Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  People streamed into the streets to cheer, to welcome, to embrace their liberators, asking them into their homes, offering them every good thing they had. Pretty girls covered the tanks with flowers and climbed onto the armored trucks. The Russians laughed good-naturedly and took out their accordions. The world was full of fragrance, and music and joy.

  Russian soldiers being welcomed

  Jan Kaplan Archive

  In later years, many writers, including my father, cited Eisenhower’s failure to send U.S. troops into Prague as a sign of Western indifference. This is not entirely fair. Beneš had never advocated liberation by the Americans and, on the contrary, had made clear his warm relationship with Stalin. Further, the Allies had no role in planning or encouraging the last-minute outbreak of violence. Eisenhower was in the middle of orchestrating the surrender of Germany—this to relieve everyone’s suffering, including Prague’s. Victory was imminent only because the Soviet army, which had two million men committed to the battle, had prevented Hitler from sending more of his troops to fight in the West. The Allied effort had proceeded smoothly, moreover, because all the participants, including the USSR, had abided by their agreements. With the war in the Pacific still undecided, a decision to break faith with the Kremlin at that critical juncture would have carried extraordinary risks.

  In any case, the responsibility for making policy was not Eisenhower’s. The general had been ordered to destroy the German military and bring the war to an early and victorious end, not to concern himself with the postwar political balance. Still, the record is clear that Ike was prepared to unleash Patton and would have done so had the Soviets not objected. The blame for what happened in Prague rests properly with Moscow.

  There is, however, little fair about the creation of national myths. Symbols matter, and some quests—however quixotic—cannot be ignored without paying a price. The Prague uprising made little sense tactically but possessed its own rationale as an expression of bottled rage, coming as it did from a people denied earlier opportunities to fight. The rebellion was not about logic but about courage and honor, or what my father referred to in the context of Munich as “national ethos.” So the legend was born that the United States had turned away from the Czechs at their moment of greatest need. For years to come, Communists would exploit the perception that Americans had “sat in Plzeň drinking Pilsener” while the people’s quest for freedom was drowned in blood.

  That perception lingers. When anniversaries of the uprising are marked, politicians still refer to Eisenhower’s failure. This is true even in Plzeň, where, as I can bear witness, the local population has preserved many of the U.S. jeeps and trucks that Patton’s men left behind. In 2010, Václav Havel told me that an American liberation of Prague would have made “all the difference.” Havel, whose family spent the war in the countryside, remembered the end of the conflict as a time of uncertainty. The Germans were being driven out; Soviet troops were running around with half a dozen stolen watches on each forearm; and people were popping out of the forest claiming to be resistance fighters when, in some cases, they were brigands. A Czech pilot returning from England landed his plane in a meadow not far from Havel’s house. The whole town threw him a celebration; they had deviled eggs with ketchup and salad.

  One of the principles outlined at Košice was that the new Czech and Slovak armed forces would be trained and equipped along the model of the Red Army; that meant, in practice, that the Russian-based exiles would form the core of the new military while the soldiers and airmen who had fought with the British would be shunned. The Communists wanted a monopoly on wartime heroes and so redefined the London-based military as a tool of capitalist oppression. Within a few years, the majority of the men who had fought so bravely with the RAF were either forced again into exile or—as with the pilot who had been feted by Havel and his community—in jail.

  24

  Unpatched

  In July 1945, I returned to the land of my birth, flying across Europe in the belly of an RAF bomber. I was eight, my sister, Kathy, only three; we huddled between my mother and my cousin Dáša, now seventeen. The seats—actually hard benches—were in bays where the air force usually kept bombs. The noise was deafening, the plane rattled and shook; many of the forty or so passengers became ill, and I was petrified of flying for years afterward. Our stomachs churned when the pilot zoomed in low over Dresden, the German city destroyed by Allied firebombing earlier that year. Inexplicably, the U.S. Air Force had dropped 150 tons of munitions on Prague at the same time; no military targets had been struck, but five hundred people had been killed. Evidently the pilots had mistaken the Czech capital for Dresden.

  My father, who had returned in May, met us at the airport. He was distressed by how far from the reception facility the plane had been directed to discharge its passengers. The British pilots were allowed to use only the most remote areas, a worrisome sign of how pervasive the Soviet presence had become. But at least we arrived safely; two months later, a similar flight bearing returnees crashed, killing all aboard.

  When the war ended, Dáša had been at sixes and sevens about what to do. She had spent the previous semester at a school in Wales specially established for Czech students. After being pressed to speak English for several years, the youngsters were now encouraged to brush up on their Czech in preparation for the return home. Understandably confused, they invented a language that was half one, half the other, calling it “Czechlish.”

  When the time came to go, Dáša hesitated. Uncle Honza and Aunt Ola invited her to remain with them in England rather than face the uncertainties of postwar Prague, yet one of those uncertainties was never far from Dáša’s mind. Like other exiles, she had made nerve-racking and often frustrating visits to the Red Cross to discover what she could about the fate of her family. There had been no letters for several years. News reports about Czech and other Jews were horrifying. One sad day, she learned of the deaths of her mother and sister, but she was also shown a list of survivors that included the name Rudolf Deiml. That settled the issue; she would go back to Prague to be there when her father showed up. “I had to go and wait for him,” she told me much later, “because we knew that everyone else was dead.”

  IN PRAGUE, OUR family was provided by the government with a flat on the second floor of a seventeenth-century house overlooking Hradčany Square. The apartment was spacious, with large bright rooms, a fireplace, nice furnishings, and ivy-covered balconies. Dáša had her own bedroom; I shared one with Kathy. I adored the apartment but was unsure, at first, what to make of Prague. Walton-on-Thames, where I had had friends and playmates, had been pretty and green. Here, I knew no one. The streets were often too crowded for my comfort, and then there were those Russian soldiers.

  Still, it was not long before the city had me under its spell. Across the street was a small park dedicated to the fourteenth-century Saint John of Nepomuk, a man as revered by Roman Catholics as Jan Hus is by Protestants. While Hus had been martyred for challenging the Church, John had been thrown off Charles Bridge for defending the Seal of the Confession against the sacrilege of a secular ruler. In statues and portraits, the holy man’s head is typically encircled by a halo of five stars, representing the heavenly witnesses to his drowning.

  When I wasn’t in the park, I was happily wandering across the square (actually a long rectangle) to the famous castle where Beneš and his wife now lived. The guards there were in fine uniforms, and nothing was more amusing to an eight-year-old than to make odd faces at the men in hopes that one would smile, which they never did.

  During the war, German engineers had confiscated more than 14,000 church bells, intending to melt them down into artillery and tanks. The faithful now rushed to return them to their rightful towers and spires. Prague had seen fighting, especially in those final days, but most of the glorious baroque architecture, the ornate palaces, and the slate-roofed apartment buildings remained intact. The pavement that had
been torn up was soon repaired, and trams began again to rumble through the rabbit warren of streets from Old Town to New. The various shops retained their distinctive hand-wrought signs, separating the boot maker from the apothecary and the butcher from the baker. Whether from one of the bridges or the castle heights, I enjoyed gazing down on the flowing water and swooping gulls, at the anglers in their small boats and the cargo vessels carrying who knew what to who knew where. Every evening at sunset, lamps were aglow amid the trees and blossoming shrubs on the river banks. This, I thought to myself, is what my parents had been talking about when they looked forward to returning home.

  Of course, I didn’t understand that Czechoslovakia had been through an ordeal that had changed it forever. Two hundred and fifty thousand of its people had died, including roughly 80 percent of the Jewish population. Tens of thousands of homes had been destroyed. Many of the larger factories had been bombed, and the country’s rail and highway network had been ripped asunder. Food was scarce. In the capital, the intense fighting of the final days had left its mark. On the streets, women who had survived the concentration camps wore long sleeves to cover scars and tattoos. The new government moved to reclaim offices and ministries that still “stank of the Nazis.” The Gestapo torture chamber, where Ata Moravec and thousands of others had suffered, was preserved, its guillotine caked with blood, draped now by a Czechoslovak flag and small wreath. The ethnic German and Hungarian minorities, once welcome participants in Czechoslovak democracy, faced the prospect of expulsion by presidential decree. From the top down, the victors rushed to punish wartime collaborators, thus advancing the cause of justice but also generating abuses and creating opportunities for political mischief.

  In his writings, my father described a country divided among returning exiles from London and Moscow, resistance fighters, “sit-it-outers,” “comrades” (who talked the most), and former concentration camp inmates (who said the least). So much had happened that the sense of national solidarity had all but drained away. Too many people had grown used to taking orders. The Czechs who had survived the occupation resented their countrymen who had been “safely out of it” in England. Many of the exiles who had served under arms questioned the bravery of those who had remained at home. The gulfs separating these groups, lamented my father, “were deep, always emotional, sometimes rational, and rarely bridgeable.”

  As in Walton-on-Thames, my father walked me to school. The difference was that, in English schools, I had thrived. In Prague classrooms, I spent most of my time in the corner. When my parents asked why, they were told I had been arrogant. How so? My teacher said I had complimented her on a dress that she was wearing, a simple courtesy in England but too familiar an utterance for a child to make in the more formal atmosphere of Czechoslovakia. At least that is how I remember the story; in any case, the school was too strict for my taste.

  The Foreign Ministry, where my father worked, was only a few blocks from our apartment, housed in the imposing Černín Palace. Years later, I would have the opportunity to compare the palace to the U.S. Department of State. From the outside, Černín is a striking example of seventeenth-century architecture, while the State Department resembles an oversize discarded box. A visitor to the palace is greeted by a massive hall with vaulted ceilings, exquisite tapestries, antique furniture, and a dramatic sculpture of Hercules slaying the Hydra. The State Department welcomes its guests with metal detectors and a security desk. To be sure, the U.S. diplomatic reception rooms are gorgeous, but they are hidden away on the eighth floor and used only for special occasions or tours. Both buildings offer a spectacular view. The State Department overlooks the Lincoln Memorial, while from its Czech counterpart one can see a historic church, wherein reside the remains of Saint Starosta, a Portuguese princess who rebuffed the advances of her unwanted husband by—with God’s help—growing a beard.

  My father assisted both the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, and his deputy, Vlado Clementis. Each of these men had a person assigned to public relations, and there were two secretaries, one who handled business in Czech and the other in Slovak. The office manager was a veteran civil servant of “frail stature [with] red cheeks, thin lips, a pointed nose, mousy hair and small grey eyes.” That flattering portrayal comes courtesy of Hana Stránská, a young woman who had been on my father’s staff in London and whom he had recruited to help out in Prague. Stránská, twenty-seven years old, worked mostly as a translator of English and also handled the overflow of paperwork in Czech.

  My father’s duties included the organization of what would become a rapidly growing Foreign Ministry and the oversight of day-to-day political activities, a heavy burden given that Masaryk spent much of his time abroad. Dealing with important visitors also consumed considerable energy; among the guests that busy summer were the two military icons of the West: General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. My father was entrusted with these responsibilities in part because he was one of the few who enjoyed a good relationship with both Masaryk and Clementis. The two diplomats, though thrust together professionally, were barely of the same species. Unlike the informal Masaryk, Clementis was habitually serious and businesslike, with an intellectual and ideological commitment to communism. Masaryk disliked ideology of all kinds, thinking that it made people forget their humanity in the vain pursuit of foolish goals. As a child, I knew both of them: Masaryk with his round face, big belly, and joking manner, Clementis with his stern eyes and deep voice.

  When asked to help manage the Foreign Ministry, my father was told by his superiors that the job would be temporary; in fact, Clementis urged him to stay longer than planned. Despite his relatively young age (thirty-six), my father was in line to become an ambassador. The logical assignment, given his experience, was a return to Belgrade as our country’s minister to Yugoslavia. Dáša chose to remain behind with a great-aunt to finish school and await news of her own father. The rest of us, once again, would be on the move.

  Masaryk and Clementis, 1946

  CTK PHOTO

  For months, Dáša clung to the hope that Dr. Deiml was indeed still alive. There were many rumors, including the possibility that former prisoners had been sent to the Soviet Union. Finally, in February 1946, she received a letter from Jiří Barbier, the carpenter who had known her family at Terezín and who had accompanied Rudolf on his final journey. Barbier, who had obtained Dáša’s address from the Red Cross, apologized for being the bearer of shattering news but thought that perhaps she had already discovered the truth. She had not.

  Dáša’s distress was unknown to me then because of my age, self-absorption, and the fact that we had spent just two months in Prague before leaving for Belgrade. Looking back, I can barely conceive her pain; but I have come to realize that she was not alone among the members of my family in experiencing and wrestling with grief.

  MY MOTHER WAS not ordinarily one to hide her feelings. If upset, she would say so; if sad, her tears would flow. But when we returned to Prague after the war, I am convinced in hindsight that she made a courageous effort to conceal her pain. She had loved her mother and sister dearly, but I saw no sign of the agony she must have felt. My father, too, showed no outward signs of mourning. I did not wonder about this, for I was told only that my grandparents had died. Alfred had succumbed before I was born; Růžena, Olga, and Arnošt were names I barely recognized; I could not remember ever calling anyone Grandmother or Grandfather.

  Fifty years later, when I learned the circumstances of their deaths and those of so many other relations, I again wondered what my father had felt. I could imagine the depths of his sorrow but had no evidence. Now I have. Rummaging through the boxes in my garage, I found a manila folder containing a document, 123 pages long, triple-spaced with narrow margins. The text is typed neatly with a few revisions in pencil. This was my father’s attempt at a novel. He had mentioned it to me once, but I had not taken him seriously and in any event had heard no more about it. A profess
or and historian, my father had a genius for making the past come alive, but he also dealt in facts. In his books and articles, he wrote to develop a thesis and prove a point. Why would he try his hand at fiction? What did he care about profoundly enough that he felt compelled to write but could not do so in his customary way? I picked up the folder, removed the paper clip, and turned to the opening page.

  “The plane was about to land,” the story begins. Peter Ptachek,* a young diplomat, is returning to Prague after six years in London, where he had directed wartime broadcasting for the Czechoslovak government in exile. Unmarried, he fantasizes about a long-awaited reunion:

  He will slip quietly through the backyard and open cautiously the door. Careful, one tile in the corridor is loose and makes [a] noise. . . . There she is. Bent over the oven. . . . He covers her temples with his hands, and. . . . Maybe she will not be at home. She just went to buy something for supper. Maybe she is in the country and [has] left a letter behind. It will be under the second glass from the right side of the kitchen cabinet. So it always was in the old times.

  Once on the ground, Peter takes a taxi from the airport to the Alcron Hotel, where returning officials have been assigned rooms. His route takes him past the castle and cathedral, down the steep street named for Jan Neruda, across the bridge toward Wenceslas Square. “Centuries have passed and centuries will pass,” thinks Peter to himself. At the hotel, he is greeted cordially by the concierge, who had probably spent the previous six years repeating, just as courteously, “Heil Hitler.” In the lobby, he overhears snatches of conversation among other returnees: “Yes, I have found them all” or “I haven’t found anybody.”