I also went to Prague, where a variety of friends, old and new, aided my research. Tomáš Kraus, the executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, answered my questions about the history of Prague’s Jewish settlements, which extend as far back as the seventh century. Daniel Herman of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes provided me with a file that the postwar Communist government had kept on my family. Not all the papers were legible, but the evidence was clear that my father had had powerful enemies in the Marxist regime. At the Czech Foreign Ministry, I was given documents related to my father’s career, among them a police report on my paternal grandfather, who was apparently not the most careful of drivers—in 1937, he was ordered to pay compensation for running over a hen. I visited, as well, the Terezín fortress and prison; our last stop was the cemetery where the victims from a long history of conflicts are laid to rest. Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Poles, Russians, Serbs, Slovaks, and others are remembered together even if, in life, they were often at one another’s throats.
In the course of my travels to Prague, I spent much time with my cousin Dáša, who always welcomed me with a plate of plum dumplings. For more than two years, we were in steady communication, exchanging memories, sharing pictures, working together to translate letters and other writings. No one alive at that point had known me earlier than she; it was often her arms that had cradled me in the bomb shelter. But her parents could not leave Czechoslovakia when mine did, and later, when the Communists took over, she chose to remain and marry her sweetheart instead of leaving for the West. We had led far different lives yet seemed to draw on the same bottomless reserve of energy. Her contributions to my research were immeasurable. When last I saw her, in April 2011, she had a schedule filled with activities, including a program for children aimed at Holocaust education and remembrance. Early in July, returning from a trip to England, she complained of pain in her neck and spine. Less than two weeks later, she passed away. I will always be grateful that this project helped bring us back together.
Mortality claimed a second person close to this book when, on December 18, 2011, President Havel succumbed to respiratory ailments. I had seen him most recently at his seventy-fifth birthday celebration two months before his death. My gift to him was a compass that had been used by a U.S. soldier in World War I, the conflict that had first brought freedom to Czechoslovakia. In my note, I cited the irony of giving a compass to a man who served as the moral North Star for a generation. The twentieth century produced only a handful of authentic democratic heroes; he was one of them.
In October 2010, we had shared a meal at the Café Savoy, a favorite smoke-filled haunt of Havel’s from the days of the Velvet Revolution. When I explained to my friend what I was planning, he immediately pledged his help. I asked about his experiences as a boy and invited him to reflect on the choices made by leaders during the war. In any discussion with Havel, issues of public policy arise and then, inevitably, also morality. He had often told me of his idea that God could be compared to the sun—a big eye in the sky that can see what we are doing when no one else is around. I had always been spooked by that image but agree that conscience is the quality no scientist has quite figured out. The nostrum “Let your conscience be your guide” was drummed into America’s baby boom generation by Walt Disney. Life is more complicated than that, but sitting with Havel, I worried that we sometimes look past what is plain. Two decades earlier, I had listened while he had delivered a speech that had thoroughly perplexed the U.S. Congress. Czechoslovakia had just regained its freedom, and the legislators were anticipating a howl of Cold War triumph. Instead, they heard a plea on behalf of the Family of Man and a declaration that the real battle—for moral responsibility toward the earth and our neighbors on it—had barely begun.
What fascinates me—and what serves as a central theme of this book—is why we make the choices we do. What separates us from the world we have and the kind of ethical universe envisioned by someone like Havel? What prompts one person to act boldly in a moment of crisis and a second to seek shelter in the crowd? Why do some people become stronger in the face of adversity while others quickly lose heart? What separates the bully from the protector? Is it education, spiritual belief, our parents, our friends, the circumstances of our birth, traumatic events, or more likely some combination that spells the difference? More succinctly, do our hopes for the future hinge on a desirable unfolding of external events or some mysterious process within?
My search for an answer to these questions begins with a look back—to the time and place of my earliest years.
Part I
Before March 15, 1939
Did not Sibilla prophesy that much misery was to come to Bohemia, that there would be wars, famines and plagues, but that the worst time would come when . . . the given word or promise would not be held sacred; that then the Bohemian land should be carried over the earth upon the hooves of horses?
—BOŽENA NĔMCOVÁ,
The Grandmother: A Story of Country Life in Bohemia, 1852
1
An Unwelcome Guest
On a hill in Prague there is a castle that has stood for a thousand years. From its windows one can see a forest of gilded cupolas and baroque towers, slate roofs and sacred spires. Visible too are the stone bridges spanning the broad and winding Vltava River as its waters flow northward at a leisurely pace. Through the centuries, the beauty of Prague has been enriched by the labor of artisans from a plethora of nationalities and creeds; it is a Czech city with a variety of accents, at its best in spring when the fragrant blossoms of the lindens burst forth, the forsythia turns gold, and the skies seem an impossible blue. The people, known for their diligence, resilience, and pragmatism, look forward each winter to when the days lengthen, the breezes soften, the trees regain their covering, and the river banks issue a silent summons to play.
On the morning of March 15, 1939, that promise of spring had never seemed so distant. Snow lay thick on the castle grounds; winds blew fiercely from the northeast; the heavens were a leaden gray. At the U.S. Legation, two disheveled men cornered a diplomat en route to his office and begged desperately for asylum. They had been Czechoslovak spies in Germany and were known to the Gestapo. The diplomat, a young Foreign Service officer named George Kennan, turned them away; there was nothing he could do.
Czechs had awoken that morning to a startling announcement: “Today at six o’clock German troops crossed our borders and are proceeding to Prague by all routes. Stay calm.” The light of dawn was still searching for cracks in the clouds when the first convoy of jeeps and trucks roared by, heading toward the castle. The vehicles, plastered with ice, were driven by red-faced soldiers wearing steel helmets and wool coats. Before long, the people of Prague had had their coffee and it was time to go to work. The sidewalks filled with men and women stopping to gape at the alien procession, defiantly waving their fists, crying, or staring in stony silence.
German troops occupy Prague.
Jan Kaplan Archive
In Wenceslas Square, voices were raised in a spontaneous rendering of patriotic songs. On and on the mechanized battalions came, penetrating every neighborhood of the ancient city. At the train station, artillery pieces and tanks were unloaded. By midmorning, heavy-footed Germans were striding purposefully into government ministries, the town hall, prisons, police offices, and barracks. They seized the airfields, deployed field guns on the snow-covered slopes of Petřín Hill, draped flags and banners across the fronts of buildings, and attached loudspeakers to lampposts and trees. Martial law was declared and a 9 p.m. curfew announced.
In the early-evening darkness, a motorcade arrived from the north. Its passengers were ushered through the deserted streets, across the river, and up the curving byways to the castle mount; and so that night, the fabled home of Bohemian kings served as headquarters for the ruler of Germany’s Third Reich. Adolf Hitler and his top aides, He
rmann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop, were in an exultant mood. “The Czechs may squeal,” the führer had told his military commanders, “but we will have our hands on their throats before they can shout. And anyway, who will come to help them?” Ever mindful of a statement attributed to Bismarck that “he who controls Bohemia controls Europe,” Hitler had long planned for this day. He thought the Czechs, because of their cleverness, to be the most dangerous of Slavs; he coveted their air bases and munitions factories; he knew that he could satisfy his ambitions in the rest of Europe only when the Czech homeland had been crushed. Now his triumphal march had begun. The German language was dominant within the castle walls, above which the German flag had been hoisted. Ordinarily a vegetarian teetotaler, Hitler treated himself to a victor’s communion: a bottle of Pilsener and a slice of Prague ham.
The next day, Ribbentrop commandeered the main radio stations to proclaim that Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist. Bohemia and Moravia would be incorporated into greater Germany, and their government, now a protectorate, would take orders from Berlin. Citizens should await instructions. Hitler, meanwhile, was receiving visitors. First Emil Hácha, the Czech president, pledged his cooperation, then the minister of defense, then the mayor; no one wanted a bloodbath. Around noon, a crowd of German-speaking civilians and soldiers gathered to cheer the führer when he appeared in a third-floor window. The resulting image so pleased the Nazis that they put it on a postage stamp.
In succeeding days, the snow stopped but the air remained bitter and cold. German soldiers occupied the local army barracks; Nazi administrators made themselves at home in the finest residences and hotels. Each morning before dawn, men in long coats moved swiftly about the city; they carried nightsticks and lists of names. My parents sent me to stay with my grandmother and did their best to do what their beloved country had done: disappear.
CTK PHOTO (Martin Štĕrba, René Fluger)
2
Tales of Bohemia
I am not sure how old I was—though certainly very young—when I first heard the story of Čech and his granddaughter, the wise and fearless Libuše. My mother read to me often, and she loved the old Bohemian tales. As in many cultures, these combined myth and reality in a blend of rousing adventures, epic quests, magic swords, and inventive explanations concerning the origin of things. Over time real heroes and villains appeared to take their place alongside the make-believe ones and together created the saga of a nation. The historian’s job is to sift through such narratives and separate truth from fiction. Frequently, however, facts are redesigned to fit a pattern that conforms to the author’s sensibility at the time the writing is done. That is why the past seems constantly to change. “A scholar,” wrote my father, “inescapably reads the historical record in much the same way as he would look in a mirror—what is most clear to him is the image of his own values [and] sense of . . . identity.”
I never had an academic course in Czech history; instead I absorbed information piecemeal from random bits of conversation, research while in college, and the books that my mother read and my father wrote. Over time, I became conditioned to think of my homeland as exceptional, a country filled with humane and democratic people who had struggled constantly to survive despite foreign oppression. The nation’s finest moments had been marked by a willingness to defend itself against more powerful foes; the saddest by a failure to fight back when betrayed by supposed allies and friends. Its purest expression could be found in the period between the two world wars, when the Czechoslovak Republic served as a model of twentieth-century democracy within an otherwise dismal Europe.
I was confident of this history, so much so that when defending my PhD dissertation, I was taken aback to be challenged by professors with family ties from elsewhere in Central Europe who didn’t understand why I thought the Czechoslovak experience so distinctive. At that stage in my life, I was not about to abandon the historical narrative with which I was most comfortable, a version that had the advantage of simplicity and clear partitions between right and wrong. The professors were just jealous, I thought, of my homeland’s democratic institutions and values. To appreciate the country, they needed to know more about its heroes and myths, its fight to establish an identity, and the singular characteristics of its people.
THE EARLIEST SETTLERS of the lands that lie within the heart of Europe between the Carpathian Mountains and the Danube were the Boii, a Celtic tribe on the run from northern floods. Those pioneers were gradually pushed out by Germanic warriors, who were then suppressed by the legions of imperial Rome. The Romans called the land “Bohemia” after the Boii, which means that the territory was named by Italians in honor of the Irish, demonstrating—if nothing else—that globalization is not new.
When Rome crumbled, the Germans returned, joined in the eighth century AD by Slavs who migrated from the Central Asian steppes. According to legend, the patriarch Čech led his people on the arduous journey west across three great rivers until they came to a hill of a most peculiar shape: round at the top with inordinately steep sides. From the summit, Čech announced to his weary companions that they had reached at last the “Promised Land . . . [of] vast forests and sparkling rivers, green meadows and blue lakes, a land filled with game and birds and wet with sweet milk and honey.”
Čech’s granddaughter, the prophetess Libuše, is described in the odd way of ancient chroniclers as “the pride and glory of the female sex, doing wise and manly deeds.” It was she who envisioned the creation of a city—Prague—“whose glory shall touch the stars.” The story may be fantastic, but there was nothing fictional about the city and its fame. By the end of the tenth century, control of the Czech lands had been consolidated by the Přemyslids, an indigenous clan whose dynasty brought the nation into being. During their reign, grand cathedrals, monasteries, and synagogues were built; the castle district was fortified; and commerce flourished on both sides of the river.
Among the nation’s early rulers was Václav (in English, Wenceslas), a devout Christian who incurred resentment among the pagan nobility due to his kindness toward the poor. In search of allies, Václav made peace with German Saxony and, in return for protection, paid an annual tribute of silver and oxen. The king was beloved by his people but envied by his treacherous brother Boleslav, whose minions murdered the young monarch while he was on his way to mass. Every nation needs its martyrs, and Wenceslas became Bohemia’s first.
King Wenceslas
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
The Czech lands thrived under the Přemyslid kings with Prague becoming a model of diversity: Czechs, Germans, Jews, Poles, Roma, and Italians lived in the city’s crowded buildings and haggled each day over the furs, scarves, saddles, shields, and other goods for sale in kiosks along its busy streets.
Toward the end of the thirteenth century, the kingdom extended its sway briefly as far south as the Adriatic Sea—just long enough for Shakespeare to set a scene in The Winter’s Tale on the otherwise hard-to-imagine “seacoast of Bohemia.”
One of the few medieval leaders to leave a lasting legacy was Charles IV (1316–1378), the first king of Bohemia to rule also in Germany and as sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire. A forward thinker, the monarch went through several wives, one French, the next three German. The fourth, Elisabeth of Pomerania, entertained dinner guests by ripping chain metal to shreds and bending horseshoes with her bare hands. There was no fifth wife.
Among the many highlights of Charles’s reign was the founding of a university in Prague that attracted students from as far away as England, Scandinavia, and the Balkans. This was in 1348, before printed books and at a time when scientific inquiry was still limited to what the Church would allow. The king also ordered the construction of a sixteen-arch stone bridge over the Vltava. His architects recommended that a special ingredient—eggs—be mixed with the mortar to ensure its strength.* Supplying the builders was too big a job for the hens of Prague, so a decree went o
ut summoning cartloads of the special ingredient from around the country. The royal masons were bemused when wagons from one northern town rolled up bearing an impressive quantity—all hard-boiled.
Charles, though cosmopolitan in his personal tastes, zealously promoted Bohemia’s national myths. He confirmed the region’s autonomy and designated Czech (along with German and Latin) as an official language within the empire. To honor Saint Wenceslas, he commissioned a crown of pure gold encrusted with precious stones topped by a cross and sapphire cameo said to contain a thorn from the crown of Christ. Today, the royal diadem and other coronation jewels are hidden away within an iron safe behind a door with seven locks in a special chamber of the towering Saint Vitus Cathedral. According to popular wisdom, if a false ruler dons the crown, death will claim him within a year.
THE MARTYR WENCESLAS was the political icon of the Bohemian nation; a second martyr, Jan Hus, became the spiritual one. Born in 1372, Hus launched his career modestly enough, as an expert in spelling. Short and plump, he developed into a popular preacher and, in 1409, was named rector of Charles University. The Czech motto, “Truth shall prevail,” derives from Hus’s refusal to accept fully the authority of the Church. Instead of Latin, he insisted on preaching in the local tongue, thus making the words and message of the Gospel more accessible. He advocated a host of doctrines that presaged the Protestant Reformation, including the idea that Jesus, not the pope, was the true head of the Church; that the Communion wafer and wine were merely symbolic; and that encouraging sinners to buy their way to salvation had no scriptural sanction. Liturgical issues were amplified by economic ones: the Church owned half of Bohemia’s arable land. According to Hus, such wealth was the dowry of Satan. These teachings brought him into conflict with the archbishop of Prague, who accused him of heresy.
Prague Winter Page 2