Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  In November 1942, when Goebbels came to Prague for a three-day visit, Lída was forbidden to leave the city for the duration—this is true.

  At the Lucerna Palace, where the movie world used to meet in the bar, she was boycotted, and there were lots of people who refused to sit next to her—this is partly true.

  She did have some good friends. She was helped by Miloš Havel, uncle of the five-year-old Václav, and founder of Barrandov Studios, “the Czech Hollywood,” who also owned a movie theater that she used to visit as a little girl (with raspberry candy smeared on her face to make her look grownup). Now he was wriggling like an eel to rescue Czech cinema at his own studio, where the Nazis had taken 51 percent of the shares away from him. His diplomacy was successful: of forty Czech movies made in the period from 1939 to 1945, not a single one had Nazi content. (Though it wasn’t possible to show Jews in a positive light, and students were a taboo topic. In 1939, after demonstrations on the national holiday, the Germans had closed down all the Czech colleges, and 1,200 students had immediately ended up in concentration camps. The Czechs were meant to be nothing but a German workforce.)

  In the Protectorate, Baarová made her four best Czech movies, in all of which she played vamps.† She also received offers from Italy, and acted in movies directed by Enrico Guazzoni and Vittorio de Sica.

  Another person in Lída’s circle was the actress Adina Mandlová, the friend who didn’t want her ashes to spoil anybody’s garden.

  One day, Lída and Adina were having a conversation about men. Lída joked that the concert hall at the Lucerna wouldn’t be big enough for a gathering of all her lovers.

  “You’d have to hire the whole stadium at Strahov,” said Mandlová, “with the rallying cry, ‘Every Czech should go to Strahov at least once in his life!’ ”

  At the time, two Czechs were trying to get her attention, the head of President Hácha’s chancellery and the minister of industry. One of them apparently said: “That’s a woman with class. Power attracts her, and the loss of it repels her.”

  We don’t know if she satisfied the minister’s hopes. Baarová was discreet. What we do know about her emotional and sexual life was forced out of her.

  In April 1945, once the Red Army had reached Bratislava, Lída was warned that she must escape. “But I haven’t harmed anyone. The Germans didn’t want anything to do with me—they were the ones who threw me out of the movies. And it all happened before the war began!” she explained. She couldn’t foresee that as soon as some of the Nazis disappeared after the war, she would be regarded as someone who knew their secrets.

  However, when more than two million Germans began to flee from Bohemia, she left by car with a family she had befriended. They stopped at a village. The Americans had blown up the bridges and she couldn’t get all the way to Munich. For a month she helped in the fields of the farmer with whom she was staying. There she met an American soldier called Peter, who fell in love.

  She let Peter and his fellow soldiers watch as she bathed in a stream.

  Peter and his fellow soldiers were part of the Counterintelligence Corps, forerunner of the CIA.

  Then Peter’s boss, intelligence officer Major Malsch, fell in love with her. She left the soldier and moved into the major’s villa in Munich, where they lived together for more than two months, while he mixed her favorite cocktails and never stopped asking questions.

  After her arrest, the Americans told Baarová that Goebbels and his wife had poisoned their six children and then committed suicide. Then they informed her that she was on a list of war criminals, and sent her back to Czechoslovakia.

  Stanislav Motl spent ten years looking for the relevant documents all over Europe.

  “There isn’t a scrap of evidence to prove that Lída Baarová collaborated with the Reich during the war,” he says. “Her crime was that she lived for her career and nothing else.”

  For her, the Nazis were a movie audience.

  While Baarová was in a Prague jail, hearing the same two remarks again and again, “You stupid cow” and “You whore,” her friend Adina Mandlová went off to visit some friends outside Prague.

  Throughout the occupation, there had been a rumor going round that Mandlová was the lover of Karl Hermann Frank, the Reich minister for Bohemia and Moravia. In a small town called Beroun, a policeman spotted her and shouted: “The bird is flying after Frank!” Guards armed with bayonets dragged her across the marketplace, straight to the station, to transport her back to Prague. People for whom she had performed here a year earlier shouted: “Where’s Frank when you need his help?” The crowd even threw stones at the train.

  At the jail, news photographers were brought to see Adina, who was made to pose while doing physical labor.

  After her acquittal in 1946, Adina Mandlová’s health declined. She was often seen drunk. In Czech and German the word Mandel means “almond,” so people started saying: “Baarová has mandlové/almond eyes, and Mandlová has barové/barroom eyes.”

  Two pieces of news reached the jail:

  Lída’s mother had died of a heart attack during her interrogation, as the interrogator continued to shout at her: “Where is Lída’s jewelry?” She was fifty-six years old.

  Her sister Zorka Janů was having a successful stage career. She was on her way to a rehearsal when her path was blocked by actor and communist Václav Vydra. “No sister of Lída Baarová can be a Czech actress!” he declared, and wouldn’t let Zorka go inside the theater.

  She drank gasoline, but her life was saved.

  After his wife’s funeral, Karel Babka ended up in the hospital. To stop the cancer from spreading higher up, his leg was amputated. When he returned home, he found that Zorka hadn’t been eating; she was wasting away, and several times a day she suffered frenzied fits of obsessive bathing. She would dry herself and then get straight back into the bathtub again, constantly repeating: “I’ve got to be clean!”

  He was making dinner when, from the corner of his eye, he saw a large towel fall from the bathroom window to the ground outside. He heard the towel land with a dull thud against the concrete steps. She was twenty-three years old.

  Lída Baarová’s problems after the war also resulted from the fact that her nation had a problem with itself.

  In a country robbed of land by its neighbors, including Poland, the ordinary Czech performed his duty of “being a Czech”—just as Milena Jesenská had wished. He worked in order to survive. (The resistance movement promoted the slogan: “Work slowly.”)

  A Czech could either work for the Germans, or work for the Germans.

  As soon as he graduated from high school in 1942, eighteen-year-old Josef Škvorecký—later a famous writer—was assigned a job at a munitions factory. He had the choice of an arms factory in Bremen, where there was constant carpet bombing, or a factory making parts for German Messerschmitts in his own peaceful town of Náchod.

  He chose the job without air raids.

  However, in a world of crime it’s impossible to remain on the outside. Many things explain the attitude of the Czechs, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by what happened. They bore a sense of shared guilt, though they may not have been aware of it.

  They may have intuitively taken it out on Baarová and Mandlová—on people who, in their eyes, had communed with the executioner of their own free will.

  Lída Baarová’s life abhorred a vacuum.

  Soon after her mother’s and sister’s deaths, two people came to the jail to see her. Both of them declared their love for her. She didn’t know either of them at all well.

  The first was Marcela Nepovímová, an actress five years younger than Lída. She brought some violets, and asked what she could do for her. “Take care of my daddy,” Lída requested.

  The second person was an actor ten years her junior called Jan Kopecký. He had reliable information that Baarová would soon be released without a trial. “And I shall be your husband,” he announced.

  Eighteen m
onths later, Baarová left jail. The investigation had shown that she had only been in contact with the Nazis on career matters.

  They were married in late July 1947, six months before the communists definitively took power.

  After the wedding, Jan Kopecký was fired from his job, so they set up a two-person puppet theater and traveled about the country.

  The communist putsch of 1948 was approaching when the phone rang at their home in Prague (still that same villa that looked like a ship). “You must run away, they’re going to lock you up again!” somebody whispered and hung up. (To this day nobody knows who made the call.)

  Jan wasn’t at home, he was away with a friend. For several weeks the house had been under surveillance by secret agents. Marcela gave Lída an overcoat and she calmly went out. With no handbag, as if she were just going for a short walk. Once she had lost sight of the house, she started to run, and reached the apartment of a friend from jail.

  Meanwhile, Kopecký called home to say that he’d been in a car crash, but Karel Babka pretended not to know him, saying that Baarová and Kopecký had gone to Moravia to look for work. Jan went to consult with Lída’s friend from jail about what this could mean.

  Baarová’s fur coats had been confiscated and were still in police storage. Kopecký brought along a moth-eaten old fur, bribed the storehouse keeper, and managed to extract the “most stunning mink coat in the entire Protectorate.” He sold it to raise the money to bribe three border guards.

  During their escape, which was made to look like an ordinary journey, Lída had her hair dyed blond and wore glasses with thick lenses.

  They reached Salzburg with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. They got jobs at the Café Mozart. Lída became a barmaid. News of where the great star was serving cocktails quickly spread.

  She is said to have made a fortune in tips.

  She broke up with Kopecký.

  She acted in five Spanish movies.

  She acted in the young Fellini’s I Vitelloni.

  She was thirty-seven. Actresses younger than her were appearing in Italy—Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida.

  She married an Austrian doctor who owned a sanatorium.

  Three years later, she was widowed.

  In 1958, she left the movies, because of her outdated acting style.

  She acted on stage in Hanover, Bonn, Vienna and Stuttgart. She was the most famous Czech actress in Europe, though in Czechoslovakia hardly anybody was aware of the fact.

  Her final role (in 1982) was as the greatest anti-fascist of all actresses, Marlene Dietrich.

  Press cuttings on Baarová at the Prague city library come to an end in 1948, and then start up again in 1990.

  “She seems to have been on the censor’s black list in Czechoslovakia for the longest time,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” responds movie critic Eva Zaoralová, now artistic director of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

  “What? Wasn’t she on it?”

  “No, because there was no list of names that couldn’t be written or mentioned aloud.”

  “So how did people know there was a ban?”

  “Everyone had to sense intuitively whose name couldn’t be mentioned.”

  For example, throughout the communist years, intuition was responsible for the fact that the names of Jane Fonda and Ingmar Bergman were never mentioned in public, because they had demonstrated against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968.

  Marcela Nepovímová, the admirer with the bunch of violets, gave up acting to care for Karel Babka, who was twenty-three years her senior. They got married. The amputation of his leg didn’t protect him from cancer, and he died twelve years later. Afterwards, she said their love had been worth more than all the roles she might still have been offered.

  The state had appropriated their house shaped like a ship. Marcela and Karel were ordered to move to a small village in Sudetenland. It was winter, and they went to live in a tumbledown shack with no heating. As a bourgeois civil servant, Karel didn’t qualify for a coal ration. Marcela used to go into the woods with a saw. She worked at a factory making artificial jewelry. Under a false name, Lída sent them parcels.

  Once Marcela had buried her husband, she went back to Prague. After years of trying to get a passport, in 1982 the authorities allowed her to go abroad. She found Lída in Salzburg and took care of her. Baarová didn’t know how to cook or clean. After breakfast and a walk, she would come home and rest on the sofa. In summer, she would walk on her own private beach on the shore of a lake.

  When she came to Prague after 1989, Lída stayed at Marcela’s apartment. Marcela lived in a block. For three days Lída hesitated over whether to go outside, but the small space—four hundred square feet—was unbearable. She went out.

  She went to Wenceslas Square, knowing (as she later said in an interview) that whatever ill people spoke of her, it was bound to be too little.

  Crowds of fans came to her public appearance at the concert hall in the Lucerna Palace. The first questions in every interview were always about Goebbels.

  Two years later, as she sat on the sofa in Salzburg, waiting for death, she told Helena Třeštíková that her daddy often used to say: “ ‘Lída, whatever may happen, just keep going.’

  “And that’s how it always was, I just kept going. But now I don’t want to keep going anymore. I refuse.”

  After her death, it turned out that Lída had left her entire estate to a gardener from a nearby monastery.

  He was fifty-two, and she was eighty-three when, as her fan, he came for an autograph. He declared his love for her. Marcela said he was too young. Lída was offended. “But he’s fallen in love,” she told her second mother. “And when you’re in Prague he makes me soup.”

  Two years before her death, she stopped recognizing either of them.

  On February 9, 2001, in the Main Hall at Strašnice Crematorium in Prague, her fans said farewell to her with this justification: “Oh well, she was just a woman.”

  More than likely, nobody mentioned that those who had brought about her downfall were only men.

  * * *

  * Gustav Fröhlich played the lead in Fritz Lang’s legendary 1926 movie Metropolis.

  † Including three directed by Otakar Vávra: Dívka v modrém, Maskovana milenka and Turbína.

  HOW ARE YOU COPING WITH THE GERMANS?

  It’s 1939.

  “So how are you doing?” the journalist Milena Jesenská asks a farmer near the town of Slaný.

  “I’ve gotten the potatoes planted, and the rye’s sown. We had a cold spring, but miraculously everything has come up, beautifully. I think I’ll cut down two of the old apple trees in the orchard and plant new ones. The duck already has young—go take a look at them, they’re like dandelion clocks. I must give that lilac bush a pruning so it won’t wither, to make the garden beautiful this year,” replies the farmer.

  “But how are you coping with the Germans?” asks Jesenská, refusing to give in.

  “Oh, whatever, they come by, and I get on with my work,” the farmer replies calmly.

  “Aren’t you at all afraid?”

  “Why should I be afraid?” he wonders sincerely, and suddenly retorts: “Besides, lady, a man can only die once. And if he dies a little sooner, he’s just dead for a little longer.”

  PROOF OF LOVE

  PART 1: ETERNITY LASTS FOR EIGHT YEARS

  Mrs. Kvítková the goose plucker plucked seventy-two geese in eight hours and went into the history books.

  At an academic conference in Brno, Minister of Information Václav Kopecký said that Europe’s highest mountain was Mount Elbrus, and defined the previously held view that it was Mont Blanc as “a relic of reactionary cosmopolitanism.”

  A definitive list was compiled of authors who would never be published again, including Dickens, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and several hundred others.

  The poet Michal Sedloň wrote that “nourishment” and “production�
� were now poetic words.

  The number of individual copies of books destroyed in the country during these years is estimated at twenty-seven million.

  As Prime Minister Antonín Zápotocký diagnosed the new age: “It’s impossible to live the old way—now life is better and happier!”

  In two years—at Stalin’s suggestion—the most eminent leaders will be condemned to the gallows.

  At the Zlatá Husa hotel on Wenceslas Square—where Andersen wrote his most famous fairytale about the idle rich, The Princess and the Pea—there hung a sign that said: “With the Soviet Union Forever.”

  Every day at midnight, at the end of its broadcast, Radio Prague played the Soviet national anthem.

  This is how the 1940s end and the ’50s begin in Czechoslovakia.

  As part of the celebrations for Joseph Stalin’s seventieth birthday held in December 1949,* the authorities decide that nine million of the country’s population of fourteen million citizens will sign birthday wishes for him.

  They manage to collect the signatures in four days. To mark the occasion, a decision is taken to erect the world’s largest statue of Stalin on a hill above the Vltava River in Prague.

  No sculptor can refuse to take part in the competition. Fifty-four artists are given nine months to design a statue. Thank God, the top Czechoslovak sculptor Ladislav Šaloun is lucky enough to be dead (as they say about this particular death in Prague). In order not to win, Karel Pokorný, regarded as Šaloun’s successor, draws the leader with his arms spread in a friendly gesture, making Stalin look like Christ.

  Most of the other artists make the same mistake. “They have presented Stalin in an affected way,” says the panel of judges.

  Fifty-six-year-old Otakar Švec, son of a confectioner who specializes in sculptures made of sugar, is a frustrated sculptor.