Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  Although the rebels had a central coordinating body (the Committee of Home Resistance), the various groups and cells were by design as independent of one another as possible. Meetings were kept small and confined to a single subject; new recruits were allowed to attend only after thorough investigation. Before returning home, leaders telephoned ahead to be sure the Gestapo was not sitting in their living rooms, waiting. A pot of chrysanthemums removed from a balcony or the altered position of a window shade might also serve as a warning. Important documents were hidden where stacks of paper would not be conspicuous, for example, in the public library, or in a place where few would look, such as inside a department store mannequin.

  Couriers were enlisted to carry secrets and also to distribute pamphlets, notices, and antifascist literature. The government’s Commission for Press and Propaganda controlled every legal newspaper; independent publications, however, still managed to operate, particularly the main resistance paper, V boj (Into Battle). One clandestine group produced books of democratic propaganda that, from the covers, looked like conventional detective novels. The telltale sign was on the back, where the publisher was identified in Czech as “G. E. Stapo.”

  The Nazis were inexperienced in the arts of occupation, but they had an aptitude for repression, infiltration, and terror. Working from lists of suspects, they banged on doors and pulled thousands of people from their beds in the darkest hours of the night. The men and women brought in for questioning needed either a truly convincing story or the ability to withstand excruciating pain. Gestapo headquarters, located near the center of Prague, was in the well-fortified Peček Palace, used previously as a bank. The safe-deposit rooms, with their windowless walls and heavy doors, were well suited to holding prisoners. Torture was applied without mercy, and the presence of a guillotine rendered verbal threats redundant. Whenever a member of an underground cell was picked up, others went into hiding; the presumption was always that suspects would talk. The Resistance, though, was rarely caught by surprise. Until 1943, a group of German-speaking Czech police, employed by the Gestapo as translators, used their access to report on what prisoners had revealed and to warn dissidents when they were being watched.

  Most of the major underground networks were torn apart at least once during a war in which tens of thousands of dissidents were killed. But for all the bloodshed, the Nazis did not come close to breaking the Czechs’ spirit or their will to resist. “If German authority in the physical sense is unchallenged,” wrote Kennan more than a year and a half after the occupation began, “morally it does not exist. Whatever power the Germans may have over the persons and property of the Czechs, they have little influence over their souls.”

  Guillotine used by Nazis in Prague

  Jan Kaplan Archive

  From the earliest days, the Czechs engaged in symbolic protests such as boycotting streetcars or, on Hitler’s birthday, placing flowers around the statue of Hus. When the Prague Orchestra performed Smetana’s My Country, the ovation lasted for fifteen minutes. Until the practice was forbidden, some citizens wore homemade badges bearing such inscriptions as “We will not surrender” and “Beneš is not asleep.” German officials who were assigned to Prague often found that their telephones did not work, that important documents had been misplaced, or that the fuel tanks in their automobiles had been siphoned dry. On the country’s National Day in October 1939, a massive antioccupation rally so angered Nazi guards that they opened fire, fatally wounding a medical student, Jan Opletal.* At his funeral, friends were bold enough to sing the national anthem and to storm through the city shouting patriotic slogans and tearing down German street signs. When Hitler learned of the disturbances, he demanded reprisals. The Nazis arrested nine student leaders—none of whom had been involved in the demonstrations—stood them against a wall, and shot them dead. Another 1,800 students were detained and held under brutal conditions, many of the boys beaten and girls abused. To punish the local intelligentsia, the führer closed the protectorate’s Czech universities and colleges for the duration of the war.

  Geography, almost as much as the Germans, limited what the Czech Resistance could do. There were neither ports through which arms could secretly be shipped nor friendly borders across which a secure base of operations could be established. Underground warriors had relatively few guns, a small supply of ammunition, a paucity of places to hide, and little cash. The longer the war lasted, the harder it would be to survive. Also, nearly everyone involved was an amateur. At first, Beneš did not appreciate these constraints. In a broadcast two weeks into the war, he asked the Resistance to deliver a steady diet of heavy blows to the enemy. After the death of Opletal and the subsequent executions, he spoke more somberly, cautioning against superfluous sacrifice. sacrifice. The president had not changed his view that the Czech underground should make life more difficult for the Nazis. He had come to realize, however, that if it were to administer “heavy blows,” it would require external help.

  Beneš speaking over the BBC

  THE FIRST YEAR of occupation was marked by tension between the Czechs’ desire for normalcy and their anger that nothing was as it should be. For the majority, life went on as it had—up to a point. Daily routines were not altered, even if shortages had inflated the cost of living and the announcements blaring from street-corner loudspeakers were in what had become a despised foreign language. Food rations were austere but sufficient. Thousands of young men went to the Reich to labor in place of the German youths who had been called to the military. Back home, many Czechs were allowed to retain their government positions. The sense of routine was strongest in the countryside, where a little boy or girl might still enjoy a relatively carefree existence. One such youngster developed a fascination for uniforms. Of course, these were present everywhere—worn by the police, the remnants of the Czech army, and the various Nazi units. Each day, when he could, the youngster went to a store where uniforms and medals were on display in the windows. He stared until an adult grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. Sitting in his room, he drew pictures of what he had seen, always imagining better and more elaborate outfits. Years later, as the newly elected leader of Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel took delight in authorizing new designs for the uniforms of his presidential guard.

  The cinema was less affected by the occupation than many distinctive Czech industries. The Nazis took control of some studios in order to produce German films without having to worry about Allied bombs, but they also permitted local moviemakers to carry on their business. The best-equipped studio in Europe had been established by young Havel’s father and uncle Miloš, a noted producer. The Germans pressed Miloš to make a film that would portray King Wenceslas as the original German collaborator. Havel refused and instead brought to the screen Božena Nĕmcová’s The Grandmother and other traditional tales. One of the actresses with whom he worked was Lída Baarová, controversial because she had, in the 1930s, an extended love affair with Josef Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Goebbels planned to divorce his wife and marry the glamorous actress until his children’s godfather—Adolf Hitler—forbade it. Such a scandal, the chancellor warned, would undermine the Nazi reputation for upholding family values.

  Drawing by the young artist Václav Havel

  Václav Havel

  The relative normality of life meshed with Germany’s long-term plan to transform the Czech lands into an integral part of the Reich. This would be done in stages, by milking the country’s resources and gradually altering the population’s racial mix. The milking began almost literally, with the inventorying and theft of cows; it continued with the German takeover of Jewish properties and major Czech businesses, including the Škoda industries, the Bat’a shoe factory, the Bohemian Union Bank, and, ominously, the Sigmund pump works, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of poison gas. The bulk of the protectorate’s tax revenues now flowed to Berlin, not Prague, and every usable piece of military equipment was con
fiscated, including 600 tanks, 48,000 machine guns, more than a million rifles, and the entire Czech air fleet.

  Hitler envisioned a time, perhaps twenty years hence, when the Czech language would be reduced to a dialect and the people who spoke it to a scattered peasantry with colorful costumes, quaint dances, and no political standing. Nazi officials scoffed at Czechs who complained about the closure of universities, saying that in the future, an elementary school education was all that any of their race would need.

  As the months passed, a split developed in the protectorate’s leadership. Neurath continued to respect local sensibilities, believing that the population could be kept docile if allowed to maintain its traditions. A harsher line was favored by his deputy, Karl Hermann “K. H.” Frank, a Sudeten who despised Czech culture and wished to Germanize the population without delay. In that he mirrored the frustration felt by many from his region. Sudeten separatists had been overjoyed when Hitler’s army had marched in, expecting that they would be placed in positions of authority, but, aside from Frank, few were. Even Henlein, the discount führer of the prewar era, was stuck in his home territory, denied a post in Prague. Worse, when the war began, every registered German male was eligible to be drafted and sent to the eastern front. So while Czech youths were assigned to factories and work details, their German counterparts were camped out in the mud or getting shot. That did not feel like the victory for which the Sudetens had yearned.

  Increasingly Czechs were prohibited from any gesture, including making disrespectful comments and booing German sports teams, that hinted at independence. However, repressive measures only stimulated the population’s desire to preserve its customs and heritage. One resistance magazine warned, “With great fanfare, the Germans are opening new schools where there used to be none. This is your business, women! It lies in your hands whether our children grow up to be Czechs or Germanized, patriots or traitors.” Nationalists had long advocated the use of schools to create a sense of cultural solidarity; now they focused on the imperative of learning at home. Parents were encouraged to teach their children the country’s language, stories, songs, and a heroic version of its history. Less helpfully, families were told to ignore the German nutritionists who advised against consuming too much butter; the Czechs saw in this well-intentioned guidance a plot to rob their children of rosy cheeks.

  With the Nazis in charge, the only way Czech women could avoid work orders was to become pregnant; this they did with alacrity. Their men, unlike the Germans, were barred from the battlefield and thus more readily available for domestic pursuits. There were also many families that considered the bearing of children a patriotic duty. During the war, Czech couples got married earlier and had children younger. The birthrate increased by 50 percent. Perhaps for that reason, the protectorate was stirred by rumors, thankfully untrue, that German doctors were planning to sterilize local women and inject their babies with poison.

  For Jewish families, the tourniquet had started to tighten even before the Nazis arrived. Bohemia and Moravia were not yet subject to the level of persecution that prevailed in Berlin or that would shortly be felt in Slovakia; Jews could still practice their religion and synagogues were undamaged, but discriminatory policies were becoming the norm. Jews were banished from public office and the professions and ordered to sit in the back of streetcars and to avoid many public places, shops, and parks. Restrictions were placed on their access to financial accounts, and valuable possessions were confiscated. Their businesses were seized or purchased at nominal prices, and food rations were even more Spartan than those of their Czech neighbors.

  The public’s reaction to these measures varied. Many Czechs were indifferent, but others found ways to bend the rules. According to one historian, the German Secret Service was incensed that rather than shunning Jews, “friends went shopping for them. . . . Butchers were selling their best meat only at the time when Jews were allowed to shop. . . . Jews [were] getting help from physicians, lawyers, their former employees, the Czech authorities and sometimes even from gendarmes.” Sympathetic Czech judges were quick to rule in favor of applicants seeking to be declared, or to have their children declared, of less than fully Jewish blood—a procedure that often required Jewish women to confess falsely to affairs with Gentile men. When one despairing woman poisoned her two half-Jewish children, her neighbors did not turn away. Instead, four thousand people—including town officials—attended the funeral.

  For the exile community in England, letters from relatives back home provided a narrow window on such events. Correspondence to and from the protectorate was irregular. Under wartime conditions, many letters never arrived. Others were sent in care of the Red Cross in Switzerland and delivered only after months of delay. My mother and father received at least a few letters from their parents, but I have not been able to find them and don’t know what information they conveyed or when they stopped. Dáša’s letters from her mother, Greta, alternated between the practical (“wear warm clothes”) and the poignant:

  Milena cried a lot when we came home without you. In the morning when I was combing her hair, she asked me to look to see if she had gray hair from worrying about you. In the evening, she gets into bed and constantly calls with all of her strength: “Dáša,” “Dáša,” “Dáša,” and thinks that you can hear.

  As the months passed, the letters from Greta became less frequent. At various points in 1940, Dáša learned that Milena was beginning to ski and had become “a real rogue,” studying with diligence but refusing to sit still in class.

  In 2011, I asked my cousin what she remembered of her family and of those early years that I had been too young to recall. She told me that her mother had been lovely but also strict, a person who believed that spoiled children would have a hard life. Both metaphorically and literally, she felt that the best way to teach a child to swim was to throw him or her into the water and see what happened. In fact, it was Dáša who had taught Milena to swim, as she would later teach me.

  Dáša’s father, Rudolf, was a general practitioner who was popular enough among his neighbors that other doctors were jealous. Unlike Greta, he tended to be lenient with children and rarely said a harsh word. Only once did Dáša make him angry:

  Our house was beside a stream over which there was a small footbridge. One day, a friend of mine named Vera was injured by a passing truck. Her father carried his daughter over the footbridge and began calling for my father, who wasn’t home. But I was. I opened the door to my father’s surgery, which was on the first floor of our house, and began applying disinfectant to my friend’s scrapes and bruises, as I had often seen my father do. Just then, he arrived home, took one look at what was going on, grabbed me by the collar, and spanked me. “What are you doing?” he yelled. “You have no training. Don’t you know you could have killed that girl?”

  Dáša told me later that she had been raised without religion, attending synagogue but once a year. Nevertheless she was required by her school to participate in a class on scripture and so studied the Hebrew Bible. She got on well with the rabbi who taught the course and, wanting to impress, invited him to visit over the holidays so he could see her Christmas tree. That led to a row between the rabbi and her father, who said, “I’ll raise my children as I like.”

  The Deimls lived in Strakonice, a city of about 20,000. Before their separation, Dáša and Milena had played with neighbors the many games children learned back when entertainment came more from the imagination than from expensive gadgets: marbles, hide-and-seek, stop-and-freeze, musical chairs, blindman’s bluff, hopscotch, yo-yos, jump rope, and various card games. No child would have thought to restrict participation according to racial or ethnic background, but the leaders of the protectorate had an agenda to carry out. Milena was forced to transfer to an all-Jewish school where youngsters of every age shared the same classroom; it closed down after a year, and then there was no school for her at all.* Greta wrote that she had had to take
the place of Milena’s young friends, with whom her daughter was no longer permitted to play.

  Despite urgent appeals from Western diplomats (including that of the United States), the opportunity to leave the protectorate legally was dwindling. The time would soon come when the door to the outside world would swing completely shut.

  11

  The Lamps Go Out

  On the morning of September 3, 1939, shortly after Chamberlain informed his countrymen that war had commenced, a French aircraft strayed into British airspace, setting off sirens and causing a brief panic. For the next seven months, aside from the Nazi conquest of the Channel Islands and a few exploratory patrols by the Luftwaffe, that was the extent of military action in Great Britain. The French, fearing retaliation, discouraged England from bombing Germany in support of the Poles; the Nazis were unready to do battle with the West. This was the period—that September until the following spring—that became known as the “phony war” or Great Bore War.

  The English made wise use of the interval. Air-defense measures, which had been in train for several years, were now a daily preoccupation. Whole factories were draped with camouflage in the form of brown-and-green netting. Trenches were dug in zigzag fashion through downtown parks, and air-raid shelters were built in backyards, creating, if nothing else, luxurious new homes for dogs and other household pets. The memory of World War I led to the nationwide distribution of gas masks—some, for children, with Mickey Mouse ears attached. Practice sessions were conducted in which adults and teenagers donned the devices and crawled through smoke-filled tunnels made of tin. The masks were supposed to be carried in a cardboard container attached to a string that could be looped around one’s shoulder, but inevitably the strings got tangled in handbags, lunchboxes, backpacks, and doors. For a time, everybody carried a mask; by war’s end hardly anyone did.