Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  Thanks to its well-placed German spy—Agent 54—the Czech Intelligence Service knew that the Nazis planned to invade, when they intended to do it, and even the invasion’s code name (Operation Southeast). The intelligence director, General Moravec, shared the information with Hácha and the rest of the Czech leadership, urging that emergency preparations be made to evacuate military aircraft, blow up munitions factories, destroy secret archives, and transport the country’s leaders to Paris or London. Members of the cabinet, convinced that Hitler was content with the status quo, refused to believe that an invasion was imminent. They did, however, decide to seek a meeting to settle the issue. Shortly before dusk on March 14, a few hours after the Slovak parliament voted for independence, Hácha and several of his aides departed by train for Berlin.

  MY FATHER’S BROTHER Jan (“Honza”) worked for the same construction firm as his father, Arnošt Körbel, and had already set up a subsidiary in England, where it was hoped there might also be room for Arnošt. With Honza employed, it was no problem for his wife and two children to join him. My aunt Margarethe and her husband, Rudolf Deiml, were seeking visas but thus far without success. They had two daughters, Dagmar (Dáša), age eleven, and Milena, just seven. My mother’s father, Alfred, had died in 1936. As I would learn much later, Grandmother Růžena lived in Podĕbrady, a town about forty miles from Prague. If she made any effort to leave, there is no evidence of it; Czechoslovakia was where she had spent her life and, besides, she had to care for her daughter, my namesake Marie, who suffered from kidney disease.

  Of course, no one knew then what was to happen. The war in Europe was still months away. When it did come, it was expected to be over quickly. Nazi prison camps, such as Dachau, housed dissidents regardless of race. For Czech Jews who were not political and who wanted to go, German authorities presented no obstacle; more than 19,000 (or about 16 percent) would leave in 1939. That summer, an office headed by the thirty-three-year-old Adolf Eichmann had been set up in Prague to encourage Jews to emigrate; the challenge was to find governments willing to receive more of those who applied. Every country had a quota of one type or another. The British, who had a League of Nations mandate for the Middle East, had placed an annual limit of 10,000 on the number of European Jews permitted to settle in Palestine. For many older Czechs, the prospect of leaving home was more unsettling than the perceived dangers of staying. As loathsome as the Nazis were, it was unclear how they might profit from persecuting the elderly. “What would they do to me?” asked one mother of her adult son. “I could scrub floors and then the war will be over.” Some may also have wished not to take up space on visa lists that, in their view, could better be used by their children and grandchildren.

  In the second week of March, my father made brief trips to Paris and London to see whether it might be possible to obtain visas for our family. He was fortunate enough to receive accreditation as a journalist for two Yugoslav newspapers. He returned home the same day that President Hácha left for his conference in Berlin.

  EARLY ON MARCH 15, 1939, after waiting for hours while Hitler watched a movie, Hácha met with the führer and his aides. Hitler got right to the point. Because of Bohemian provocations and the unrest in Slovakia, Germany had decided to incorporate what remained of the Czech lands into the Reich. The issue was not up for discussion. The invasion would commence at 6 a.m. Hácha, stunned, refused at first to sign the documents thrust in front of him. Göring threatened that unless he picked up the pen, the Luftwaffe would obliterate Prague within hours. The president consulted by phone with his cabinet, which advised him unhelpfully that active resistance was impossible and explicit acquiescence unconstitutional. Hácha continued to resist, then fainted. At 4 a.m., after Hitler’s physician revived him with an injection of dextrose and vitamins, the president, weak in every sense, finally gave in. The statement he signed called on the Czech army to accept the German occupation and declared that he, Hácha, was confidently placing his people’s fate in the hands of the führer and the Reich.

  Amid the heavy snow that night, one of the few aircraft to take off from Prague’s Ruzynĕ Airport was a Dutch plane sent by the British to rescue General Moravec. He took with him ten senior members of his staff, along with as many secret files and as much cash as they could carry. The next morning, German troops marched on Prague. Because they had not yet received the instruction to surrender, two regiments fought back briefly, thereby earning a permanent place of honor in Czech history. But that was it.

  THE NATIONAL MEMORY of any people is a mixture of truth and myth. For Czechs, 1620 is the year they lost their independence and 1918 the year they regained it. The Ides of March 1939 is when they had their liberty snatched away again. Within days, there were red-bordered posters with an eagle and swastika plastered all around Prague. Storm troopers loitered with fastened bayonets on the streets of Old Town, around Wenceslas Square, in front of cathedrals, and on old Hradčany. The Gestapo set up headquarters. German-language street signs appeared on every corner. According to a March 19 dispatch from the U.S. Embassy:

  There are several thousand . . . political refugees and their families here in hiding and in danger of their lives. Many of the women and children are spending their days and nights in the woods in the vicinity of Prague, notwithstanding that the ground is covered by snow. All relief organizations have been forcibly disbanded . . . the German secret police here are making hundreds and perhaps thousands of arrests in the usual Nazi manner; the Jewish population is terrified; as are . . . those persons closely associated with the former regime.

  My parents were among those who had one question uppermost in their minds: how to get out? In the words of my mother:

  To leave Czechoslovakia immediately was technically impossible. There was complete chaos in Prague. Communication was stopped, banks were closed, friends were detained. We learned from competent sources that Joe’s name was on the list of people who should be arrested. After leaving Madeleine with my family, Joe and I moved out of our apartment and began sleeping each night with friends, spending the days in Prague streets and in restaurants. It was mostly during the nights that the Gestapo captured people.

  After more than a week of living on the run, my parents obtained the necessary paperwork. My mother wrote later that a little bit of petty bribery might have been involved, which would not have been surprising in those days. The Nazis had established an office to process exit visas with an eye to preventing known enemies from leaving, but they were dependent at the outset on Czech inspectors who ignored instructions and allowed hundreds of politically active countrymen to escape.

  On March 25, my mother collected me from Grandmother Růžena and, in the afternoon, sat with me in a coffee shop while my father went to the police for the final stamp of approval. When he returned, about five o’clock, we had time to pack two small suitcases before heading to the railroad station. My guess is that Růžena, Arnošt, and Olga were all there to see us off, because in my mother’s letter she noted with sadness that that was the last time we saw them alive.

  It was ten days after the Nazi invasion. The southwest-bound Simplon Orient Express came through Prague only three times a week; on that day, the waiting platform must have been jammed and the carriages packed. To my parents, the sight of swastikas everywhere would have removed any doubts about their choice. They pushed their way in and handed their tickets to the conductor. The whistle blew, and our seventeen-hour journey began. The sleeping cars consisted of wood-paneled compartments, each with two beds, one above the other, and a tiny washbasin. During the day, the beds could be put up and the space converted into a small sitting room. There being no separate seat for me, I must have been handed back and forth while being encouraged to settle in and sleep. The first border we came to was that of the newly independent Slovakia. Next was the crossing into Hungary, where I imagine every passenger, including every political activist and most particularly every Jew, held his or her breath
until travel documents were returned and the train began again to move. After Hungary came Yugoslavia, then on to Greece where we boarded a boat for England. Our destination: freedom.

  Part II

  April 1939–April 1942

  In our fate, a universal drama is being enacted . . . [as] every resort to brute force is brief compared to the lasting need of man for liberty, peace, and equality.

  —KAREL ČAPEK,

  A Prayer for Tonight, winter 1938

  9

  Starting Over

  I was too young to remember the tiny rooms in the dank boardinghouse where we began our new life, but my mother would not forget those first days in a strange land. We lived among other foreigners, and because England was short of jobs, refugees were barred from seeking employment. Uprooted, we faced a future that was in every way uncertain and had few obvious ways to occupy our time. So as the weather warmed, my mother and I spent many hours in nearby parks while my father sought to reestablish contact with friends.

  For my parents, not quite thirty years old, the prospect of starting over amid the alien throngs of London must have been intimidating. The British capital was by far the world’s most populous city. Its port was the busiest, its underground rail system the most intricate, its public buildings the most iconic, its financial institutions the center of the economic universe. His Majesty’s empire, though aging, still maintained interests on every continent.

  It was in London that Beneš had begun his exile, but he soon accepted an offer from the University of Chicago to lecture on democracy. Thus he was in the United States when German troops marched into Prague. He knew from the outset what the invasion signified not only for his country but also for his own credibility. After all, hadn’t he warned against trusting the Nazis? Hadn’t he said that the Munich agreement centered on a lie? During the First World War, Masaryk had lobbied the world on behalf of Czech and Slovak independence; now Beneš prepared to lead a comparable struggle to help his country rise from the ashes and, not incidentally, demonstrate the correctness of his own judgment.

  In his view, the German attack left Czechoslovakia without a legitimate government, thereby creating a vacuum that only the most recent freely chosen regime—his own—could fill. This demanded that Professor Beneš once again play the part of President Beneš. Not waiting even a day, he resumed writing letters to world leaders, began issuing instructions to Czechoslovak embassies, and exhorted the media to echo his own keenly expressed blend of indignation and resolve. He made dozens of speeches across the United States, seeking and receiving support from the same immigrant organizations that two decades earlier had aided the cause of independence. He benefited, as well, from the American tendency to rally behind victims of injustice. In New York, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia described Munich as an act of “common butchery” perpetrated by “decadent European democracies and two violent dictatorships.”

  American audiences may have been deeply sympathetic to Beneš and his plight, but that did not mean they were eager to take up arms. In fact, nothing pleased them more than to be told that it was Europe’s job to clean up the mess Europeans had created. On Easter Sunday, President Roosevelt prepared to return to Washington from his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. Before boarding the train, he bade farewell to bystanders. “I’ll be back in the fall,” he promised, “if we don’t have a war.” This offhand remark set typewriters clacking. Walter Winchell, a popular columnist, wrote, “the future of American youth is on top of American soil—not underneath European dirt.” The renowned sage Walter Lippmann urged the administration to use diplomacy to “prevent the hideous consequences of a war.” David Lawrence, the founder of United States News and World Report, echoed the pro-German call for “a second peace conference to undo the wrongs imposed by the Versailles Treaty.”

  The 1936 Democratic Party platform, on which FDR had campaigned, renounced war as an instrument of policy, pledged neutrality in international disputes, and vowed to resist being drawn into hostilities by “political commitments, international banking or private trading.” In 1937, Congress had considered a constitutional amendment that would have required a popular referendum before war could be declared, a potentially crippling measure that was only narrowly defeated. Roosevelt promised over and over again to keep the United States out of war, but conservative commentators noted that Woodrow Wilson had made—and failed to keep—a similar pledge. The president thought privately that a European conflict was inevitable but had not yet decided what America’s role should be. To prevent political storms, he typically avoided provocative language, which is why his comment in Georgia generated such a heated reaction. But while the male columnists wrung their hands, one writer seemed ready to raise her fists. “I wonder,” wrote Eleanor Roosevelt, “whether we have decided to hide behind neutrality? It is safe, perhaps, but I am not always sure it is right to be safe. . . . Every time a nation which has known freedom loses it, other free nations lose something, too.”

  On May 28, Beneš met for three hours with Eleanor’s spouse at the couple’s residence in Hyde Park, New York. He reported to friends that Roosevelt had greeted him as a fellow president, condemned British and French appeasement, and promised to recognize the old Czechoslovakia in the event of a European war. That description may have embellished the facts. Roosevelt’s policies were notoriously hard to pin down. Around the time of Munich, FDR had privately compared British and French actions to those of Judas Iscariot; officially, he cabled his congratulations to Chamberlain. After the invasion of Prague, he warned Hitler against further aggression but without specifying any penalty. Notwithstanding Beneš’s description of his meeting with Roosevelt, the State Department had yet to acknowledge him as the legal representative of Czechoslovakia or to support the reestablishment of his shattered land.

  Leaving the United States for London, Beneš was in an uneasy frame of mind. How would Czechoslovakia’s government in exile fare at the hands of Chamberlain and the architects of appeasement? He soon discovered that as critical as he was of the British leader, so too were many Britons. On July 27, he was the guest of honor at a parliamentary luncheon sponsored by Churchill and his shrewd comrade in arms, Anthony Eden. “I don’t know how things will develop,” Churchill said, “and I cannot say whether Great Britain will go to war on Czechoslovakia’s behalf. I know only that peace . . . will not be made without Czechoslovakia.” For Beneš, those words must have sounded like a heavenly choir. Many of his countrymen saw him as a failure and Chamberlain considered him a nuisance, but Churchill had written a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.*

  Even before that memorable lunch, the nuts and bolts of a government in exile were being assembled. Jan Masaryk and a small circle of senior émigrés—both civilian and military—were starting work. One morning, a friend of Masaryk’s came to see my father and told him, “Here is a key to Jan’s flat at 58 Westminster Gardens. He wants you to be his secretary.” For my father, this was a career breakthrough at the moment he needed it most. “I was a young diplomatic officer,” he later recalled. “Jan was a veteran of diplomacy. We were both without a job. I shall never forget his words of welcome. ‘Glad to meet you; heard about you before. Do you need any money?’ ” Masaryk rented an office near his apartment and recruited a staff that also included Eduard Táborský, a lawyer who had worked in the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry. Their collective task was to generate articles favorable to their cause in the local media.

  At the same time, my father began a lengthy exchange of letters with Hubert Ripka, his elder by fourteen years and a man who shared his commitment to Beneš and the restoration of Czech democracy. Ripka was a broad-shouldered man, well over six feet tall, with short dark hair atop his oval-shaped head, an avuncular manner, and a reputation for being “clever as a bag of monkeys.” Ripka had been a diplomatic correspondent for the country’s leading newspaper and one of the group around Beneš who had pushed most strenuously f
or rejection of the Munich agreement. In the fall of 1938, he had moved to Paris, where he had used his many contacts to publicize the country’s plight.*

  Given the turbulence of the period, it was natural that Ripka had an avid interest in what was happening in London and my father an equal curiosity about the situation in Paris. Their most urgent desire was to help friends who sought visas, often a frustrating quest. A second goal was to discourage the formation of rival power centers; the Czechoslovaks did not need to have more than one government in exile. A third focus was to gain exposure to influential writers, whether in the Slavic countries or the West. One such writer, Shiela Grant Duff, served as an intermediary, carrying letters back and forth between my father and Ripka, whom she had earlier befriended in Prague.

  As a female foreign correspondent, Grant Duff was something of a pioneer. She developed a strong following while writing for the popular London Observer and was one of the few British reporters to mount a sustained challenge to Chamberlain and appeasement. Her disdain for her colleagues was evidenced in a rhyme she was fond of quoting:

  You cannot hope to bribe or twist

  The honest British journalist;

  But seeing what the man will do

  Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

  At Ripka’s urging, Grant Duff introduced herself to Churchill (she was a cousin of Mrs. Churchill) in order to educate him further about the situation in Czechoslovakia. Her book Europe and the Czechs was a heartfelt plea for Britons to take seriously the fate of that small country; the paperback appeared on the same day that Chamberlain returned from Munich and sold so well that an updated edition was published just two weeks later.

  My father’s correspondence with Ripka, which began in May 1939 and continued for two years, had a conspiratorial flavor. Both men were wary about whom to trust. In his first letter, Ripka asked that a message be transmitted to the director of intelligence, Moravec, requesting information about a man in Holland who might or might not have been working on behalf of Jews seeking to flee Hitler. My father in turn described a visit from “a man called Zid . . . [who] elicited in me a peculiar impression.” Zid sought a direct audience with Masaryk, flashed money around, and was vague in responding to questions. My father, whose trust had to be earned, thought him a spy.