Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  It was healthy for my father to have a position that demanded his energies, a destination when he left our apartment each morning, and friends with whom he could work and commiserate. For my mother, life was more of a chore as she struggled to occupy her mind and keep me entertained in a city where it was hard for her to communicate and where the overall mood had darkened. As refugees in London that summer, we had plenty of company. Jews and other antifascists arrived from Germany, Austria, Poland, and our own Czechoslovakia. The British had quotas that limited the number of adults, but an exception was made for unaccompanied children under seventeen years of age.

  A humanitarian program, the Kindertransport, had begun rescuing Jewish children from Germany and Austria. A similar but separate Czech operation was set into motion by Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker who had visited Prague at the invitation of a friend, encountered German thugs everywhere, and returned home determined to save whomever he could, especially children. “I wasn’t allowed to bring anybody in until I had a family and guarantors that would look after them,” Winton recalled, “and it wasn’t always easy to get people to make that commitment because some were very, very young.” To place more youngsters, he made repeated appeals to the United States, but no help was forthcoming. Of the roughly six thousand children whose names were on Winton’s list, only one in ten reached England.

  Among those who did was my cousin Dáša Deimlová, then eleven, the daughter of my father’s sister. She was aboard the second of the four Winton trains, departing Prague at the end of June. Aside from a small suitcase, she carried only a tiny doll; around her neck was a cardboard sign bearing the number 298. There were six in her compartment, all girls, ranging in age from two to fifteen. Dáša quickly introduced herself to a child with the same first name as her seven-year-old sister, Milena. As the locomotive pulled out of the station, leaving behind parents and friends, the two girls closed their eyes, held hands, and promised each other, “We will not cry.” When they reached the German border, the train halted for almost five hours. There had been a mix-up with the paperwork, and proper documents had to be fetched from Prague. The youthful passengers sat, peering anxiously through the windows as Nazis with their fearsome-looking rifles and bayonets marched along the platform. Finally the train resumed its journey westward, passing through Dresden, Frankfurt, and Cologne. The incessant motion upset Dáša’s stomach; she accepted an older boy’s offer of alcohol, the imbibing of which upset her even more. Not until they reached Holland were the children allowed to stretch their legs, given postcards to send home, and treated by the Red Cross to bananas and cocoa.

  Dáša and Milena Deimlová with the author, one year old

  Dáša Šimová

  From there the children took a ferry to Harwich; most then continued on by rail to Liverpool Street Station. Like her companions, Dáša experienced the trauma of sudden separation from parents and homeland. Unlike many, she was old enough to comprehend the reason for leaving and had the comfort of a familiar set of faces at her journey’s end. Her sister had been on the list to come, too, but their parents had had a last-minute change of heart, thinking Milena too young. Fifty-seven years later, Dáša told a reporter from the Washington Post that the reason Milena had not been on the train was that she had a broken arm. That wasn’t true. At the time Dáša did not wish to admit, as she did later to me, that she had never forgiven her parents for their fateful decision; many children younger than Milena had been on the train leaving Prague. The unbearable irony is that my little cousin would have her life cut short not because of her parents’ indifference but because of the intensity of their desire to protect her.

  My father met Dáša in Harwich and brought her to our apartment. “We took her over in good shape,” my father wrote to her parents, Rudolf and Greta. “She was one of the few who was not tired. . . . In a few days we will take her to school. . . . Do not worry, we will take good care of her, and besides I can see that she is a very reasonable little girl.” He added:

  Perhaps I will soon learn if it will work . . . it is now harder, because you did not send Milenka. With Canada, Rudo do not have illusions. Kisses—we have not heard from Mother in 2 weeks.

  Deciphering those words now, I believe that my father was trying to use whatever connections he had to help Dáša’s parents leave Czechoslovakia. He worried that their decision to keep Milena might complicate the matter and was unsure he would succeed.

  In the summer of 2009, the exodus of the Winton children was reenacted, using the same locomotive and taking the identical route between Prague and London. Among the passengers were Dáša, then eighty-one, and her old seatmate, Milena Grenfell-Baines. A young girl, dressed in the style of the 1930s (hat, simple coat and frock) was also aboard, representing the travelers from long ago. Around the girl’s neck was the number 298, Dáša’s number, on the very piece of cardboard that my cousin had worn years before. Waiting to greet them in London was a friend celebrating his one hundredth birthday, Nicholas Winton, the man who—when others had merely shrugged—had acted just in time to save their lives.

  FOR NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia had been a profound embarrassment. The hero of six months earlier had been exposed; Hitler had played him for a fool. The führer’s territorial ambitions did indeed extend beyond areas where Germans were already a majority; Poland was likely to be next. Having tried appeasement, the prime minister switched almost literally overnight to deterrence. In late March 1939, he declared that England would rush to the aid of Warsaw in the event of a German attack. It was a tough stance but lacked a military strategy to support it. The British could no more save Poland than they could have interposed their troops between Germany and Czechoslovakia. The hope was to convince Hitler that he could not invade without triggering a larger war. To prepare for that contingency, Chamberlain proposed that twenty-year-olds be drafted, the first peacetime conscription in modern British history. In the villages, people talked about what they would do “If the worst came to the worst.” “It was funny,” observed the fictional Mrs. Miniver in Jan Struther’s contemporary novel of the same name, “how one still shied away from saying, ‘If there’s a war,’ and fell back on euphemisms.”

  Meanwhile, diplomatic wheels continued to grind. The German Embassy informed the Foreign Office that the Reich would henceforth assume legal authority over persons in England who were of “the Czechoslovak race.” The British rejected that but were uncertain who, if not the Germans, could legitimately speak for the occupied nation. To them, Beneš lacked official standing. One question was how to shield people from deportation who, like the members of my family, were traveling on Czechoslovak passports; the solution was to designate us as “stateless persons.” An even knottier conundrum was whether to continue inviting the staff of our now-orphaned legation to official parties. After much high-level debate, the Foreign Office settled on a compromise: our diplomats would remain on the guest list through the summer, after which their names, like our country, would be erased.

  THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT’S essential tasks were to rearm and to persuade Germany that war would be a mistake. The military buildup began in earnest, but the diplomatic aspect stalled. The logical strategy, endorsed by Churchill among others, was to forge an alliance with the Soviet Union; that would leave Hitler in a position where any conflict would have to be fought simultaneously on the eastern and western fronts. The Russians were eager to conclude such an arrangement, but Chamberlain held back because of his disdain for Stalin and because he worried that the führer would view a London-Moscow alliance as a provocation. He was also mindful of Polish opinion, which was at least as hostile to the Communists as to the Nazis.

  This was an opportunity lost. Stalin grew suspicious that the West intended to sit back and pick up the pieces after a war between his country and Germany. He knew that the German factories were still in need of raw materials that only his country could provide. To keep
his options open, he fired his foreign minister and replaced him with Vyacheslav Molotov, a tough, unflappable survivor of Kremlin politics. Molotov had no love for the West, nor any trace of sentimentality; he was precisely the sort of man with whom Hitler could do business.

  In May, Beneš learned that arms deliveries from the Czech Škoda Works to the Soviet Union were continuing despite the Nazi occupation. He concluded that some sort of secret understanding between Germany and Russia had been reached. This was big news, and he immediately conveyed his suspicions to the Foreign Office. Belatedly, English diplomats made fence-mending trips to Moscow, where they were offered plenty to drink but no deal; the opening for an effective antifascist alliance had closed.

  On August 17, the U.S. government sent a cable informing London that Germany and the Soviet Union were about to climb into bed together. The document lacked a priority marking and so was not opened until August 22—the day that Hitler and Stalin announced their shocking agreement to remain neutral in conflicts involving the other. Beneš was at his desk when word of the deal spread. Because it was August, the British government was on vacation: Chamberlain was fishing in Scotland, Halifax was at his estate in Yorkshire, and the senior British military commanders were busy shooting—geese.

  The pact between Germany and the USSR appalled the British and most everyone else in the West, even many Communists. Beneš, in his most cold-blooded state, was pleased, aware that Hitler would view the agreement as a license to initiate war—the only means of restoring Czechoslovak freedom. He also understood the logic of the agreement, perhaps even better than Stalin. The Germans had gained a supplier of wheat, petroleum, timber, and minerals, along with a green light to invade Poland from the only country even remotely in a position to stop them. The Soviets had secured access to manufactured goods and the opportunity to seize the Baltics and the eastern half of Poland without worrying, for the time being, that Germany would open fire. Stalin told his colleague and eventual successor, Nikita Khrushchev, “Of course it’s all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me, but actually it’s I who’ve tricked him.” Beneš believed, more accurately, that the Nazis would not wait long to double-cross their partner.

  This cynical arrangement meant, almost surely, that Europe would soon be at war. As British leaders swapped their fishing and hunting gear for suits and uniforms, a last round of diplomacy played out. With the Russia card now faceup on the wrong side of the table, the Allies had no choice but to vest their hopes in Mussolini. The Italians—or, in Cadogan’s phrase, “the ice-creamers”—had little to gain from a European war. French and British diplomats urged Mussolini to restrain Hitler while they put pressure on Poland to make whatever concessions might be necessary. At the same time, every enterprising businessman who claimed to have a back channel to the German leadership was given a hearing. The Allies called up reserves and mobilized their fleets. Ambassadors exchanged talking points. British aristocrats contacted their Nazi acquaintances. None of it did any good.

  Early on September 1, 1939, fifty-six German divisions, supported by 1,500 aircraft, swarmed into western Poland, surrounding and smashing the defending troops while sowing terror in the civilian population. The Poles fought back bravely, but with inadequate numbers and no reserves. Much of their air force was destroyed before it could take off, while their horse-borne cavalry was no match for German tanks. Before succumbing, they launched a desperate counterassault that prolonged the struggle but only until the end of the month. By that time, the Soviet army had swooped in, vulturelike, to devour Poland’s east. A line separating the German and Russian zones was carved through the country’s midsection. The Second World War had begun.

  10

  Occupation and Resistance

  Reichsprotektor Baron Konstantin von Neurath arrived in Prague by train on April 5, 1939. A daylong celebration ensued in which representatives of local organizations, obliged to take part, did so listlessly and with many a muttered oath. Berlin’s intent was to plunder the Czechs without provoking rebellion; thus Neurath hoped to see them adapt quickly and passively to their loss of freedom, minimizing any need for brutality. The silver-haired protektor was by nature more diplomat than firebrand, having been sacked from his previous job as foreign minister because of his distaste for Hitler’s war plans. He took care in his new position to show public deference to President Hácha and to maintain the fiction that the Czechs retained a meaningful voice in governing their affairs.

  Germany’s show of empathy was not confined to that displayed by Neurath. In the first days of the occupation, a Bavarian welfare organization sent a caravan of volunteers to Prague. Their mission was to feed the city’s children, who—as Nazi propaganda had it—were starving due to the incompetence of local authorities. In fact, the only youngsters in need of free meals were antifascist Sudeten refugees. When the Bavarians discovered that the hungry were not as numerous as anticipated, they asked some of the more photogenic ones to demonstrate how they said their nightly prayers. The resulting images were sent to Berlin with the caption “Prague children beg for food.”

  Barely a week into the occupation, the parliament was dissolved and the traditional political parties disbanded. In their place, Hácha created National Solidarity (NS), an organization that included virtually the entire Czech population—except for Jews and Freemasons, who were excluded to please the Germans, and women, who were barred because Masaryk and Beneš were no longer around to insist on fair treatment.* The NS was a pragmatic entity, not an ideological one. It sought to accommodate the German occupation without abandoning the country’s indigenous culture and customs.

  The Czechs who held official positions during the years of the protectorate would later be vilified as traitors or, as my mother disdainfully referred to them, “collaborants.” The labels did not always capture the intentions of the figures involved. In the beginning, Hácha sent messages to Beneš in which he pledged his loyalty: “I am looking forward to the day when I will hand over my office; you know to whom.” The old judge had not sought the presidency and always seemed on the verge of resigning. His avowed purpose was to minimize harm, but he failed to recognize that damage can be done to the spirit as readily as to the body. He urged his people to be both good Czechs and good Germans—a possibility in peacetime, perhaps, but not under occupation. Starting as an ally of democracy, Hácha ended as a foe; an exceptionally weak reed, he stood for nothing in a job he never should have accepted.

  By contrast, the new prime minister, General Alois Eliáš, turned his face to the wind and refused to buckle. Eliáš too avoided provoking the Nazis, but behind their backs he maintained close ties to the Czech underground, funneled intelligence to London, and did all he could to help the families of those arrested. Many other officials tried to preserve what they could of national identity and independence, hoping that—despite the early German triumphs—the war would be over quickly. However, as the months dragged by, members of the Hácha government found themselves in the untenable position of being hated by Czech loyalists, bullied by German overseers, and respected by no one.

  Watching from the U.S. Embassy was George Kennan. Known throughout his career for penetrating insights and a lack of romanticism, he wrote that “one of humanity’s oldest and most recalcitrant human dilemmas” consists of the choice between “a limited collaboration with evil, in the interests of its ultimate mitigation” and “an uncompromising, heroic but suicidal resistance to it.” Everyone involved in the drama of post-Munich Czechoslovakia, he observed, would be “tossed, one way or another, on the horns of this dilemma.”

  BEFORE GOING INTO exile, Beneš had discussed with friends the need to fashion a unified resistance that would articulate a clear political line and operate effectively both domestically and abroad. The president’s thirty-nine-year-old personal secretary, Prokop Drtina, was among those who stayed behind in Prague to organize the effort. The
dissidents had many friends who were still in government, some in the mayor’s office and city council, but also bookkeepers, phone operators, and file clerks who could supply useful information. The network drew primarily upon Beneš’s political supporters, the military, former members of the Czechoslovak Legion, the Boy Scouts, the Sokol gymnasts, and such Jewish organizations as the Maccabi athletic club. Early on the resistance helped funnel soldiers and other escapees across the border into Poland and, when that avenue was foreclosed by war, through Hungary.

  As in any underground operation, secure communications were vital. In the first weeks, the conspirators had received a cipher (concealed in a toothpaste tube) disclosing an address in Turkey through which reports could be transmitted to Beneš. Drtina used this channel to send regular reports to the president. These, too, required secrecy, and I was intrigued to find in my research that Josef Korbel was credited by one resistance leader with suggesting a clever code involving dictionaries. However, no sooner was the dictionary idea agreed on than it was replaced by a more sophisticated system devised by the army.

  Throughout the war, written materials were smuggled by sympathetic railway workers shuttling among depots in Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, and Belgrade. In defiance of all risk, the underground established radio contacts that—although interrupted from time to time—transmitted thousands of messages from the protectorate to England and the Soviet Union. The equipment was serviced by city engineers, who bicycled to the clandestine sites at night. The underground’s principal transmitter, code-named Libuše, was a briefcase-size contraption with dials and knobs attached to a barbed-wire antenna, climbing skyward in a stiff array of gnarly knots; the device now resides in the Czech National Museum.