of
a world which has lost its humaneness and has instead become a place of threat and persecution.
Fuks’ prose depicits the existential anguish of an individual surrounded by an incomprehensible,
coldblooded mechanism.

It is interesting that Arnošt Lustig used a similar approach in the mid-1960s; previously, he had
opted to write using real-life situations as the basis. His most famous book remains the novella
Modlitba pro Kateřinu Horovitzovou (1964) [A Prayer for Katarina Horovitzova] translated into
English by J. Němcová, 1973] which was made into a television movie by Antonín Moskalyk in 1965.
The story was inspired by actual events which took place in Auschwitz in 1943 – the murder of a
group of rich Jews whom the Nazis had promised safe passage across the border for a high price.
However, the prose is structured in an extremely complicated way, high lighting the intelligent
Nazi Arthur Brenske who acts like the devilish Mefisto. He does not dominate his victims with brute
force, but rather uses sophisticated double-edged talk and promises. For example, he talks about
“the final solution” and the “gloom which will decide everything.” The rich Jews gradually prepare
their finances saved in American banks for transfering to Nazi accounts, hoping that this will help
them survive.

            This manipulation of the people via language and the abuse of power is one of the most
important themes in Czech literature from Karel Čapek and Karel Poláček to Václav Havel. The
perspective set in the novella is remarkable, since the majority of the situations are viewed
through the eyes of the naïve American Jews who take a long time to realize that they are nearing
their downfall. Meanwhile, the reader, who is receiving additional information, awaits the
mercilessly tragic end. Unlike Fuks’ work, where the observer does not cross the characters’ own
horizon, the perspective of the reader versus the character is reversed here. In Lustig’s novels,
the rich American Jews go into the gas chambers like sheep. One woman among them rebels: Kateřina
Horovitzová grabs the SS-man Schillinger’s gun and shoots him. Thus Kateřina is likened to the
Biblical character Judith.


4.

Another integral theme in Czech prose of the 1960s was a non-traditional depiction of the Shoah
from the standpoint of the guilty party. Once again, Ladislav Fuks and his novella Spalovač mrtvol
serve as an example of this. The extermination of the Jews is not strictly in the center of the
action, since the plot of the novella concludes time-wise sometime at the end of 1939 with a short
coda set in May 1945. (The film version is somewhat closer to this theme, since it explicitly
portrays Karel Kopfrkingl who is charged with organizing the liquidation and burning of people en
masse by the Nazi authorities).[1]

            This character is even stranger than Fuks’ previous characters. As is characteristic
for the author, the reader also finds factual reality mixed with the fantastic and various visions.
This work indeed verges on a horror story in terms of genre, while from the narratological point of
view, the narrative is unreliable. Thus, the fictional world is depicted in purely personal terms
via the unsettled perspective of the reality donned by the protagonist. Only the subtle suggestions
within the novella’s text and other more marked signals towards the end reveal this distance to the
reader.

            However bizarre and psychologically disturbed, Kopfrkingl is not the embodiment of the
traditional villain. In essence, he has a petit bourgeois mentality, works carefully, loves music
(opera melodies sound from the crematorium), cares for his family, does not drink or smoke and
enjoys speaking in a flowery manner (he calls his cat “enchanting-beauty” and his wife Marie
“Lakmé”). Thus, he is “decent” as a person, yet personality and individuality are lacking and thus
is a complete conformist. Characteristically, Kopfrkingl accepts the thoughts and empty phrases
which he has previously heard.

            Fuks’ novella skillfully, and even monstrously, paints the fun-house atmosphere as
solemnity and stark ornamentation devolve into horror. The entire text is structured as a web of
allusions and anticipations. For example, the second chapter covers the Kopfrkingl family as they
visit a carnival, including a fun-house with frightening scenes from the great plague of 1680. The
dying and killing which are demonstrated here (hanging, death by being run through with spikes)
foreshadow Kopfrkingl’s own actions in chapters 13 and 14, when he hangs his wife in the bathroom
and runs a spike through his son, Mili, at the crematorium. Right before the visit to the
fun-house, the reader learns about Mr. Strauss who lost his wife; she died of “consumption in the
neck” and his son who died from “scarlet fever” (13, italics L.F.). Once again, this foreshadows
both murders, since Kopfrkingl throws a noose on his wife’s neck and burns the body of his son in
the crematorium.


5.

From the end of the 1960s onwards, the theme of the Shoah did not play such a key role in Czech
literature as had previously. The works which did address it basically continued in two main
directions: genuine authentication (Arnošt Lustig, Ota Pavel) and figurative stylization (Viktor
Fischl).

            For the generation which has never experienced the Shoah, they have primarily
understood this theme in terms of set images and stark Holocaust iconography. Some authors have
attempted to push these borders. From a traditional standpoint, their works  appear as a defamation
of the Shoah theme, however, he does provide possibilities for its being updated in a contemporary
way.

            Czech literature has also concentrated on the Shoah theme after 1989. Arnošt Goldflam’s
(1946) play Sladký Theresienstadt (premiere 1996, in book format 2001) [Sweet Theresienstadt]
serves as an example. Hearkening to his Jewish roots, he originally recorded a famous episode from
the Theresienstadt ghetto in his propaganda film “Theresienstadt,” better known as “Vůdce daroval
Židům město” [The Führer Gave the Town to the Jews]. Meant to impress the international Red Cross
commission, the film starred the well-known German actor and Theresienstadt prisoner Kurt Gerron
(named Gerroldt in Goldflam’s play). In this “documentary,” people state how peaceful life is in
Theresienstadt, how they play soccer, visit various cafés, libraries, etc. Similar situations were
also filmed in “Transport z ráje” [Transport out of Paradise]. After the Red Cross Commission left,
the director and the actors in the film were sent on the transport to die to Auschwitz. Within his
play, Goldflam used comic, tragic and grotesque elements as well.

            The theater advisor and literary historian Radka Denemarková (b. 1968) also accessed
the Shoah theme in her successful novel Peníze od Hitlera (2006) [Money from Hitler]. It describes
the cruel fate of Gita Lauschmannová, a German-speaking Jew from Moravia with Czechoslovak
citizenship. Although she has survived the concentration camp, her parents have died there. After
the war, she returns to her home village only to discover that the local inhabitants have
confiscated the estate where she was born under the guise that her father “committed an offense
against the Czech national honor.” In order for the inhabitants to keep the property that they have
usurped, they have designated her as a German and a daughter of a collaborator. She has to work
like a slave, be tyrannized and barely escapes death. Once again, she returns to her village sixty
years later, when her parents are in the process of being vindicated. She now has a right to have
her property restituted, but she is actually more interested in moral fulfilment. The sons and
daughters of the former neighbors, however, hardly differ from their fathers. We can classify this
novel with works that cover the “trauma of the return,” as well as those that describe the
brutality of the wild, post-war resettlement of the Sudeten Germans.

            Perhaps the most remarkable attempt at a new approach to the Shoah theme is the
“Auschwitz” chapter of Jáchym Topol’s (b. 1962) novel Sestra (1994) [City Sister Silver, translated
into English by A. Zucker, 2000] entitled “I Had a Dream.” This text, written as a frightening
vision fuses horror, vulgarity, the grotesque and banality. It may thus be understood as a
provocative summons against conventional Holocaust iconography and its being blasphemed. The
narrator describes a dream he had wherein he found himself, together with his friends, on a type of
flying carpet which lands in a sea of ash and bones in Auschwitz:


It was the ashes of cremated people, my brothers, the ashes of cremated Jews. Any last hope we had
that maybe there’d been a mixup, an at least we were in some slightly cosmopolitan wicked old
gulag, was lost. An the ashes stirred up by our landing stuck to our shoes an clothes, an made it
hard for us to walk. An where there weren’t ashes, brothers, there were bones, human bones, an
endless ghastly sea of bones. Then we saw towers in the distance an so we started walkin ... usin
one of the taller towers as our point of orientation ... an we were afraid cause the skulls were
watchin us, lookin at us, an we asked ourselves: Why are we here? Why us? Why did it happen for me?
And some of the skulls seemed to answer: Why not? Some of them lay there softly, jaws set in a
knowing smile, but more, far more, just peered out blankly at us, what was left of the jaws twisted
into a grimace of pain, cause they these’d got in the hard way, brothers, an heavy-duty, alive.
There was a sea of them, an ocean. An this comparison occurred to us when we couldn’t walk anymore
because we kept plunging into the bones an so we tried to swim our way through, we tried to move an
crawl an shove our way through with our arms. (...) An we inched along toward the towers, trying
not to catch the skulls’ empty glances so we wouldn’t go insane. There were children’s skulls, my
brothers, an there were piles of skulls smashed to bits, an there were skulls shot full of holes,
an skulls that looked like they’d been crushed in a press, an skulls with small holes mended shut
with barbwire, an one oif us, O knights and skippers, cracked another joke: Guess that’s what you’d
call his-and-hers skulls, ho! ho!, but then started to vomit. An the one creeping in front of him
didn’t hear him because he was weeping, an the one crawling behind him didn’t hear him because he
was praying out loud. An, friends an brothers of mine, it wasn’t hell we were going through but
whatever it is that comes after it. (Topol 2000, 101–102)


            The heroes meet with the live skeleton of the Czech Josef Novák who did not end up in
Auschwitz for racial reasons or for having taken part in the resistance, but because of an
illegal[Clary1]  store selling food products. This strange guide – the prototypical “small-scale
Czech person” speaks in a low-class type of Prague slang (the remainder of Topol’s entire novel
uses normal, spoken Czech in a non-traditional manner). To horrified listeners, he recounts drastic
scenes of torture and murder which he himself partially participated in as the “capo”; this
alternates with gallows humor. Despite all this, he and the famous Dr. Mengele (who apparently
atoned for his sins after the war by devotedly treating the Indians in South America), go to Heaven
after their deaths. His very arrival in Heaven recalls the selection process in Auschwitz:


...that was Mr. God, my boys, an as the lines went past he’d jus smile an go Rechts! und Links! wid
this like white cane, an in the line I was in, the Angels took care our wounds (...) but the
debbils tore inda that other line wid pitchforks an whips... (Topol 2000, 116)


            Topol’s text may be explained not only as an evocation of the Shoah’s horror, but also
as a reminder of the Czechs’ responsibility in the Jews’ extermination. At the end of his dream,
the narrator meets with the lofty Face (of God) from whom he learns that the future Messiah died as
a young Jewish child in Auschwitz. The hundreds of thousands of skulls in the bone fields cry out
to him and his friends, “Our blood on you and your children!” (Topol 2000, 123), referencing
Matthew 27:25 from the Bible: “His blood be on us, and on our children”.

            The chapter “I Had a Dream” climaxes with the sentence, “time’d died with the Messiah
in Auschwitz” (Topol 2000, 123). A remarkable analogy may be found in Elie Wiesel’s declaration
that “It is impossible to comprehend Auschwitz with or without God. According to him, Auschwitz is
an event which was just as significant as God’s appearance on Mt. Sinai or the future coming of the
Messiah, however in a negative sense, such as an “anti-appearance” or the “Anti-Messiah” (Saint
Cheron 1988, 51).


Bibliography


Brabec, Jiří 2009: Panství ideologie a moc literatury. Praha.


Frankl, Michal 2007: “Emancipace od Židů.” Český antisemitismus na konci 19. století.
Praha/Litomyšl.


Fuks, Ladislav 1969: Pan Theodor Mundstock. Praha.


Týž. 1991: Mr. Theodore Mundstock. Translated by I. Urwin. New York.


Týž. 2003: Spalovač mrtvol. Edited by M. Pohorský. Praha.


Jakobson, Roman 1957: “Řeč a písemnictví českých židů v době přemyslovské,” in Rok 1957, New York,
pp. 35–46.


Koschmal, Walter 2010: Der Dichternomade. Jiří Mordechai Langer – ein tschechisch-jüdischer Autor.
Köln, Weimar, Wien.


Kovtun, Jiří 1994: Tajuplná vražda. Praha


Lustig, Arnošt 2008: Modlitba pro Kateřinu Horovitzovou. A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova.
Anonymous translator. Praha.


Pěkný, Tomáš 2005: Historie Židů v Čechách a na Moravě. Praha.


Saint Cheron, Michael de 1988: Le mal et l’éxil. Rencontre avec Élie Wiesel. Dialog avec
Philippe-Michael de Saint Cheron. Paris.


Topol, Jáchym 2000: City Sister Silver. Translated by A. Zucker. North Haven.


Weil, Jiří 1998: Life with a Star. Translated by R. Klímová and R. Schloss. Evanston.
________________________________

[1]              The novella’s conclusion obviously differs from the film, primarily in that the
ambulance seemingly takes Kopfrkingl to the sanatorium for the health of his spirit. However, in
the film, a German car takes him away from the crematorium to fulfill his supposed “mission.”
________________________________

 [Clary1]V cestine myslim si, ze tady je chyba v pravopisu, takze ne “negelánímu”, ale “
nelegálnímu ”.