UNFREE ASSOCIATIONS

Epilogue

243 Epilogue Because Maus’ mother was German she was able to make slight changes in her identity card and succeed in avoiding both persecution and deportation . She spent the war years giving German lessons to Czech children and taking on tasks that she could do with her hands, like assisting her mother in simple tailoring. After having withstood the last seven years, from the occupation of the Sudets to the death march inThuringia, I had tried to reassure myself that nothing more could happen in my life with which I could not cope. But it was an illusion. As a matter of fact, I had become more sensitive than ever to hardship because I was so vulnerable and not resistant to the daily insults and disappointments inherent in the struggle of reestablishing an existence. I was highly sensitive to anything that felt to me like rejection, discrimination, or lack of understanding of my condition. I was impatient and, after waiting only a short while in a store, would often angrily give up my position in line and leave. It was no wonder that we who had returned were categorized as “survivors” and looked upon as a special kind of “demanding” people. My future brother-in-law, Walter Kohner, who had left Czechoslovakia before the war, had become an American officer working in psychological warfare, and was stationed at the time in Luxembourg. He came to Prague in late 1945, looking for traces of my sister Hanna, who had also survived, and he found me. Hanna had returned to Amsterdam, the place from which she had been deported along with her husband, who had been killed on arrival at Auschwitz. Walter and I went to visit our hometown of Teplitz. One of the things we saw was the site of the old Jewish temple that Walter had attended as a child.There was nothing but grass, wiped out as if it had never been, like the village of Lidice to which we also made a pilgrimage. 244 Unfree Associations The struggle with the new Czech bureaucracy made me again feel like a refugee asking for favors, which touched my open wounds. Confirming my citizenship in the new Republic was not easy. Germans had to leave the country and we Jews, who had lived among them and who spoke GermanorhadbeeneducatedinGermanschools,hadtogothroughgreat efforts to prove our identities. I had to stand in long lines to get forms for all kinds of applications just to be acknowledged as a regular person returning home—there were applications for an apartment, for food stamps and for student financial support. Jewish organizations, mainly the Joint Redistribution Committee, (which we called the Joint), helped me over the first months. After almost a year’s delay, I was finally allowed to apply to the Czech University. The German University was closed, as were all other German institutions. To complete my medical studies for my degree, I had to take final examinations in all subjects, this time in Czech, and was finally graduated from medical school January 31, 1947. I worked in a few different hospitals before I arrived at the neuropsychiatric department of Vihnoradska Hospital, a university hospital in Prague, where I assisted Professor Šebek in teaching medical students. I loved my work, which was the most important and satisfying part of my life. Gottfried Bloch and Walter Kohner at Lidice, “or what remained of it.” — September 1945. Sign says: “Here was the community of Lidice” (in Czech and Russian) 245 However, I considered leaving Czechoslovakia when the opportunity would arise. I was sad to leave my new friends, my colleagues, my acquired position and the country. However, I knew that I could not tolerate the political pressure and felt that I had to leave before I would become too deeply rooted again. After having survived the German terror, I could never live unfree again. Two incidents were decisive. The university hospital political administration was run by the Czech Communist Party, an agency of the U. S. S. R. One day there was a mass meeting of the total staff at which everyone was urged to express complaints and make suggestions. A maintenance man, a veteran party member, arose and asked why there were so many Jewish doctors at the hospital. Very few had even survived the war or returned to Prague. After a heavy silence, he was referred for further political training. The second incident involved...