Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  The same afternoon, Churchill dispatched the first of many passionate letters to Franklin Roosevelt seeking the loan of ships, aircraft, ammunition, and steel. “I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long.” The letter arrived in Washington at the same time as a warning from Ambassador Joseph Kennedy that America could be left “holding the bag for a war in which the allies expect to be beaten.” If we have to take up arms, continued the envoy, “we would do better fighting in our own back yard.”

  Churchill went to France for a firsthand view of the hostilities; he returned disgusted and shocked. Tens of thousands of British troops had crossed the Channel to aid the French. The Royal Air Force was running hundreds of missions a day. Many Czech, Slovak, and Polish soldiers had joined the fight. Yet Boulogne was taken, then Calais. One air officer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (the author of The Little Prince), compared the Allied effort to tossing glassfuls of water at a forest fire. The French government appealed to Churchill for more planes, but the Britons, who lost more than 950 aircraft in the campaign, refused to risk further losses.

  Jan Stránský belonged to one of the Czechoslovak Republic’s leading democratic families; he would later join the government in exile. In July 1939, he escaped from Prague to Poland in a coal truck, then found space on a ship to Marseilles and signed up with the French Foreign Legion. For months, he and his fellow Czechs slept in dirty, rat-filled barracks and spent days marching around in ragged outfits with sun-bleached caps. When the Nazis threatened, the volunteers were finally given uniforms and transported north to the front. There they encountered

  drunken French soldiers deserting right and left; disorganization and utter chaos; lack of a unified command, lack of food; cartridges which did not fit rifles, positions supposed to be ours but long since taken by the Germans . . . a retreat and more trenches to dig, another retreat and a rout.

  Stránský’s crew commandeered a truck that they drove night and day “on those terrible encumbered and bombarded roads . . . sometimes machine-gunned, sometimes stopped by the gendarmerie who took us for German parachutists and often having to fight our way through.”

  As the Germans closed in on Paris, the only question was whether the British Expeditionary Force and its allies could be saved for future battles. On May 27, Cadogan was near despair: “position of B.E.F. quite awful, and I see no hope for more than a tiny fraction of them.” The last remaining open port was Dunkirk. Another who was there reported:

  From the margin of the sea, at fairly wide intervals, three long thin black lines protruded into the water, conveying the effect of low wooden breakwaters. These were lines of men, standing in pairs behind one another far out into the water, waiting in queues till boats arrived to transport them, a score or so at a time, to the steamers and warships that were filling up with the last survivors. The queues stood there, fixed and almost as regular as if by rule. No bunching, no pushing, nothing like the mix-up to be seen at . . . a football match.

  The epic evacuation provided a welcome lift in that otherwise disastrous spring. If the expeditionary force had been demolished, the Commonwealth would have had to face the Nazis alone and with its army in tatters. The Royal Navy, the coast guard, and a flotilla of volunteers pulled first 100,000, then 200,000, then more than 330,000 British and Allied troops from the beach. Just as the English were preparing for the worst, they engineered a miracle.

  No orator anywhere at any time could have outperformed Churchill in those weeks. In May, he had nothing to offer except “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” On June 4, he pledged to “fight on the seas . . . oceans . . . air . . . beaches . . . landing grounds . . . fields . . . streets [and] . . . hills.” On June 18, he declared:

  The Battle of Britain is about to begin. . . . Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the light of perverted science. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to do our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”*

  As stirring as Churchill’s rhetoric was, oratory alone could not transform the abysmal spectacle presented by the world in midyear 1940. On June 10, Italy had joined the war on Germany’s side. The Nazis overran Paris four days later, and within seventy-two hours, the French gave up. The ceremony of surrender was held in a clearing in the Forest of Compiègne. Hitler, arriving first, paused before a monument commemorating the 1918 defeat of the “criminal . . . German Empire.” The führer turned and entered the same railway car (carefully preserved by the triumphant French) in which German officers had admitted to defeat twenty-two years previously. Following in his wake, the French officers took their seats and listened with blank faces as the terms of capitulation were read. After an exchange of salutes, the fifteen-minute ceremony was finished—and so, for the time being, was France.

  Between April and June, Germany had seized 400,000 square miles of Europe, taken control of air and naval bases from the North Sea to Marseilles, secured access to a bounty of ore and oil, and wiped out the only significant opposing army on the continent. There was scarcely anyone left—only Greece, Great Britain, and the ragtag bands of exiles that had washed up on English shores. Beneš, who rarely exhibited anger, pointed out that fully one-third of the German tanks rolling into France had been built in the Škoda Works, now turning out munitions for the enemy. He was bitter, as well, that to celebrate the Dunkirk rescue, the BBC had played the national anthems of all the countries in the Allied coalition—except that of Czechoslovakia.

  12

  The Irresistible Force

  My first memories are of an apartment where my parents slept on a Murphy bed, the kind that comes out of the wall. We had a green telephone and a cabinet radio several centimeters taller than I was. The radio fascinated me because it was our sole source of entertainment and because, hearing my father’s voice on the BBC, I thought that he was in the radio and tried to get him out.

  The apartment was a welcome step up from the cramped, dingy boardinghouse. We lived on the third floor of a redbrick building called Princes House at 52 Kensington Park Road in the neighborhood of Notting Hill Gate. The building was four years old; I was three. We had a tiny kitchen, a small bath, a little hallway, and two main rooms with central heating and milk delivery to the door. Dáša and I shared one room; my parents slept in the other, which had wooden floors and a trio of windows overlooking Portobello Road, a busy thoroughfare. In front, across the road, was Ladbroke Square Gardens, a lovely park where I was taken when the weather allowed. The building was U-shaped in order to accommodate a large horse chestnut tree; there were shrubs, too, along with pots of marigolds and violets.

  The residents of Princes House made up a miniature League of Nations—including British, Polish, Spanish, German, Canadian, and other Czech families, among them that of Prokop Drtina, the friend of my father who had been Beneš’s private secretary at the time of the Munich Conference. Drtina had stayed on for almost a year in Pragueto help organize the underground. He had escaped in February 1940 and resumed his role as an adviser to Beneš, working closely with the head of intelligence, Moravec. I must have liked Drtina, and he me, for in his memoir, he characterized little Madlenka Korbelová as “charming . . . a pleasure and an entertainment.”

  The author in front of Princes House, 1940

  Pedro Mahler

  Near the same time, Dáša wrote to her parents, “Madlenka is very cute. . . . She prays to God every night. One evening she thought she could pray with her little feet [instead of her hands].”
When Dáša was not helping to care for me, she was in boarding school, trying to adjust to an alien culture, a different language, a new way of writing, shoes that gave her blisters, a mandatory brown skirt that she thought drab, and the temperamental British weather. “When it rains,” she complained to her parents, “I am always in a bad mood, because they take us into a kind of big room and there we occupy ourselves.” She met a Czech girl whom she liked but from whom she was promptly separated because the teachers would not allow them to speak their native tongue.

  Life in exile had its irritations for the older generation as well. My mother remembered:

  We were living in a foreign country but surrounded only by Czech people, without making friends with the English except for a very few. . . . English people have a different temperament than those coming from Central Europe. It was pleasant to be there as only temporary guests. That was what we wanted and they wanted as well.

  Even with Churchill now in the prime minister’s chair, the legacy of Chamberlain and appeasement was not forgotten. My father told a story about that period. He had been on a bus and tripped over an Englishman’s foot. Instead of apologizing, he said, “I am not sorry, that is for Munich.” Then there was the immigrants’ ironic prayer: “Please, O God, give the British all the strength they will need to withstand the beating they deserve.”

  Because his mother was American, Jan Masaryk had spent more of his early life in the United States than in his native land. During his years across the Atlantic he had acquired a reputation as something of a playboy, a man who enjoyed a good time and loved music. Few had a better ear. Not only could he speak English, he could do so in a variety of accents equally suitable to a barroom argument or a Buckingham Palace dinner. He could make a joke out of almost anything and complained that he spent much of his time as ambassador correcting Britons who insisted on referring to his country as Czechoslovenia or Czechoslavia. But although he was at ease in the United Kingdom, many of his countrymen were not. We Czechoslovaks felt looked down upon for the clothes we wore and for our cuisine—such as the traditional Christmas Eve dinner of potato salad and fried carp.* Of course, we were hardly thrilled with British food. London loaves were bland and white instead of earthy and dark. The omnipresent beverage was not coffee but tea, which was ruined in any case by an excess of sugar and milk—and how could any nation whose elite ate cucumber and watercress sandwiches hope to defeat Nazi Germany?

  Evidence that Jan Masaryk might have been in England for too many years arrived at Princes House one afternoon along with the foreign minister. As always, he aimed to please, and when he rang the bell of number 35, we found that he had brought with him a huge platter of red Jell-O mold with slices of various fruits suspended within. Our family gathered round the table. As the eldest child, it was Dáša’s responsibility to express delight and gratitude. The problem was that she had never seen anything so revolting. With all the adults, including the famous Jan, looking on, she had no choice but to dig in. The fact that she recalled the scene so vividly seven decades later should be a warning to guests about bearing edible gifts.

  Language, too, was a barrier. Czechoslovaks sound the r differently from Britons and, like Germans, pronounce w as if it were a v. Any Slav, seeing a word in English, would likely emphasize the wrong syllable; as for London slang—incomprehensible. My mother cringed at an oft-told story about one of our soldiers who visited an aquarium soon after learning how to order fish and chips. He gazed happily at the swimming creatures and pointed. “See,” he said, “chips.” Another soldier answered the phone in a house where he was staying and instead of identifying himself as a guest replied to the inquiring voice that he was a “ghost.” Even Beneš pronounced “theories” like “tories,” spoke of using public debate to “make my luggage” instead of “make my case,” and expressed his determination to “take the bull by the corns.”

  IN 1938, BENEŠ had been required to choose between a fearsome war and an ignoble peace. In 1940, he was an exiled leader with a diplomatic agenda; for him, a more comfortable role. In the next two years, he was the irresistible force crashing against the immovable object of the British Foreign Office. Cadogan’s diary includes a number of references to meetings with him accompanied by such comments as “pretty awful” and “Beneš, for an hour and a quarter!”

  Diplomatically, the Czechoslovak leader knew exactly what he wanted to achieve and whom he needed to convince. His country, he insisted, had not really ceased to exist. The legal situation was the same as it had been before the now-discredited Munich pact. That meant that he was still president, the government in exile should be accorded full recognition, and the Allies were obliged to restore the nation’s prewar boundaries. If the legal arguments did not persuade, the moral rationale should. Czechoslovakia deserved support because the country had been badgered into submission by its supposed friends and because its traditions, in the spirit of the great T. G. Masaryk, stood for everything that Hitler was fighting to tear down.

  All that and more Beneš was prepared to explain at length to whoever would listen, but he did so from a position of weakness. Half his homeland was under Nazi occupation; a second portion had declared itself independent; and other slices were controlled by Hungary and the Soviet Union. In the week after Munich, he had formally resigned his presidency; his successor, Hácha, sat in the castle office. In London, there were contingents of Czech, Slovak, and anti-Hitler Sudeten Germans who refused to acknowledge Beneš as their rightful leader. Whether or not Foreign Office lawyers were sympathetic to the Czechoslovak plight, there was no legal precedent for what he was asking.

  Further, the president was hampered by his personality, which took flight for one cause only. He was incapable of the kind of sophisticated banter or feigned interest in others that helps to grease the wheels of diplomacy. He did not make jokes, coin witty aphorisms, or indulge in irony. He was sensitive about his height and tried to avoid being photographed while standing next to taller people. Eduard Beneš was not a natural leader.

  Yet he succeeded. He pushed ahead relentlessly but knew when to ease the pace. He moved from one step to the next instead of trying to leap the whole stairway in a single bound. He learned to restrain his frustration with British policy and took care in public statements to avoid giving offense. By sharing intelligence information and his own expertise, he made himself as useful as possible to the Allied cause. Even without the power to arrest, banish, or discipline foes, he gradually consolidated a position of undisputed leadership among Czechs and Slovaks.

  Beneš also chose competent aides, such as my father’s friend Hubert Ripka, now in London, to manage the day-to-day affairs of government. Ripka was a skilled administrator, the man to whom people inside the government turned to get things done. The broadcasting operation was under his jurisdiction, so my father went to him with problems and requests. Of these there were many because, as in any group under pressure, not everyone got along with everybody else. Drtina, for example, thought Jan Masaryk received too much attention and did too little of the hard work; Ripka coveted Masaryk’s job; the spy chief, Moravec, was envied for the secrets he knew and would not share with anyone except the president. Yet despite the petty resentments, their loyalty to the nation and its leader was never in doubt.

  All in all, Beneš performed remarkably. Notwithstanding his limitations, he was a genuine symbol of Western democracy. Helping him meant rejecting Munich, and with Hitler now unmasked, Munich had become a synonym for feckless leadership and cowardice. Besides, the British were in urgent need of people who would fight.

  During France’s precipitous fall, Beneš had appealed to Czech soldiers and airmen to escape by any means possible and find their way, if they could, to England. For many, the journey was both perilous and circuitous. Within a short time, however, some 4,000 soldiers were stationed at a temporary camp in Cholmondeley Park next to the castle in Cheshire of the same name. Most were still garbed
in the uniforms of the French Foreign Legion; the more fortunate wore the British battle dress with a narrow patch over the shoulders that read “Czechoslovakia.” Some of the units were made up of young soldiers and exhibited an air of confidence and vigor; others consisted of older reserves who didn’t belong in a professional military but had nowhere else to go. Age and appearance, however, were less serious barriers to cohesion than ideology and prejudice. Among the ranks were Czechs, Slovaks, Sudeten Germans, Jews, anti-Semites, and radical nationalists—also Communists, who, taking their cue from the Hitler-Stalin pact, were reluctant to fight on the same side as British “imperialists.” Ignoring a personal appeal from Beneš, more than four hundred of the leftists joined an international brigade pledged to carry on the battle but without the taint of capitalism.

  Meeting at the Foreign Ministry of the government in exile; (from left) Jiří Špaček, Josef Korbel, Hubert Ripka, and Jan Masaryk

  CTK PHOTO

  Beneš confers with Czechoslovak exile officers.

  Pedro Mahler

  Through a program of rigorous training, the early difficulties were resolved, and within a year or two, the Czechoslovak army was as able as any of its size. By contrast, there was never a question about the professionalism of the country’s airmen, of whom about nine hundred (including eighty-eight experienced pilots) made it to Great Britain. In July, fighter and bomber squadrons were formed, while additional pilots were assigned to Polish and other RAF units.*

  Years later, a friend of my family recalled visiting the Czechoslovak club on Clifton Road near Cholmondeley. “That is where the officers went for coffee and to schmooze,” wrote Renata Kauders, “and sometimes to pick up girls. It was a lively place. Surrounded by the noise and movement, you felt as if you were in the middle of the war.” Among the officers with whom Renata remembered sharing drinks were two army men, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík. Both were in their late twenties, handsome, and full of coiled energy; Kubiš was tall, slender, and as reserved as the muscular Gabčík was outgoing; each smiled easily. Renata did not know (and neither did the men) the role that they would soon play in the history of the war.