The author and her sister, Kathy, prepared for flower duty
Intrigued as he was by his travels, my father also had cause for disappointment. Many of the friends he had known before the war were unwilling to resume their relationship because, under Tito, contact with a suspect foreign embassy was grounds for arrest. Even the most innocent interaction could lead to a problem. For example, the French ambassadress had a dog for which she wanted to find a mate. Through inquiries, she located a Yugoslav family that owned an animal of identical breed and opposite sex. A conjugal visit was arranged, after which the police descended on the family in question, interrogating the head of the household for days.
The altered atmosphere drained the spontaneity from conversation; people either repeated the party line or restricted themselves to pleasantries. One friend eventually told my father that he had stopped visiting because he had been ordered to spy on him, which he refused to do. Other acquaintances, such as the Ribnikars, with whom our family had been close, were now partisans of Tito, whether out of sincerity or survival instincts my parents were unsure. As a result, my father could share his thoughts about the most interesting and meaty issues only with other members of the diplomatic corps or with the rare Yugoslav who didn’t care what anybody saw or heard.
Early in his tenure, my father attended a session of the Yugoslav parliament at which Tito was the main speaker. Instead of just standing politely when the dictator entered, the Soviet ambassador joined in enthusiastic applause at various points throughout the remarks. His lead was followed by the representatives from Communist-controlled Poland, Hungary, and Romania. This was the beginning of what the Cold War would produce—a sad collection of compliant satellite regimes whose officials would clap in unison whenever the right rhetorical buttons were pushed, such as an attack on bourgeois capitalists or a complaint about Western imperialism. My father refused to join in this already tired game. He instructed his embassy staff that when attending events they might courteously applaud Tito’s arrival, but they should listen to his speeches in silence.
This effort to place professionalism above politics nettled the embassy’s lawyer, a Communist who started to cause trouble in Prague, only to find that the ambassador was no pushover. After a little investigation, my father uncovered evidence that the counselor had been smuggling currency on the black market. As that was illegal, the miscreant was promptly dismissed. There were, however, no final victories. The Foreign Ministry soon sent a replacement, who spent his time reporting on every allegedly disloyal comment he heard. This may explain an entry I was shown in 2011 from the files of the secret police complaining that my father was “not a Communist” but instead a Beneš supporter who had done little “to earn the favor of leading Yugoslav officials.” Further, the embassy staff included Gottwald’s daughter, Marta, likely a pipeline to her father and—because she was married to a Yugoslav diplomat—possibly passing secrets to Tito as well. Given the scrutiny my father received, it’s a miracle that he lasted as long as he did, for he took every opportunity to share information with the British and U.S. embassies—disclosing nothing that would hurt his country but whatever might help the democratic cause.
To shield me from Yugoslavia’s poisonous politics, my parents had asked Blanka, a twenty-year-old Czech governess, to come to live with us in Belgrade. She took charge of my schooling and helped to look after my sister, Kathy, as well. To this day, all the grammar I know in my native tongue I learned between the ages of eight and ten. Once again my parents did all they could to make life, as changeable as it was, feel normal. My father’s office was connected to the residence through a passageway on the third floor. When he was not busy, he joined us for lunch, and in the afternoon we drove into the countryside in our black Tatra, a Czechoslovak car with fins on the back resembling a Batmobile. If the weather suited, we enjoyed walks in the woods or stopped at Mount Avala, where we climbed the steps to the huge World War I Monument to the Unknown Hero.
Sometimes my father invited Yugoslav government officials or journalists to join us, I think now because open-air conversations were less likely to be overheard. It may be that the Yugoslavs who were brave enough to come didn’t expect to live long in any event; they were the most reckless drivers I had ever seen. I remember well my horror at watching one of their cars run over a dog. My father worried because the Czechoslovak government had given a Tatra to Tito as a gift. The old man had passed the vehicle on to his son, who drove like a maniac despite having lost an arm in the war. “Suppose there is a crash,” my father said. “Who do you think Tito will blame—the driver or the car?”
STALIN WAS TRUE to his word in one respect: Soviet troops didn’t stay to occupy Czechoslovakia. The U.S. Embassy helped to negotiate a mutual withdrawal so that American and Soviet soldiers departed by the end of 1945—with the Russians carrying off as much in the way of jewelry, crockery, farm implements, carpets, plumbing fixtures, toys, musical instruments, mattresses, and other loot as they could manage. The Red Army’s departure, however, did not mean an end to Soviet influence. At public events, there were as many portraits of Stalin as of Beneš. Gottwald and his comrades spoke constantly of the country’s debt to Moscow and argued that the USSR was a valuable trading partner—selling grain, buying armaments, and exchanging a long list of goods.
Less openly, the Soviet interest in Czechoslovakia was piqued by what was, at the time, the globe’s most sought after substance. When, in August 1945, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosions changed the world forever, there were three sources of uranium: Canada, the Belgian Congo, and the Jáchymov mine in Bohemia. The Russians did not have access to the first two; hence their hunger for a special relationship with Prague. Earlier in the century, tailings from the Jáchymov uranium mine had been used by Marie Curie to produce radium for health treatments and by glassmakers as a source of yellow coloring. With the dawn of the nuclear age, uranium itself became the prize.
Stalin wanted a guaranteed supply, and he would get one. His already advantageous negotiating position was enhanced by the eager cooperation of Prime Minister Fierlinger. Well before any formal talks began, Soviet security agents were allowed to inspect the mines, take samples, and send soldiers to guard the area. Bypassing the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry, Fierlinger worked directly with Moscow. On October 7, a Sunday, he walked through the garden of his country estate to that of his neighbor, President Beneš, for a confidential discussion. He explained the Soviets’ desire for uranium and suggested that a pact on the right terms would ensure Stalin’s support on other matters, such as the development of oil fields in Slovakia and the clarification of minor border disputes with Poland and Austria. The president insisted that the Czechoslovaks retain a share of the uranium (the agreed amount was “up to 10 percent”) but did not object either to the proposed arrangement or to its secrecy.
The treaty was approved at a closed meeting of the cabinet on November 23, 1945, the day Jan Masaryk first learned of it. Two months later, he gave a speech to the United Nations promising that his country’s uranium would be used solely for peaceful purposes. Moscow had other plans. Stringent security measures were put into place, and the Red Army, although gone from the rest of the country, never left the Jáchymov district. Labor at the mines was furnished by a combination of civilian workers and prisoners, first German and later Czech and Slovak. In the early years, union officials were sufficiently independent to protest when safety standards were ignored; after 1948, such courage went out of fashion. Although uranium deposits were soon identified in the USSR and elsewhere in Central Europe, the Czechoslovak mines made a substantial contribution to the Soviet arsenal throughout the first decades of the nuclear arms race.
IN 1945 AND 1946, communism was ascendant in Czechoslovakia. However, the democratic parties were not without assets. Nationalism remained a powerful force. This helped the democrats because Stalin, for all his popularity, could not claim to be one of us; Beneš was sti
ll the legitimate custodian of T. G. Masaryk’s vision. The Sokol gymnastics organization, with its deep roots in Czech culture, rebuffed Communists’ efforts to infiltrate it, as did the Boy Scouts. Gottwald railed against the West, but many of his countrymen admired its democratic values, first-rate universities, and cities that were more exciting to visit (or imagine visiting) than snowy old Moscow. Notwithstanding the trendiness of leftist economic ideas, there remained businesspeople and farmers who held more conservative views. Finally, Communist ideology was incompatible with religion. The Czechs habitually invoked God’s name whether or not they believed, while in Slovakia the pull of the Vatican remained strong. That is why Gottwald and other Communist leaders assured voters that, alongside Lenin and Stalin, Christmas too had a place in their hearts.
The first—and, as it would turn out, the only—meaningful national elections in the postwar period were held in May 1946. Previously, Communists had rarely received as many as one vote in ten. They were expected to do better in this balloting because they controlled more media outlets than their rivals; the right-wing Agrarian Party had been outlawed; and the Communist minister of agriculture had been given the popular assignment of distributing confiscated farms. In addition, hundreds of thousands of alleged collaborators had been erased from the electoral register. Even the most pessimistic of democratic political leaders, however, did not anticipate that the Communists would garner 38 percent of the vote—more than any other party.
That outcome gave them a plurality of seats in parliament and the right to name a new prime minister, enabling Gottwald to take the reins from Fierlinger. The new cabinet consisted of nine Communists, three Social Democrats, and a dozen ministers from the more moderate democratic parties, a twelve-to-twelve split. The two remaining cabinet members, Jan Masaryk and the defense minister, Ludvík Svoboda, had no party affiliation. The delicacy of this political equation would have a major impact in future months.
The election results tarnished Czechoslovakia in the eyes of the United States. Americans were less likely to look with favor on a country whose people had chosen—freely, no less—to elect a Communist prime minister. American assistance at the time was limited to some agricultural credits, but even those were held up as the U.S. Embassy sought to push Czechoslovakia’s economic policies in a direction more agreeable to the West.
Two months earlier, speaking at Westminster College in Missouri, Winston Churchill had declared that an Iron Curtain was descending across Europe. He had cited Czechoslovakia as the only country lying behind the curtain that was also a democracy. This dual status reflected the reality: there was still a chance. Virtually surrounded by the Soviet bloc, Czechoslovaks could still vote—and vote again; the country’s ultimate place remained to be determined.
AMONG THE MOST welcome visitors to the embassy in Belgrade was Jan Masaryk, a man in whom joy seemed in constant competition with sorrow. Around the time of the 1946 election, he came to our living quarters and asked my mother for a sling. “I’ll need it,” he said. “I don’t want to shake hands with Communists.” That was a joke he often told among friends. The irony was that he was susceptible to pain and sometimes did have need of a sling. On that particular evening, he accompanied my father to a reception hosted by Tito. A garish display of food and wine was laid out, this in a nation overflowing with hungry children and where little money was set aside for hospitals or schools. Masaryk, who never enjoyed such events, grew agitated. Finally, he asked my father, “Have you a piano at home?”
The two hastily took their leave and returned to our embassy. The foreign minister, having discarded his sling, sat behind the piano and joined my father in singing old Czech songs. In my father’s recollection, his companion “soon lost himself in the tunes and in his thoughts.” The mood in the room became unusually intimate, given the twenty-three-year difference in ages between the two men and the professional basis of their relationship. To reestablish the natural order, or perhaps to prevent my father from seeing too much, Masaryk turned to him in midsong. “You idiot,” he said, “make up your mind whether you are a tenor or a bass. I can do all sorts of things, but I can’t change your voice.”
My mother had a circle of friends, old and new, with whom she drank thick Turkish coffee and indulged in one of her hobbies—fortune-telling with coffee grounds. The process, called kypellomancy, requires placing the saucer on top of the cup, waiting a few seconds, then turning the cup over to examine the grounds first in it, then in the saucer. The meaning of a particular shape will vary, depending on whether the formation is on the top, right, bottom, or left; drips and clumps have special implications; and to those with the requisite faith, forecasts are guaranteed accurate for forty days.
In addition to predicting pregnancies and the sudden appearance of handsome strangers, my mother played card games with me—usually gin rummy. However, she spent the bulk of her time managing the embassy staff. She had to make sure that we had enough food for ourselves and for entertaining and, to that end, sometimes sent to the country for live lambs; these played noisily around the kitchen until they became dinners that I, for one, refused to eat.
Tito kept a busy schedule of public appearances within his country but attended diplomatic receptions only rarely. Thus when our embassy planned a party on the Czechoslovak national day, my father was not perturbed to learn that the prime minister had declined the invitation. He was surprised when, an hour before the event, Tito’s chief waiter appeared with baskets of food, seeking directions to the kitchen.
Tito arrived at five exactly, well ahead of most other guests. It was one of those times when Kathy and I were assigned the job of handing out flowers. We gave the great man a bouquet of white roses (which he later forgot and had to send back for); he thanked us, and we all shook hands. Then, to my mother’s immense irritation, the dictator was steered away from all food or drink except that provided by his own cook. My mother steamed about for a while, then gathered her courage, elbowed her way through the crowd, and presented herself to Tito. In her hands, she held a plate of párky, the famous (and spicy) Czech sausage that she had prepared herself. To show that it was safe, she cut a sausage in half, popped a forkful into her mouth and offered the other portion to our guest. He smiled, ate, and asked for seconds. The score at the end of the night was Mrs. Korbel, 1; Tito’s staff, 0.
On a later occasion, during a diplomatic ceremony, my mother was invited to sit in an anteroom with the wives of two other ambassadors. Suddenly the door opened, and a Yugoslav soldier marched in carrying a silver tray on which there sat a trio of red-velvet boxes; in each there was a ring boasting the appropriate birthstone. The one given to my mother—she was born in May—was an emerald surrounded by fourteen diamonds. We called it “Tito’s ring,” and when my father first saw it, he growled, “I wonder whose finger they cut off to get this.” The ring was eventually given to me, and in 1980, I wore it to Tito’s funeral.
IN AUGUST 1946, my father was called away from his duties in Belgrade to join Masaryk and Clementis in representing Czechoslovakia at the postwar peace conference in Paris. He asked if I would like to accompany him; I said no, which I still can’t believe except that I was frightened of airplanes and had perhaps been moved around enough at that point.
In Paris my father’s chief job was to serve as president of the Economic Commission for the Balkans and Finland. In fulfilling that task, he earned the respect of U.S. diplomats for not behaving like a Stalinist. That may seem like faint praise, but it actually signified a great deal. The political atmosphere between West and East was deteriorating rapidly, as the Soviets adopted a confrontational approach on nearly every issue. They expected the Slavic-country representatives to fall into line, which they routinely did. This supine behavior was a source of dismay to the United States, which had not yet accepted the division of the globe into two fiercely opposed power blocs. One afternoon in Paris, Secretary of State James Byrnes sat seething while a Soviet
speaker denounced American foreign policy in vicious and sarcastic terms; he became furious when he saw two Czech diplomats smiling and applauding the offensive statements. I cannot help thinking how different my life would have been had my father been one of them.
Czechoslovakia’s highest priority, sadly, was to amend the draft peace treaty with Budapest in order to authorize the forcible removal of 200,000 ethnic Hungarians from its soil. The country’s decision to expel most of its German population could at least be defended on the basis of extreme circumstances. This parallel effort lacked that rationale. After Munich, Hungarian leaders had exploited Prague’s weakness in order to reclaim a slice of southern Slovakia; the country had also fought on Germany’s side through most of the war. But Slovakia, too, had been a Nazi ally. Czech and Slovak officials, from Beneš on down, often equated Hungarian crimes with those committed by Germany; that was unfair. In truth, the purge had been proposed because it was politically popular among Slovaks and because it would make Czechoslovakia less diverse and hence easier to govern. These reasons were hardly persuasive, and at the Potsdam Conference, neither the U.S. nor the British government had gone along. Instead, the issue had been set aside for consideration in Paris.
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