Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  Peter takes streetcar number 1. Disembarking, he walks—then runs—to the familiar door. Behind it, instead of his mother, he finds a stranger, who says that she has been living in the house for three months; before that a German family had stayed there. She has no information. Stunned, Peter decides to hike to the home of his mother’s younger sister, Martha, who lives with her husband, Jan, and two children. As he walks, he thinks of the many Friday evenings before the war when he had joined Martha’s family in playing chamber music. He arrives and knocks. The door opens—again, not a familiar face but a stranger:

  Peter introduced himself and asked about his uncle.

  Yes we knew him very well, answered the man. We were good friends of both Jan and Martha. We also knew your mother, poor soul.

  What happened? Where is she? muttered Peter in fear.

  My dear friend, if I have to be the first person to tell you. She is no more. It happened in May 1942. They took her away, and two weeks later Jan got a note about it. Then came Jan and Martha’s turn. Before they came for them, Jan asked us to move into their apartment.

  What happened to the boys?

  God in heaven. They took them too, two days later. I have got some pictures. Would you like to see them? Your mother’s picture, too.

  No, I don’t think I would. Not now. I’ll come later.

  Darkness of the night swallowed Peter’s sinking body. Heavy, slow steps carried him through streets and squares. Prague, his cradle, suddenly became to him the strangest city in the world. Charles Bridge was leading him to the bank of the unknown. As he was crossing it a woman, standing under the statue of Christ, emerged and asked: Would you buy me a drink, darling?

  Peter went on and looked down to the river. The life on and under the bridge obviously continued unchanged, he thought.

  It was well after midnight when he reached the hotel. He tottered to his room. Tense and exhausted, he fell on the bed. His face dropped into the grave of the pillow. “God give me one, I beseech you, give me at least one,” he sobbed. Stones of tears were falling through a hole in the pillow cover. The war was over. It left behind many holes. Some could be patched up. Some couldn’t.

  So there it was. My father was no stoic; the opposite, in fact. The emotions were there and had been tugging at him for years. Probably he had begun writing with an idea to publish, but he must have concluded that it was not something he could do. Why had his mother and cousins been taken away?

  Later in the story, Peter goes to the countryside to visit his boyhood home. The door is answered by a remarkably short man. Peter explains himself and asks if he might come in and look around. The man shrugs in embarrassment, then opens his mouth and makes unintelligible sounds. After a moment, Peter realizes that his host is deaf and dumb. Following some awkward attempts to communicate, Peter politely takes his leave. “I am grateful,” he thinks to himself as he walks away; the encounter must have been a sign: “The past was to be deaf and dumb to him. It was to be neither heard, nor spoken.”

  25

  A World Big Enough to Keep Us Apart

  During the war, Beneš had sought diplomatic backing for his plan to banish ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia save only those who could prove their resistance to fascist occupation. In 1944, he submitted a memorandum to the great powers (United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union) proposing to expel about two-thirds of his country’s Germans. Those transferred would be entitled to take with them all movable property and receive compensation for the rest. He pledged that the process would be completed within two years. “Our people,” he declared, “can no longer live in the same country with Germans.”

  This policy of confiscation and expulsion—embodied in what became known as the Beneš decrees—reflected a passion that had seeped into the bones and blood of virtually the entire Czech population. Throughout their lives and through the inherited memory of their nation, Czechs had shared space with their German neighbors. Each people had frustrated the ambitions of the other, and the two had maintained separate identities despite mixed marriages, personal friendships, commercial ties, and countless common experiences. It was never inevitable that this intimate relationship would terminate in war, but the war had happened and dug a deep well of bitterness. In May 1945, most Czechs had no interest in defining a new relationship with Germans; they wanted to end that relationship.

  When, on May 17, one of the major democratic parties held its victory celebration in Prague, our friend and former neighbor Prokop Drtina was among the principal speakers; he would soon become minister of justice and a central figure in the new government. For the event, in front of a large and enthusiastic assemblage of future voters, his political antennae were fully extended. Writing later, he confessed that denouncing Germans to a Czech audience in 1945 was “a demagogic opportunity” too favorable to pass up. Getting rid of Germans, he said in his speech, “is the historic task of our generation. . . . Our new country cannot be built except as a pure state. . . . One of us must leave—either the Germans or us—and since this is a Czech country and we are the winners, they are the ones to go!”

  The Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, stoked the same fire by suggesting that expulsions were merited for reasons deeply rooted in the past. “Now we will definitely compensate for White Mountain,” he promised. “And not only that; we [will] reach even further into our nation’s history: by confiscating the property of the Germans, we will rectify the mistakes committed by the kings of the Přemyslid dynasty who [invited] . . . German settlers: now they will be expelled from our land once and for all.” These and similar declarations evoked ovations of such foot-stomping rowdiness that any talk of orderly procedures and equitable compensation was soon forgotten. The assurances that had lent a veneer of reasonableness to Beneš’s diplomatic memos were cast aside in the first flush of victory.

  During the late spring and early summer of 1945, an unknown number of Germans were shot, lynched, or beaten to death. The citizens of Brno gathered as many as could be found, roughly 20,000, and forced them to march toward Austria. Due to a lack of food, an outbreak of dysentery, and an almost total lack of organization, an estimated 1,700 died. There were other abuses. According to one report:

  In Nový Bydžov, 77 captured German soldiers were executed; in the mountain town of Špindlerův Mlýn, 30 German civilians were murdered along with 50 soldiers; near Přerov 265 were killed, including 120 women and 74 children younger than fourteen years of age. In Postoloprty, a Czech investigative team later unearthed the corpses of 763 Germans who had been concentrated in the area and liquidated.

  Due process, especially in the first weeks, was widely neglected. In some cases, alleged collaborators were simply killed; in others, they were hauled off to makeshift prisons to be interrogated and tortured. In many towns, the maiming of local Germans became a spectator sport, as crowds gathered to jeer. To the local guardians of security, the rough treatment was not lawlessness but justice. Germans were given the same rations that Jews had been allotted during the war and were prohibited from entering hotels, restaurants, and shops. They could no longer speak their language in public. In some towns, they were required to wear specially colored armbands; in others, swastikas were painted on their backs. Their schools were closed and many of their businesses seized. Czech women who had a reputation for fraternizing with Germans were humiliated. Not surprisingly in this environment, horrible mistakes were made. In early May, an elderly man was beaten to death in a Prague hospital after he cited as his hometown a village in the Sudeten region. The killers assumed that he was German when, in fact, he was Czech. In any case, he was not causing harm to anyone from his hospital bed.

  A few weeks after the war’s end, Hana Stránská (the twenty-seven-year-old who worked in my father’s office) went on an excursion to the American-occupied resort town of Marienbad. She found the streets crowded with easygoing, wisecracking U.S. soldiers and was upset t
o see some of them walking “arm-in-arm with dirndled Sudeten-German Frauleins.” Hana could not forget the camp survivors she had seen on the streets and trolleys, with their haggard faces, scarred bodies, and hair just starting to grow back.

  As she walked along, her senses were attracted by the sound of a Czech love song and the sight of a group of men singing and dancing in the middle of the street. These were not, she soon realized, ordinary singers; they were, in fact, German prisoners being ordered to perform by a contingent of Czech soldiers. Every so often, when the Germans stopped or lost their place, the soldiers screamed at them to resume. Hana smiled.

  Germans surrounded by angry Czechs

  Jan Kaplan Archive

  A U.S. serviceman, standing nearby, was not so content. He yelled at the Czechs to stop. “The war is over, so halt your bullying!” he shouted. Some of his buddies agreed.

  That was too much for Hana. “How dare you?” she demanded of the American. “Where in the States are you from, anyway?”

  “Mississippi,” he said.

  “Miss-iss-ip-pi?” said Hana, drawing out the syllables sarcastically. “I see. So you’ve come all the way from Miss-iss-ip-pi to tell us in Czech-o-slo-vakia how we should treat our traitorous Nazi scum, our prisoners. You find it too much if we humiliate those dregs of humanity by making them sing Czech folk tunes? Where have you been all this time? Do you know what they have done? Do you know they tortured and killed millions? Or haven’t you heard? Or maybe,” said Hana, drawing a deep breath, “you sympathize with them because you float dead Negroes down your river?”

  Her words caused a commotion: furious and indignant soldiers gathered round; Hana’s own phrase was thrown back at her: “How dare you?”

  Another American intervened. “She’s absolutely right,” he said. “I’ve just come from those camps where we’ve been liberating the inmates. You should see it. Besides, these Germans are not being harmed in any way.” Turning to the first soldier, he said, “Let’s you and I keep out of it, okay?”

  Like many Czechs, including my parents, Stránská had lived with Germans most of her life. She had known them at school, spent summers with them, learned their language, shared dinners and social occasions. But the war had changed her. She later summarized her thoughts on that day in Marienbad:

  I will not take a German’s word for it that he is innocent. Who would admit guilt as colossal as that? As far as I am concerned, they were guilty until proven innocent. And they would so remain in my eyes for the rest of my life. I vowed that I would never utter a word in German unless no other language would serve . . . never willingly set foot in either Germany or Austria ever again . . . not buy German products, large or small . . . not talk to a German or Austrian, not even to ask the time of day. The idea that a German might smile at me gave me goose-pimples. The world is big enough to keep us apart.

  The first time I heard this story, I thought to myself: who is right—the soldier who intervened or the one who said it wasn’t America’s business to try to sort out disputes that arise among others? It is a question that—in this context and many more recent ones—I still ask.

  As reflected in Hana’s account, the U.S. troops who occupied Plzeň, Marienbad, and other parts of southwest Bohemia generally did not allow the abuse of Germans. The Soviets, who were in control of the rest of the country, encouraged and joined in it. This discrepancy filled many Czechs with resentment—toward the Americans.*

  My father, a student of history, came to appreciate the remarkable and deeply felt efforts made by Germany to atone for the most unspeakable chapter in its history. My mother’s reaction was comparable to that of Hana. She never wanted to hear a good word on Germany’s behalf. Years later, when I first told her of my love for a man named Joe Albright, she asked me to repeat the name. When I did, she sighed, “Thank God it’s Albright, not Albrecht.”

  OFFICIALLY, THE GOVERNMENT’S plan called for the division of ethnic Germans into three categories: (1) collaborators and opportunists; (2) those who had been arrested or persecuted by the Nazis; and (3) others. People in the first category were required to leave, those in the second could stay, and those in the third could reapply for citizenship. By presidential order, 270,000 farms covering more than six million acres were confiscated.

  The Nazi racial laws had been hard to implement because people of even arguably one blood were the exception, not the rule; the Beneš decrees ran into a similar problem. Many Czech and Sudeten families were culturally mixed or had bounced back and forth between the two nationalities based on which was more convenient at the time. Even Hana Stránská, who had attended German schools as a child, had to go to great lengths to prove herself a Czech. Less successful was a man, Emmanuel Goldberger, who in 1942 had escaped from a concentration camp and ultimately joined the Czechoslovak exile army. Because he had been raised in a German-speaking family, the Defense Ministry denied his application to return home. Goldberger was accused of having chosen a Czech identity during wartime “in order to remain hidden and avoid attention,” not out of “authentic” national loyalties. The fact that he was Jewish was not considered a sufficient extenuating circumstance.

  To its credit, the Beneš government soon took steps to curb the excesses. It called for an end to extralegal violence, jailed thousands of people on charges of plunder and theft, and established a structure for adjudicating cases of alleged collaboration. In mid-June, Beneš declared that the transfer policy would not go forward except with international cooperation and in an organized way.

  IN JULY, NINE weeks after V-E Day, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union met in Potsdam, a riverside city once home to Prussian royalty, fifteen miles southwest of Berlin. Of the trio that had convened in Yalta five months previously, only Stalin would remain through the conference. Roosevelt’s place was taken by Truman; Churchill had to excuse himself after a few days to return to England, where elections were under way. To his chagrin, British voters decided that, with Germany now crushed, they no longer had need for his services.* His chair in Potsdam was filled by Clement Attlee, the comparatively colorless head of the Labour Party. After discussing the future administration of Germany and Austria and the organization of war-crimes trials, the leaders found time to approve the “orderly and humane” transfer of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.

  The Allied governments accepted Beneš’s basic argument, but they also asked him to slow the pace. Prague should not be deporting Germans until the occupation authorities were prepared to receive them, a period of waiting that would consume several months. The trains finally began to run in December. The deportations were implemented by the army, which secured the perimeter of villages one or two at a time, then notified residents that they would have to leave. Under the rules specified by the Allies, families were not to be divided and food and clothing allowances were to be adequate. For the deportees, that still meant leaving behind their land, dwellings, livestock, farm equipment, and the graves of their ancestors. There was no right of appeal. During the yearlong exodus, more than 1.2 million were sent to the American Zone of Germany and another 630,000 to the Soviet Zone. Several hundred thousand more had been pushed out before the program officially started. In the end, only a quarter-million Germans remained in Czechoslovakia, less than 10 percent of the prewar level.

  IN JUSTIFYING HIS policy, Beneš argued that the conditions existing prior to 1939 could not be repeated after the war. The Sudeten minority had served as a pretext for Munich, which had in turn destroyed the republic and imperiled the very existence of the Czech people. Further, Sudeten support for the Nazis had been enthusiastic and widespread; such a population could never be at home in Czechoslovakia. Finally, the German presence was a provocation; if it remained, people would likely be killed out of a desire for revenge.

  In defense, most Sudetens said that they had been unaware of the extent of the Nazi atrocities. They were, t
hey insisted, just ordinary citizens—butchers, farmers, shopkeepers, tailors, factory workers. They had not known about the death camps; they had never liked the Nazis; they had become party members out of fear; they had only been protecting their families; they could not fairly be blamed. The Czechoslovak government responded that it was impractical to evaluate the behavior of every individual. Lists were drawn up of Germans with proven antifascist credentials; they could stay, but others were required to go.

  The expulsion of ethnic Germans remains controversial. Was it a legitimate response to the crimes of war or an overzealous reaction grounded in vengeance? Was it flawed in conception or merely in implementation? Did it help to make Czechoslovakia a better country?

  Certainly a case could be made for deporting individuals who were shown, after an objective legal process, to have joined in persecuting their neighbors. Under the Beneš policy, however, a German and a Czech who had acted in the same manner would be judged differently. Passive obedience on the part of a Czech or Slovak was acceptable; in a German, it was not. Undoubtedly, many of the Germans who were expelled deserved their punishment, but many who were not culpable also lost their homes.

  My views on Czechoslovak policy in this period are colored by my experiences as an adult far removed from the passions of the day. As a diplomat, I sharply condemned ethnic cleansing in Central Africa and the Balkans and championed the creation of a war crimes tribunal to ensure that individual rather than collective responsibility would be assigned for humanitarian crimes. Collective punishments, such as forced expulsions, are usually rationalized on the grounds of security but almost always fall most heavily on the defenseless and weak. According to the Czechoslovak government’s own figures, 80 percent of the Germans targeted for eviction were women, children, or elderly. It seems revealing, as well, that under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechs had been among the leading advocates of minority rights. Beneš had personally helped establish the legal protections that were in place under the League of Nations. That devotion to principle was no doubt sincere, but it had been consumed in the fire of Nazi atrocities.