A cat was starting to pick a fight with two chickens in the dusty main street here, but they were big chickens, and the cat eventually slunk away.
So much for Sunday excitement in Zborov, a mountain village in eastern Slovakia near the Polish border - about as far away as you can get from the gentle Prague revolution that overturned communist rule in Czechoslovakia six months ago."You can't really call this a town," a fellow said between beers at the local restaurant. "They call this a restaurant. It has no food. There's nothing to do here. Nothing to see. Nothing to buy.
"We used to have stores - right along there," a man named Jan said, as he waited near the Zborov crossroads for a bus into Bardejov, to the South. He pointed at a dreary stretch of mud-colored buildings. "I was born in 1921. I can remember the stores. We had everything you could want, stores that sold food, clothing, tools, liquor, wine - you name it."
Where did all the stores go? a visitor asked.
He led the way off the main street, past a broken-down truck, up a gravel driveway and into a tangled patch of woods and brush. Underfoot, in the weeds and in deep shade, were Jewish gravestones, row upon row, some standing, some leaning, some lying flat on the ground.
"The Jews had all the stores," Jan said. "There were a lot of Jews here. For hundreds of years. They had a synagogue, over there." He pointed to a ruined building across the road. "That's where they prayed. But afterward it was converted into a movie theater. You can see where the synagogue windows were plastered over. Then the front was torn down. But now it's going to be restored."
"Back into a synagogue?"
"No, back into a movie theater," Jan said. "There are no Jews here anymore. Not one. The ones in the cemetery died here. The others, the Germans took away. To Auschwitz."
Communists ran Czechoslovakia for 41 years until last December, suppressing private enterprise, collectivizing the economy, trying to suppress religion. Now Czechoslovakia is free, ready to blossom into a Western-style free-market democracy. Anybody is free to start a business. But it wasn't the communists outlawing private enterprise that closed the stores in Zborov. History in Eastern Europe is more complicated and more painful than that. This is Holocaust country.
Not only did the Germans and their local allies kill the Jewish inhabitants of these shabby but picturesque villages; they also destroyed a centuries-old cultural and commercial presence that had thrived under the protection of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The blight is visible to this day.
"You want a date, I'll give you a date," Morris Gross, 69, a Los Angeles real-estate dealer and insurance agent said. Gross was wearing a prayer shawl and adjusting leather straps around his left arm in preparation for prayer in his sunny room at the friendly and comfortable $17-a-night Hotel Slovan in Kosice, Slovakia.
"The date was . . . " he thought for a second, "March 20, 1942. That was the first transport. They took out 400 girls, age 16 and over. To the concentration camps. In April, they took the young men. In July, they took the families. On March 15, 1944, the order came that all Jews from East Slovakia should go to the West, which meant to the concentration camps, and I went into hiding."
Gross was making a family pilgrimage to the beautiful hill country of Eastern Slovakia with his wife, his two sons, Harry of Monsey, N.Y., and Peretz of Los Angeles, his daughter Faigi, and a sister-in-law, Miriam Grunberger, of Brooklyn.
They drove from cemetery to cemetery in a rented Hungarian van, saying prayers over graves of relatives.
"I have five kids," said Harry Gross, an actuary with an office in Fort Lee, N.J. "I had to come so I could show them one day where they come from."
"Yes, it's a beautiful place," Gross said as he climbed a trail to the gravesites in the untended cemetery at Humenne, Slovakia. The graves look out over a small industrial town in a valley. In the distance is a ruined Hungarian castle. On the other side of the woods is a wretchedly poor gypsy encampment. "It's a beautiful place that nobody wants to be in. To tell you the truth, I've been back three times and I didn't want to come again. But the children wanted to see their roots."
Gross was born in Humenne, and survived the Holocaust by going underground and joining the Slovak National Uprising. Grunberger survived Auschwitz.
"In Humenne, the Jews owned all the stores," Gross said. "On a Saturday, you couldn't go shopping because the stores were closed for the Sabbath, except maybe the drugstore was open for emergencies. Before the war, we had the biggest hardwood lumber exporting company in Czechoslovakia - Ehrenberg, Rosenblitt and Gross. We had hundreds of horses and miles of trails. The Germans came in and told the Slovak government - the puppet government they had - to take us over. The Slovaks couldn't agree on who should own us, so we stayed on as managers for a while. Then the deportation order came, so I went illegal and hid."
The Slovaks are eager to get back into private enterprise, but after 40 years of communism, most have no idea how to go about it - how to get a loan, how to keep the books, how to hire people and how to pay them, how to deal with the communist-style bureaucracy that has survived the downfall of communism itself.
Morris Gross could give the locals advice on how to run a business. He built a successful business in Los Angeles after the war, and he speaks Slovak. But he holds the Slovaks partly responsible for assisting the Germans in deporting the Jewish population.