No Army

Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust gave me sensitivities and a way of seeing the world different from that of most American Jews. As the child of Holocaust survivors, I inherited contradictory impulses: fear and defiance, insecurity and pride, grief and resilience. I grew up with pain that engendered anger, though over time that anger slowly eased as the 1970s became the 1980s became the 1990s, and America grew kinder and more hospitable not only to Jews, but to many groups that had once faced prejudice and discrimination.

As I entered adulthood, I built what felt like a normal American life. I became a lawyer, married, bought a home, joined a Reform synagogue, and had children. Slowly, I came to believe that the traumas that shaped my parents belonged to another time and another world. After all, I was living the American dream.

Yet I remained unusually attuned to cultural and political currents, and sometime during the 2010s I began to feel a vague but persistent unease. Then, in 2019, that unease hardened into something more concrete: a fear that the social foundation I had always assumed was secure was beginning to crack. For the first time in my life, I found myself wondering whether the kinds of forces that shattered my parents’ world in 1930s Czechoslovakia could emerge in twenty-first century America.

My life changed profoundly after that realization, and the direction of that change was shaped by the experiences my parents carried out of Europe and passed down to me. 

My parents, who were fluent in English, often spoke their native-tongue Hungarian, which they never taught me. I resented that because much was said around me that I could not understand. My mom said it was because they wanted me to be fully Americanized. This was true, but not the whole truth. Hungarian also functioned as a shield behind which painful memories and tragedies could be concealed. Yet the concealment itself created in me a dark and persistent sense of loss.

Sometimes my parents discussed things in hushed tones tinged with anxiety. Other times Hungarian-speaking ladies, approximately my mom’s age, came to visit. They would fawn over me, grip my face on both sides with their lotioned hands, and tell me in Hungarian what a sweet little darling I am. They gave me anxiety.

We usually had relatives over for Passover, that most American of Jewish holidays. I can still picture my mother sitting at the head of the dining room table nearest the kitchen, speaking normally about something mundane. Then suddenly a thought would enter her mind—or she would mention her parents or her younger brother Marci (Martin in English)—and she would burst into sobbing for a few shocking seconds, provoking in me some mixture of embarrassment, pity, and horror. The table would grow silent. A few moments later she would compose herself and resume the conversation. I would tell myself silently: just pretend that didn’t happen.

Unlike my mother, my father rarely spoke about the Holocaust or the war. He mostly kept those things sealed inside himself, though he sometimes spoke in idyllic terms about his childhood. He was the youngest of four children: his middle brother was John, after whom I was named; his older brother Alex; and his sister Ann. He spoke of riding horses and skiing in the Carpathian Mountains, of his closeness to John, who could “fix anything” and dreamed of becoming an engineer, and of his father, who owned a successful moving business with his brother Julius, who lived next door.

That world was destroyed after Hungary annexed the region and aligned itself with Nazi Germany. The Jews of Ungvár were driven into forced labor battalions and ghettos, and ultimately deported to Auschwitz and other death camps. The most I ever heard about John was that he died somewhere in “Rush-ee-uh.” Ann was murdered along with her husband and child. Alex, who had become a banker, was sent to a labor camp. His wife and child were murdered, I believe in Auschwitz. I absorbed these fragments as a child because asking too many questions seemed too painful for everyone involved.

I have often wondered whether my father’s stoic silence and refusal to grieve contributed to the heart attack he suffered when I was eleven years old. He survived and recovered enough to continue supporting us, though not enough to ease the additional anxiety this placed on my mother. As for me, that was the end of bowling and McDonald’s on Saturday mornings.

Despite my father’s reluctance to talk about the war, I gradually learned fragments of his story from my mother. Only much later, through adult conversations and historical research, did those fragments begin assembling themselves into something resembling a coherent narrative.

Somehow Alex escaped death. Forced into a Hungarian Jewish labor battalion and reportedly condemned to death for attempting to flee and join the partisans, he escaped before the sentence could be carried out and eventually reached Soviet-controlled territory. There he joined the First Czechoslovak Army Corps and became involved in reconnaissance and partisan operations behind German lines during the final years of the war. Only recently did I discover military history references substantially confirming these stories, identifying my uncle as Capt. Alexander Kováč, connected to special reconnaissance and parachute units operating during the Slovak National Uprising.

According to the family stories handed down to me, my father also escaped from a forced labor camp but was captured by “the Russians” and jailed. Somehow Alex found him there, secured his release, and brought him into the anti-Nazi partisan forces. For years these stories sounded almost unbelievable to me, suspended somewhere between family legend and history.

What I eventually pieced together was that after the Allied victory, Alex was placed in charge of a district that included Komárom, my mother’s hometown, and my father served there with him. Their duties included de-Nazification—interrogating suspected collaborators and turning captured Nazis over to Soviet authorities. It was amid this devastated postwar landscape that my father met my mother. She had survived Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and forced labor at a Siemens factory in Bavaria, where Hungarian Jewish women were worked long shifts in support of the Nazi war machine.

As I grew older and occasionally became able to speak with my mother about the war, she told me how she survived by staying close to her friends Kathy and Rita. They shared food and cared for whichever one of them was sickest or nearest to despair. My mother saw Marci a few times in Auschwitz. Once he managed to give her food. After the war, when she returned to Komárom, she was told that Marci had been seen alive during the liberation of Auschwitz. She waited for him to come home, and waited. He never returned, and she never learned what became of him.

Like many concentration camp survivors, my mother was determined to marry and have children, both to rebuild a shattered life and to deny Hitler a posthumous victory over the Jewish people. It was in this atmosphere that she met my father, whom she later described to me as “a tall, handsome man on a white horse.” Together, my father and Alex helped protect my mother and her friends from predatory Soviet soldiers who roamed the region in the chaotic aftermath of the war. They also brought to justice a former friend and neighbor who, before the deportations, had agreed to hide jewelry from my grandfather’s modest jewelry shop but instead stole it for herself.

Under the postwar Czech government, my father was placed in charge of a factory in the Sudetenland, from which the German population—most of whom had supported Hitler—was being expelled. During this period, my father became disillusioned with communism. Unlike Alex, who had become an influential government official, my father saw where the new regime was headed. In this he had an ally in his cousin and best friend James Kovac, Julius’ son. Growing up, I knew him simply as “Uncle Jimmy.”

I had many “uncles” as a child, even though my only actual uncle was Alex. So little family remained that more distant relatives—and even close family friends—were folded into the category of family itself. I also had a “grandfather,” Emil Moskowitz, the father of my father’s first cousin Harry, whom I knew as “Uncle Harry.” Emil and his wife Hanna sponsored my parents when they emigrated to the United States in 1946.

We visited “Grandma and Grandpa” in their Passaic apartment on Saturday afternoons. Grandpa often greeted me at the door with a Cadbury chocolate bar or a shiny silver half-dollar. A deeply religious man, he kept a reel-to-reel recorder in his bedroom with a microphone through which, he confided to me, he would “talk to God.” 

I remember reading a newspaper article about one of “Grandma and Grandpa’s” major wedding anniversary celebrations shortly after I had learned to read. Imagine my surprise when I was not listed among the grandchildren. No explanation made sense to me. Not until well into my teens did I fully understand that an uncle is the sibling of a parent, and a grandparent the parent of a parent. Only then did I begin to grasp that the loss was not only my parents’ loss, but mine as well.

Uncle Alex reacted strongly to my father’s decision to emigrate to the United States. On the eve of my parents’ departure, he reportedly instructed my father to “tell Truman to go to hell.” At the time, Alex remained deeply committed to the postwar communist project in Czechoslovakia. In later years, however, Alex came to believe that my father had made the right decision and that the true villain was Stalin rather than Truman.

In time, Alex himself fell victim to the Stalinist system he had served. Like many Eastern European patriots and anti-fascist fighters who had allied themselves with Soviet power during the war, he eventually became politically suspect under the paranoid and repressive atmosphere of postwar communism. The anti-Semitic atmosphere surrounding the Slánský trials and related purges in Czechoslovakia shattered the faith many Jewish communists had once placed in the Soviet system and left deep scars on those who had believed they were helping to build a more just world.

In the early 1950s, Alex was sentenced to prison, where he served approximately five years before being released and, in my father’s words, “retired.” Before his downfall, he remarried without disclosing his Jewish background and had three children. One was named Leslie after my father. Another, Eva, studied architecture, and while still a university student witnessed Soviet tanks crush the hopes of the Prague Spring in 1968.

My mother, who desperately wanted children, was unable to conceive for many years after the war, which led her into profound depression. I was told that in 1958 she suffered what was then called a “nervous breakdown” and attempted suicide by “sticking my head in the oven.” She was hospitalized in what my family referred to as “a sanitarium” for approximately six months. I later learned that Uncle Harry had given my father the money to pay for her treatment.

After leaving the hospital, my mother underwent therapy for many years. I was born on New Year’s Eve 1961, roughly a year after my parents moved from Passaic, where they had been renting, to suburban Nutley, where they purchased the house in which I grew up. My mother later told me that she had finally “learned to relax,” allowing her to become pregnant. I was an only child. Throughout my life my mother would often tell me, “You are my everything.”

In the summer of 1978, when I was sixteen, I traveled with my father to Budapest and Lake Balaton in Hungary to vacation with Alex, his wife, and my three cousins. Uncle Jimmy came as well with his daughter Karen. Uncle Alex and I played chess in the grass overlooking the lake. He spoke little English, but whenever I was close to winning he would smile, shrug his shoulders, and say, “No Army.” By this he meant that after losing too many pieces—the queen, rooks, bishops, knights, pawns—he was powerless and defenseless.

At the time, I was curious about communism. One evening we went to a nearby Cuban restaurant and waited what felt like hours for service while employees visibly lingered about doing almost nothing. I ordered “veal à la Castro” largely because Castro himself interested me. That night I became violently ill and remained sick for much of the trip.

Only later did I come to understand that there had been a larger purpose behind the visit. My father, Uncle Jimmy, and Uncle Alex were quietly planning for Eva to defect to the United States.

In 1980, Eva was granted permission to visit us in the United States for one month. Before she left, Uncle Alex reportedly warned her that she might discover her relatives in America were Jewish. She didn’t know.

When Eva failed to return, the Czech government realized she had defected and sentenced her to prison in absentia. My father hired a lawyer, secured the conviction papers, and used them to demonstrate that Eva would face political persecution if forced to return to Czechoslovakia. That is how my cousin eventually received political asylum and became an American citizen.

Eva lived with us for approximately a year, during which time she learned English while my father worked to secure the documents that would allow her to seek employment. One afternoon, while my father was at work, Eva, my mother, and I sat together in my parents’ bedroom going through old family photo albums. Suddenly Eva came upon a photograph of her father, Uncle Alex, together with his first wife and child. She stared at it in shock and confusion, unable to understand why her father appeared with another family she had never seen before. My mother then had to explain the terrible truth to her.

I had never seen the photograph before and was almost as shocked as Eva. Perhaps I had heard at some earlier point that Uncle Alex once had another wife and child who were murdered during the Holocaust before he married Eva’s mother, but I had long since buried the thought. I remember sitting there silently while Eva and my mother spoke, trying to imagine the psychological shock Eva must have been experiencing. To the best of my recollection, she and I never discussed the moment afterward. I would not even have known how to begin.

Eventually, I got on with my life. I moved west across the country to attend law school in California, then east again to Brooklyn for my first job as a lawyer with the District Attorney’s Office, where, for the first time in my life, being Jewish did not feel unusual. There I met other children of Holocaust survivors, with whom I immediately felt a special bond.

After three years, I returned to California, where I worked for five years as a litigator at a small law firm. Eventually, feeling restless with the practice of law, I attended UCLA and UC Irvine for a year to prepare for admission into a Ph.D. program in English literature. This additional study was necessary because my undergraduate background had been in political science and history.

I had always been drawn to politics because somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt a need to remain alert to political and historical currents so that if the danger of anti-Semitism were to return, I could recognize it in time to protect myself and my family. To my surprise, I discovered that the study of literature increasingly resembled political theory. This was intellectually exciting but also faintly unsettling. The emerging intellectual currents—postmodernism, postcolonialism, and identity politics—struck me as potentially dangerous for Jews, though when I raised these concerns with a Jewish professor, he assured me there was nothing to worry about.

I was later admitted to Rutgers on fellowship, an outcome that proved fortunate because I sensed—correctly, as it turned out—that my father did not have much time left to live. My father passed away on Independence Day 2001, just two months before September 11. I have often felt relieved that he did not live to witness that day or the world that followed it. By then I had left graduate school and started my own law practice, and my wife and I had our first child.

My mother passed away in 2018 at the age of ninety-four. I have often felt relieved that, like my father before her, she did not live to witness the resurgence of anti-Semitism and fear that would emerge so soon afterward.

Around the time of my mother’s death, I happened upon Douglas Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe. At the same time, I was following Jeremy Corbyn’s rise within the British Labour Party and the prevalence of anti-Semitism there. Although Murray’s book focused primarily on immigration and cultural change rather than anti-Semitism itself, the juxtaposition of these developments caused me to worry not only about the future of Jews in Europe, but increasingly about what could happen in the United States.

Then, in 2019, I saw something taking shape in my hometown of Highland Park, New Jersey when anti-Zionist activists successfully organized and staged a reading of the propaganda book P is for Palestine for young children at our public library. As I began looking into the event, I realized that this was not spontaneous local activism, but part of a sophisticated, organized, and well-funded movement. I was particularly struck by a petition supporting the reading that was backed by Samidoun, which I quickly learned was a front organization for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

At that moment, something crystallized for me. I understood that my life would henceforth be different, and that the history of my family and my people—as handed down to me through my parents—required me to oppose what I was seeing. I joined with other Jews in my town to resist these forces and have remained active in opposing the scourge of anti-Zionism ever since.