Frank Chmura/Getty Images
Dedication
TO THOSE WHO
DID NOT SURVIVE
BUT TAUGHT US HOW TO LIVE—
AND WHY
Epigraph
MEMORIES OF PRAGUE
How long since I last saw
The sun sink low behind Petřín Hill?
With tearful eyes I gazed at you, Prague,
Enveloped in your evening shadows.
How long since I last heard the pleasant rush of water
Over the weir in the Vltava river?
I have long since forgotten the bustling life of Wenceslas Square.
Those unknown corners in the Old Town,
Those shady nooks and sleepy canals,
How are they? They cannot be grieving for me
As I do for them . . .
Prague, you fairy tale in stone, how well I remember!
PETR GINZ (1928–1944)
Terezín
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Setting Out
PART I: BEFORE MARCH 15, 1939
1. An Unwelcome Guest
2. Tales of Bohemia
3. The Competition
4. The Linden Tree
5. A Favorable Impression
6. Out from Behind the Mountains
7. “We Must Go On Being Cowards”
8. A Hopeless Task
PART II: APRIL 1939–APRIL 1942
9. Starting Over
10. Occupation and Resistance
11. The Lamps Go Out
12. The Irresistible Force
13. Fire in the Sky
14. The Alliance Comes Together
15. The Crown of Wenceslas
PART III: MAY 1942–APRIL 1945
16. Day of the Assassins
17. Auguries of Genocide
18. Terezín
19. The Bridge Too Far
20. Cried-out Eyes
21. Doodlebugs and Gooney Birds
22. Hitler’s End
PART IV: MAY 1945–NOVEMBER 1948
23. No Angels
24. Unpatched
25. A World Big Enough to Keep Us Apart
26. A Precarious Balance
27. Struggle for a Nation’s Soul
28. A Failure to Communicate
29. The Fall
30. Sands Through the Hourglass
The Next Chapter
Guide to Personalities
Time Lines
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Authors
Also by the Madeleine Albright
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Setting Out
I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who “my people” were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.
Only I didn’t. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make—choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.
I had been raised a Roman Catholic and upon marriage converted to the Episcopalian faith. I had—I was sure—a Slavic soul. My grandparents had died before I was old enough to remember their faces or call them by name. I had a cousin in Prague; we had recently been in touch and as children had been close, but I no longer knew her well; the Iron Curtain had kept us apart.
From my parents I had received a priceless inheritance: a set of deeply held convictions regarding liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law. I inherited, as well, a love for two countries. The United States had welcomed my family and enabled me to grow up in freedom; I was proud to call myself an American. The Czechoslovak Republic had been a beacon of humane government until snuffed out by Adolf Hitler and then—after a brief period of postwar revival—extinguished again by the disciples of Josef Stalin. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution, led by Václav Havel, my hero and later my cherished friend, engendered new hope. All my life I had believed in the virtues of democratic government, the need to stand up to evil, and the age-old motto of the Czech people: “Pravda vítĕzí,” or “Truth shall prevail.”
FROM 1993 UNTIL 1997, I had the honor of representing the United States as ambassador to the United Nations. Because I was in the news and because of Central Europe’s liberation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I began to receive mail about my family. Some of these letters had the facts wrong; others were barely legible; a few requested money; still others never reached me because staff members—strangers to the language—could not distinguish between correspondence on personal as opposed to public issues. By late in President Bill Clinton’s first term, I had seen several missives from people who had known my parents, who had the names and dates approximately right, and who indicated that my ancestors had been of Jewish origin. One letter, from a seventy-four-year-old woman, arrived in early December 1996; she wrote that her family had been in business with my maternal grandparents, who had been victimized by anti-Jewish discrimination during the war. I compared memories with my sister, Kathy, and brother, John, and also shared the information with my daughters, Anne, Alice, and Katie. Since I was in the process of being vetted for secretary of state, I told President Clinton and his senior staff. In January 1997, before we had time to explore further, a hardworking Washington Post reporter, Michael Dobbs, uncovered news that stunned us all: according to his research, three of my grandparents and numerous other family members had died in the Holocaust.
In February 1997, Kathy, John, and John’s wife, Pamela, visited the Czech Republic; they confirmed much of what had been in the Post story and identified a few errors. That summer, I was able to make two similar though briefer trips. For me, the moment of highest emotion came inside Prague’s Pinkas Synagogue, where the names of our family members were among the eighty thousand inscribed on the walls as a memoriam. I had been to the synagogue before but—having no cause—had never thought to search for their names.
That episode is recounted in my memoir Madam Secretary and will not be elaborated on here. The core revelation, however, is central because it provided the impetus for this book. I was shocked and, to be honest, embarrassed to discover that I had not known my family history better; my sister and brother shared this emotion. Nor was I entirely reassured by the many people who spoke or wrote to me of having had comparable experiences concerning secrets kept by their own parents. I could accept without being satisfied that there was nothing inexplicable or unique about the gap that existed in my knowledge; still, I regretted not having asked the right questions. I also felt driven to learn more about the grandparents whom I had been too young to know—especially since by then I had become a grandparent myself.
Having decided to delve more deeply into my family’s history, I soon realized that I could not do so without placing my parents within the context of the
times in which they had lived and especially 1937–1948, the era encompassing World War II—also the first dozen years of my life.
IN THE LATE 1930s, the global spotlight was drawn to Czechoslovakia, a faraway place that few people in such capitals as London and Washington had visited or even knew how to spell. The country was familiar, if at all, in the guise of Bohemia—a land of magic, marionettes, Franz Kafka, and Good King Wenceslas. But to those knowledgeable about Central Europe, the nation was respected for its thousand-year history and valued for its location as a crossroads between West and East. It was also the scene of a long and at times bitter rivalry between Czechs and Germans. In that struggle’s climactic chapter, Adolf Hitler demanded that the government surrender its sovereignty by opening its borders to his troops, thus creating for all of Europe a moment of hard reckoning. To the major powers in the West, Czechoslovakia was not thought to be worth fighting for, so it was sacrificed in the quest for peace; yet still the war came—and with it the near total destruction of European Jewry and ultimately a realignment of the international political order.
My family spent World War II in England, arriving just as the population of that island nation was awakening from two decades of complacency. We were there when Winston Churchill rallied his countrymen to unite against the Nazi darkness, endure the Blitz, find space for the continent’s refugee children, and play host to the Czechoslovak government in exile, whose cause my father served. My earliest memories are of London and the British countryside, of bomb shelters and blackout curtains, and of being taken by my parents to the seashore despite the massive steel barriers erected to foil enemy attempts to invade.
From the day the United States entered the war, my parents and their friends were confident the Allies would win. As democrats from Central Europe, they prayed that it would be the United States—not the Soviet Union—that would possess the decisive postwar influence in our region. It was not to be. With the Nazis defeated, Czechoslovakia was once more to become a pivotal battleground where the forces of totalitarianism would prevail, driving my family again into exile, this time finding a permanent refuge in the United States.
Nothing could be more adult than the decisions people were compelled to make during this turbulent era, yet the issues involved would be familiar to any child: How can I be safe? Whom can I trust? What can I believe? And (in the words of the Czech national anthem) “Where Is My Home?”
A child of my generation born in Prague would almost certainly be familiar with the novel The Grandmother. Written in 1852, the book was one of the first serious works of literature to be published in the Czech language. The story has a special place in my heart because of the heroine’s name: “Madaline.” One of the supporting characters is a striking young woman, who—bewitched and “ruined for marriage” by a passing soldier—retires to a forest cave, going barefoot even in winter, surviving on berries, roots, and the occasional handout. When asked by a child how the young woman can endure such harsh conditions, the grandmother replies that it is because the poor creature never enters a room warmed by fire, “so she is not as sensitive to cold as we.”
While I was growing up, tens of millions of people were denied the chance, metaphorically, to enter a room warmed by fire. Instead, they were forced to adapt to the hardships of war: occupation by enemy troops, separation from home and loved ones, shortages of food and heat, and the constant presence of suspicion, fear, danger, and death. Without the chance to evolve gradually, amid familiar people and places, they were thrown back on their primal instincts and forced to make practical and moral judgments from a short menu of bad options.
In many cases, the choices made were brave, in some purely pragmatic, in others accompanied by the shame of betrayal or cowardice. Often the path selected was a crooked one, as caution, then courage, pointed the way. Sometimes an action chosen in response to immediate circumstances had long-term impacts that could not be foreseen. In this environment, hurried decisions—whether made by national leaders, enemy combatants, harried bureaucrats, next-door neighbors, or even parents—could have fatal or lifesaving consequences.
In the end, no one who lived through the years of 1937 to 1948 was a stranger to profound sadness. Millions of innocents did not survive, and their deaths must never be forgotten. Today we lack the power to reclaim lost lives, but we have a duty to learn all that we can about what happened and why—not to judge with the benefit of hindsight but to prevent the worst of that history from playing out again.
RESEARCHING THIS BOOK began, as many family-centered explorations do, with a stack of boxes stowed in the garage. My father had published half a dozen works of nonfiction and, when taking notes, used a Dictaphone to record his thoughts. I have a basketful of recordings to which I had never listened for fear that his voice would prompt too painful a sense of deprivation. I felt a similar anxiety about those boxes. When in government, I had been too busy to sort through them; in the years since, a profusion of other projects had allowed me to persuade myself that the time was still not right. But I had waited long enough.
Gathering my courage, I pulled down a few cartons and began my journey. Inside, I discovered a bounty of papers separated by rusted paper clips and held together by rubber bands so brittle that they snapped when they should have stretched. Much of the material was routine, but mixed in were more interesting findings. Here were the original drafts of talks that my father had given about the figures he admired most: T. G. Masaryk, the founder of modern Czechoslovakia, and his son, Jan, who had been my father’s boss. I came across books written by people I had met as a child, including a multivolume set by Prokop Drtina, with whom we had shared an apartment house in wartime London. Inside one of his books, a page had been turned down at the corner, noting the place. I soon learned that our long-ago neighbor had thought to include a description of a little girl named Madlenka, the first time anyone had written about me. It could only have been my parents who had marked the page.
In recent years, I have taught a course at Georgetown University titled “The National Security Toolbox.” I found an article written four decades earlier by my father—a piece I had never known existed—called “The Tools of Foreign Policy.” In another folder was a pile of some 120 pages, neatly typed and divided into chapters. At one point in the past, my father had confided that he was attempting to write a novel. I asked, “Concerning what?” He replied, “A man returning to Czechoslovakia at the end of World War II.” This must be it. Eagerly, I plunged in; before long, my eyes had filled with tears. In pages to come, my father’s words will have a prominent place.
So, too, my mother’s. In 1977, shortly after my father’s death, she had written an eleven-page letter that provides the sole firsthand information I have about dramatic moments in my parents’ lives, including our escape from Prague following the German invasion. For several weeks, I searched for the essay but could not find it. Growing nervous, I asked my sister and brother if they knew where it might be: no luck. I turned my office upside down, then looked for the tenth time through my desk. There in the drawer with the papers I care about most was my mother’s writing, squashed and pushed to the side. Smoothing the edges of the lined yellow pages, I began to read:
On a high mountain near Denver is a little cemetery and there on the wall of a mausoleum is a plaque with the name: Josef Korbel 1909–1977. Maybe one day somebody will wonder who was this man with such an unusual spelling and why was he buried in the mountain in Colorado.
Well I would like to write something about him, because his life was even more unusual than the spelling. He is buried in the mountain because he loved nature, because he loved fishing, because it was in Colorado where he spent many happy years after an active life in many different fields and countries. He used to say often, “I was in many glorious jobs, but to be a college teacher in a free country is what I enjoy best.”
Joe was born in Czechoslovakia in a little town where his father ha
d at that time a small shop with building materials. There was not even a high school in this place so he had at the age of twelve to live in a neighboring town. It was in this high school where we met and fell in love . . .
There it was in summary: the beginning of the story and the end; but surely there was more to learn about all that transpired between the high school and the mountain.
Josef and Mandula Korbel
SOME PEOPLE PURSUE enlightenment by sitting quietly and probing their inner consciousness; I make plane reservations. On a Saturday morning in September 2010, I rang the buzzer of a modest flat in London. This was the apartment house where I had spent the early days of World War II. Responding to the bell was Isobel Alicia Czarska, a charming woman who even in the middle of preparing for a trip happily gave me a whirlwind tour. For the first time in almost seventy years, I walked down the stairway to the cellar where I had once taken shelter from the bombs of the Luftwaffe. Isobel explained that the basement had never been refurbished—a fact confirmed by me as soon as I saw the ceiling, painted the same unattractive green I remembered. As we stood in the cramped space, I explained my quest; Isobel kindly offered to do research into the building’s wartime history and send along what she learned—a commitment she would faithfully keep.
Before departing London, I attended a symposium titled “Ties That Bind,” commemorating the seventieth anniversary of the Czechoslovak government in exile. Hosted by Michael Žantovský, the Czech ambassador to the United Kingdom, the conference served as a forum for revisiting past controversies in light of newly available information. I was struck again by how pivotal a period in history this had been and by how wide an array of opinions scholars can have about the same set of events. By the end of the day, some of us had been moved to cheer, some to weep, and some virtually to come to blows.
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