There is another reason, little discussed, why I find it hard to believe that T. G. Masaryk’s son would kill himself. The senior Masaryk’s earliest book was a study of suicide, in which that phenomenon is depicted as a symptom of social and spiritual loss, a judgment that one’s life has no meaning, a negative verdict on the world. Such a judgment could not have been further from Jan’s inheritance. Would a child so conscious of his father’s opinion willfully disregard it at a defining moment in his life?
Officially, the Masaryk case was reopened three times: in 1968, when Communist control relaxed for the period known as Prague Spring; in 1993, after the return of democracy (via Václav Havel and the Velvet Revolution); and in 2003. The first two inquiries were inconclusive; in the third, the state prosecutor ruled that Masaryk had been murdered, based primarily on expert testimony about the position in which the body had been discovered. Investigators argued that the foreign minister must have been pushed; they came to no conclusion as to who might have done the pushing.
AT T. G. MASARYK’S funeral, Beneš had delivered the main oration. At Jan’s, he refused to speak. He would not share the dais with Gottwald and had only at the last moment consented to attend. Wrapped in a heavy coat, he sat slumped in a seat next to Hana.
Following the ceremony, Beneš would leave his estate in Sezimovo Ústí but one more time, in April, to mark the six hundredth anniversary of the founding of Charles University. There he would summon a final measure of eloquence in support of freedom “of belief, science, thought, and vocation . . . founded on man’s respect for man.” Not until June did he formally resign, departing the office four years younger than T. G. Masaryk had entered it. His successor, no surprise, was Gottwald, to whom—out of an excess of courtesy (or perhaps fear)—he addressed a congratulatory note.
In his final months, the circle of aides and friends that had long assisted Beneš melted away. Aside from his doctors, there was the always steady Hana, a personal secretary, and such visitors as were willing to run the gauntlet of gun-toting Communist guards. Weary and lacking hobbies, the former president wandered about his gardens or sat in his chair without papers, lost in thought. He sometimes listened to broadcasts from the Voice of America, but Hana insisted that he do so only on the second floor, beyond the hearing of his security detail. Politics had filled his life, but the hourglass was running out.
But Beneš still cared about his reputation. From exile, Ripka and some of the other democratic ministers had been quick to tell their side of the February story, blaming the president for accepting their resignations, failing to arrest Gottwald, and losing control of the military and police. Above all, they criticized him for placing the nation’s fate in Soviet hands.
On August 19, Beneš called on his last remaining reserves of energy to fight back, telling an interviewer:
They are accusing me of disappointing them. But I am accusing them of disappointing me. . . . When Gottwald filled Old Town Square with armed, bloodthirsty militia, I expected a counter-rally on Saint Wenceslas Square. . . . I believed that the demonstration of unarmed students would be a signal for a general uprising. When however, nobody made a move, I would not allow Gottwald’s hordes, who were spoiling for a fight, to perpetrate a wholesale massacre on the defenseless Prague population.
At the time of this conversation, Beneš nurtured a hope of escaping the isolation of Sezimovo Ústí; he had spoken to Hana about moving to an apartment in the capital, near the Foreign Ministry, where he had presided for so many years. But the day after the interview, his health took a sharp downward turn. For a few days he lost his voice, then rallied for a time, then began again to weaken. He lapsed into a coma and, on September 3, 1948, breathed his last.
Beneš had neither T. G. Masaryk’s intellectual range nor Jan’s easy way with people. He was not a war hero or a gifted politician. My father, especially in his last book (on the meaning of Czechoslovak history), was among those who faulted him for failing to fight after Munich and for his lack of effective leadership against the Communists. But in my view, much depends on the standard against which Beneš is judged. Those anticipating a second T. G. Masaryk were right to be disappointed; on that scale, he did not measure up. He was too much the lawyer and analyst, striving to gauge the course of events while lacking the boldness and charisma to shape them. He worked consistently within the confines of the democratic and humane values that Masaryk championed but rarely pushed back against the flow of public opinion. If the majority wanted to kick out the Germans and Hungarians, he would lead the effort. If the people were drawn toward socialism, he would help to nationalize the economy. If the consensus held that Stalin was their liberator, so be it. Popular opinion was a fact, one of many that Beneš took into account when calculating his next move. When he did challenge the public mood, it was to cool the boiling pot, as after Munich, when this Czech Sancho Panza tried to save his country from what he thought a quixotic response.
Tomáš Masaryk, by contrast, was the rare leader who taught as he led. Even as a relatively young man, he exposed patriotic—yet fraudulent—documents, fought anti-Semitism, espoused women’s rights, promoted public health, and emphasized the responsibilities of democratic citizens. He spoke instinctively to the decency of his listeners, seeking not to prove how astute he was but to bring out the best in those who cared to listen. Decades later, Václav Havel would do the same when striving, as president, to heal the deep wounds that remained between the Czech and German populations and to elevate public debate into a discussion of ethics and mutual responsibility. In sum, Beneš was a less commanding figure than T. G. Masaryk and a less compelling moral arbiter than Havel. As criticisms go, these damn but faintly.
Measured against the other European leaders of his day, and especially considering his health problems toward the end, Eduard Beneš was a man of lasting stature. Early in his career, his diplomatic genius helped to create the Czechoslovak Republic and contributed much to the senior Masaryk’s success and reputation. As president, he performed miracles in holding the government in exile together and realizing its goals. After the war, he gave his country a better chance than others in the region to preserve its freedom. In later years, Jan Masaryk was the only one to rival his popularity yet the (slightly) younger man would not have been a successful president. He was a moody, volatile, compassionate jester who never took anything quite as seriously as Beneš took everything. Jan Masaryk complemented his boss; he could not have replaced him.
Between 1937 and 1948, the team of Beneš and Masaryk was matched first against Hitler and Ribbentrop, then against Stalin and Molotov. History’s narrative tells us that, in both cases, the more powerful duo prevailed—at least for a time; but history’s judgment suggests that Beneš and Masaryk were the kind of leaders we might wish to see again.
WHEN MY PARENTS returned to Prague for Masaryk’s funeral, Dáša was there to greet them. At my parents’ hotel, she learned that our family would soon be leaving Yugoslavia as my father began a new assignment. Perhaps we would be returning to London; would she like to come, too? My cousin was torn; the great-aunt with whom she had stayed after we went to Belgrade had herself left—to join family members in England. Dáša had then been “planted” with her aunt Krista, of whom she was not overly fond. As with the Nazis years earlier, no one knew in advance exactly what life in a Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia would be like. The Cold War had been given a name (by George Orwell), and Walter Lippmann had already written a book about it, but life behind the Iron Curtain was still in the process of being defined. Dáša had a boyfriend, Vladimir Šima, and wished to complete her studies at Charles University. Now twenty years old, she decided to stay in Prague.
Alas, her life, like those of so many others, would be knocked askew by politics. In January 1949, she was summoned by security officials for questioning about the activities of my father and about her own views on the people’s revolution. Her affirmations of political
indifference were not enough to save her from being expelled and virtually disowned by her aunt, described later by my cousin as “a Communist beast.” Dáša was so upset that she went to her fiancé’s apartment and threw her student book with all her identification papers into the fire—from which her future mother-in-law was just able to retrieve them.
Dáša and Vladimir married; she became an accountant, translator, and journalist and he a military construction engineer. Theirs would not be an easy life, but they built their own family and persevered. My mother did her best to help by sending them the deed to her parents’ Czechoslovak property, which was later sold to raise money. I find it touching that, out of respect for their heritage, Dáša’s grandchildren developed a special passion for helping young refugees from Bosnia, the Caucasus, and Asia.
BEFORE DEPARTING PRAGUE, my father met with Clementis to confirm that the government’s offer of the UN position still stood. My parents then returned to Belgrade, where the political waters remained turbulent. Even as the Communists were celebrating victory in Czechoslovakia, signs of a falling-out were rising to the surface in Yugoslavia. Tito had an oversize ego and did not like being told what to do—even by Stalin. Officials in Washington were unaware of the extent of his wrath until my mother paid a farewell visit to the family of Andrija Hebrang, a prominent local politician with close ties to Moscow. She discovered the house empty except for a frightened maid, who told her that the entire family had been arrested. Apparently, Tito had become convinced that the Soviets were grooming Hebrang as a replacement for him—a possibility he refused to accept. The U.S. Embassy included a report on my mother’s house call in a top secret cable to Washington. A month later, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Soviet bloc and the historic rivalry between Stalin and Tito burst into the open.
I did not see my family until May 1948, when they came to Switzerland so that my father could confer in Geneva with UN officials. The rest of us went with him, and although the trip itself was uneventful, we did love watching the peacocks parade in front of the organization’s European headquarters. For Kathy, the highlight was an introduction—courtesy of yours truly—to the wonders of bubble gum.
After Geneva and our rendezvous with the peacocks, my father returned to Belgrade, while I stayed on to finish school in Chexbres and my mother, Kathy, and John went to London. When I joined them, we moved into a dark basement apartment, memorable only because the bathtub was in the kitchen. Before that, they were hosted by Eduard Goldstücker, the scholar with whom we had lived previously in Walton-on-Thames and who had since been promoted to second in command at our country’s embassy. Naturally, as a Communist, his reaction to the February events was far sunnier than that of my parents. To him the change in leadership meant a chance to prove that the ideology in which he believed could deliver on its promise of social justice. He was soon rewarded for his loyalty with a post he coveted: ambassador to the newly created state of Israel. For a time, the two countries enjoyed warm relations; Israel needed weapons and training, especially for its fledgling air force; the Czechoslovaks provided them willingly and at a fair price. The friendship soured, however, when Israel’s leaders refused to align their nation’s strategic interests with those of Moscow.
The author, age ten, Switzerland
Sadly, the fates of Clementis and Goldstücker were not as either envisioned. Both would be caught in the web of the Stalinist show trials that terrorized Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s. Moscow was determined to prevent its Central European satellites from imitating Tito’s independent line. Its chosen method was to push the governments of Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia to make an example of selected government officials, whether or not they were actually guilty of revisionist thinking. Gottwald, who feared being purged himself, cooperated by offering up more than a dozen colleagues, including Clementis, who was arrested and later hanged, and Goldstücker, who was sentenced to life in prison.* The specific charges varied, but the general allegation was that the suspects had been plotting to betray communism to the West.
The period also marked a frenzy of activity on the part of the secret police, whose young investigators were urged by the Soviets to find conspiracies wherever they could—especially among the men and women who had been active in the London-based exile community during the war. By the new logic, anyone who had considered the West a true ally in the fight against Hitler should be judged a traitor to the proletariat. One was either a Communist or a spy; there were no neutrals. Among the supporters of Beneš who were investigated in absentia and at length was Josef Korbel—a badge of honor.
GOTTWALD’S TIME ATOP the power pyramid in Prague was brief, for the role of Soviet puppet proved an exhausting one. In March 1953, a few days after attending Stalin’s funeral in Moscow, he died of a burst artery brought on by heart disease and several decades of alcohol abuse. The story of his burial site is worth recounting for what it says about the tangled web of Czech history.
In the nineteenth century, Czech Protestants sought to place a statue of the one-eyed Hussite general Jan Žižka alongside the other major monuments of the city. Conceived in 1882, the project was delayed by Catholics, who had no wish to honor a Protestant hero, and by cubists, who favored a design more abstract than the conventional man on a horse. When, in 1913, a competition was held, three artists were declared to have won second place but none first. Eventually, a brilliant young sculptor of the Rodin school was selected and began work on what would become the world’s largest bronze equestrian statue: seventy-three feet high. Construction was then suspended because Czech legislators felt that Žižka’s horse looked suspiciously Austrian and because church leaders thought the general should be shown holding a Bible instead of a sword. By the time the sculptor had completed the mold, the Nazis had invaded and begun searching for the work, which was hastily cut into pieces and concealed in various locations around Prague.
Finally assembled after the war, the statue was dedicated on July 14, 1950. Because the government by then was Communist, the Hussite rebellion now had to be reinvented as an early demonstration of secular class warfare, with Žižka glorified as the first Marxist. Suitable bas-reliefs celebrating the proletariat were added. Thus it seemed only right to his admirers that when Gottwald died, his remains should be committed to the mausoleum behind Žižka’s statue—where the two could commune, one great people’s warrior to another. The task of embalming, however, was entrusted to amateurs. Within a decade, the decomposing corpse had to be removed and cremated.
MY FATHER’S UN job was not a permanent position, even though the quarrel over Kashmir—still unresolved six decades later—might make it seem so. The commission had been established in January, and its first three members were selected the following month. Two more were added in April; in July, the full panel, with my father as chairman, departed for Pakistan. Its members spent most of the summer shuttling between there and India.
Through the last half of 1948, my father wrote us cheery letters about the exotic landscape and wildlife of the subcontinent, including the monkeys that came into his hotel room. He was aware, however, that he was working on borrowed time. The Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry suspected strongly—this according to recently released documents from the secret police—that he had no intention of returning to Prague. Yet he also had three young children and little in the way of accumulated assets. It was natural that his thoughts for the future would turn to America, where the United Nations was based and where opportunities exceeded those of anywhere else. At year’s end, the commission was due in New York to submit its report. He would use the time there to inquire whether a suitable position might be available in the UN Secretariat. He would also arrange for his family to meet him.
On the evening of November 5, my mother, Kathy, John, and I made our way to Southampton, where we boarded the SS America and crossed the Channel to France, where we spent the night. The next morning, after breakfast, we resumed our journey w
estward, chasing the sun. Greeted by the Statue of Liberty, we arrived in New York Harbor shortly after 10 a.m.; it was, fittingly enough, Armistice Day. Shortly before Christmas, my father joined us, crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary. Although his hope for a job at the United Nations was not realized, his request that our family be granted political asylum was supported strongly by the U.S. and British diplomats who knew him and by the Czechoslovak democratic exiles with whom he had served in times of war and peace. For several months my parents anxiously waited; the application was approved on the first day of June 1949. So began the further adventures of my family—in what Antonín Dvořák had referred to in his famous symphony as the New World.
The Next Chapter
Few sentiments are expressed more often than gratitude for the sacrifices made by earlier generations; so be it, originality isn’t everything. I truly am indebted to my parents for the love and protection they provided and for the inheritance I received—including a commitment to freedom and an understanding that its survival cannot be presumed. I am grateful, too, for my father’s example; without it, I would have had neither the passion for public affairs that has driven me throughout my life nor the confidence to insist that my voice be heard. As should be evident by now, he was not someone who was content sitting in an armchair reading about world events. He had a desire to know every detail, to delve into the motivations of leaders and countries, to learn their history, to sample the opinions of all he met, and to search for solutions that accorded with his high standards. Many children rebel against their parents; I wanted to make my father proud and to act as I thought he might in comparable circumstances—whether as a diplomat, teacher, or citizen.
After our arrival in the United States, my father began a second career as a professor at the University of Denver, where the school of international affairs today bears his name. Upon his death in 1977, the school published a memorial book of essays on Czechoslovak history and heritage. The volume included tributes from former students lauding Professor Korbel’s “passion for learning [and] devotion to truth.” In 2011, the Czech Foreign Ministry also honored him, in this case with a film, A Man with a Pipe: A Documentary on the Life of Josef Korbel.
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