Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  The film had its premiere in the fall of 2011, while I was in Prague for the dedication of a statue of Woodrow Wilson. An earlier version of the statue, built in the 1920s, had stood in front of the train station until it was ordered destroyed by Heydrich. The new one is paired in Washington, D.C., with a comparable memorial to Tomáš Masaryk, highlighting the deep historic ties that bind Czechs and Slovaks to the United States, a bond that is also part of my inheritance. For years, on the Fourth of July, my mother called to ask if we were watching the parades and fireworks and singing patriotic songs. She was proof—as are her children and millions of other immigrants—that allegiance to country can spread from one land to another. In A Man with a Pipe, my brother observed that although my father had been seen as intellectual and my mother more a creature of temperament, she had often been the more levelheaded of the two. In sum, we miss them as we loved them, equally and always.

  I FEEL AN obligation I can never repay to those who helped me learn more about my family and what they experienced. The Holocaust has yielded many moving accounts from people who survived—whether in concentration camps or in hiding—and also from those whose diaries lived on even if they did not. The stories are important in their own right but even more so because they give us a better idea of the histories we will never hear from the millions who lacked the means, the strength, or the opportunity to commit their thoughts to paper. The members of my family who were murdered by gun, gas, or disease left behind but a limited quantity of letters. Part of my goal in writing this book has been to learn more. For that, I thank the remarkable people who lived alongside my relatives in Terezín and the many since who have dedicated themselves to honoring the dead. Remembrance is the least we owe.

  Looking back at the stories that fill these pages, I am struck, too, by the magnitude of our debt to the men and women who fought and won World War II and who created the institutions that would contain and ultimately defeat communism. Foremost among these institutions was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), whose origins can be traced directly to the shock of Jan Masaryk’s fall from the Foreign Ministry window on the night of March 9, 1948. His death erased any lingering hope that collaboration between the Soviet Union and the West—so essential during the war—could survive even in diluted form. The European winter that began with Hitler’s occupation of Prague resumed a decade later with the loss of democracy’s favorite son. We know today what was then “behind the mountains.” NATO would prove equal to its responsibilities; the West would stand firm; and the Iron Curtain would one day be torn down from both sides by a revolution that liberated Poland over the course of ten years, Hungary in ten months, East Germany in ten weeks, Czechoslovakia in ten days, and Romania in ten hours. Twice in my lifetime, Central Europe lost and then regained its freedom; that is cause for celebration—and also for vigilance. NATO’s job is far from over.

  STILL, COMPARED WITH our parents and grandparents, we live in a transformed world. Due in large measure to technology, the means of diplomacy have been revolutionized, the geopolitical center of gravity has shifted from the West toward the East and South, and new threats to international security have arisen. Fortunately, the role of our principal World War II adversary has turned right side up. In the decades after Hitler, the German people lifted their country to greatness in the best way, as a bulwark of democracy, a good neighbor, and a model in protecting human rights. It is an irony of our age that the United States now asks its ally in Berlin to be more, not less, assertive on the international stage. Ironic too that in 2011, on the seventy-second anniversary of the German invasion of Prague, that country’s ambassador called to ask me whether I would accept an award (the Federal Cross of Merit) for service on behalf of U.S.-German relations. I said, “Yes, of course, I would be honored,” thinking that by now even my mother would approve.

  The marriage between Czechs and Slovaks survived wars both hot and cold, but, on December 31, 1992, the two split peacefully through what was called the Velvet Divorce. Like my parents, I had always embraced the idea of a united Czechoslovakia, but perhaps it was never truly meant to be. The majority of Slovaks earnestly desired their own state—a sentiment that Czech nationalists might regret but could hardly fail to understand.

  All this is not to say that the new era is free from echoes of the old. The lessons of the Second World War and its aftermath have been learned at best imperfectly. Minor irritations are frequently enough to rekindle medieval resentments involving the Slavic peoples and their neighbors, or between East and West. In Moscow, authorities have pushed to replace monuments of Stalin that had been toppled and to teach students what is referred to as “positive history,” that is, a thoroughly Russocentric version of landmark events. This doctrine promotes the idea that Stalin almost single-handedly won World War II while British and U.S. leaders sought cravenly to engage Hitler in a separate peace. Few choices have proved more damaging to the future than teaching children to resent the past. In Europe, politics remain tarnished by extremist parties, some transparently anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim, that place national identity above a commitment to democratic values. Left-wing organizations also survive; in the Czech Republic, the Communist Party is the third largest, in Russia, the second.

  People everywhere, including the United States, are still prone to accept stereotypes, eager to believe what we want to believe (for example, on global warming) and anxious to wait while others take the lead—seeking in vain to avoid both responsibility and risk. When troubles arise among faraway people, we remain tempted to hide behind the principle of national sovereignty, to “mind our own business” when it is convenient, and to think of democracy as a suit to be worn in fine weather but left in the closet when clouds threaten.

  Just as extreme nationalism, bigotry, and racism remain very much a part of contemporary life, so too do torture, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In one of the many boxes in my garage, I came across a quotation attributed to Otokar Březina, a nineteenth-century Moravian poet: “It is no longer possible,” he asserted, “to strangle one’s brethren unheard. Somebody will always hear the cry of agony and let it fly from mouth to mouth throughout the land like a hurricane that blows the holy fires into flame.” Unfortunately, news of genocide can outpace the wind and still not prompt timely action to save lives. Well-intentioned people have been striving for generations to find an effective guarantee against atrocities, but we are not there yet.

  MY FATHER’S UNPUBLISHED novel concludes with a reminder, shared between the protagonist, Peter, and a friend: “The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.” Peter, when alone, repeats the mantra, as if seeking a source of certainty in a world where supposed absolutes have lost their meaning: “The main thing is to remain oneself.”

  Upon first reading, I had to wonder what my father had meant by that sentence. Was he referring in some oblique way to our family’s Jewish heritage? I am sure now that he was not. Writing about the period after the war, a time in which he saw his countrymen divided against themselves, religious and even racial identity were probably not the first subjects on his mind. To him, “being ourselves” meant living up to the humanitarian values that had been championed in the first Czechoslovak Republic. The ethos of T. G. Masaryk is what burned most brightly in my father’s intellect and soul. In that sense, the idea of “being ourselves” is not confining, as categories of nation and creed inherently are. In fact, the very belief that “being ourselves” should be an aspiration reflects profound optimism—especially after the events that shook Europe and the world between 1937 and 1948.

  It would be good news indeed if people were behaving unnaturally when, under the stress of wartime conditions, they exhibited more cruelty than compassion and more cowardice than courage; or if those who rushed to salute Hitler and Stalin had first been twisted into something other than “themselves.” In saying this, I do not intend to leap into a philosophical
or still less a theological discussion of human character. There is no need to go beyond what we know and have seen.

  Given the events described in this book, we cannot help but acknowledge the capacity within us for unspeakable cruelty or—to give the virtuous their due—at least some degree of moral cowardice. There is a piece of the traitor within most of us, a slice of collaborator, an aptitude for appeasement, a touch of the unfeeling prison guard. Who among us has not dehumanized others, if not by word or action, then at least in thought? From the maternity ward to the deathbed, all that goes on within our breasts is hardly sweetness and light. Some have concluded from this that what is needed from our leaders is an iron hand, an ideology that explains everything, or a historical grievance that can serve as a center to our lives. Still others study the past and despair that we will ever learn anything, comparing us instead to a laboratory animal on an exercise wheel, always running, never advancing.

  If I agreed with this dismal prognosis, I would never have arisen from bed this morning, much less written this book. I prefer the diagnosis of Václav Havel, whose conclusions about human behavior were forged in the smithy of the Cold War. Amid the repression of those years, he discerned two varieties of hope. The first he compared to the longing for “some kind of salvation from the outside.” This caused people to wait and do nothing because they had “lost the feeling that there was anything they could do. . . . So they waited [in essence] for Godot. . . . But Godot is an illusion. He is the product of our own helplessness, a patch over a hole in the spirit . . . the hope of people without hope.”

  “On the other end of the spectrum,” said Havel, there are those who insist on “speaking the truth simply because it [is] the right thing to do, without speculating whether it [will] lead somewhere tomorrow, or the day after, or ever.” This urge, too, is fully human, every bit as much as the temptation to despair. Such daring, he argued, grows out of the faith that repeating truth makes sense in itself, regardless of whether it is “appreciated, or victorious, or repressed for the hundredth time. At the very least, it [means] that someone [is] not supporting the government of lies.”

  There are many examples of cruelty and betrayal in this book, but they are not what I will take with me as I move to life’s next chapter. In the world where I choose to live, even the coldest winter must yield to agents of spring and the darkest view of human nature must eventually find room for shafts of light.

  Let us focus, then, not on the frozen ground but on the green blades rising, on the men and women who met adversity in the right way, with courage and faith. Let us remember those who were drawn closer together by Hitler’s bombs, who stood virtually alone in the battle for a continent, finding in the moment of crisis the bravery and strength they had almost forgotten they had. Let us honor the fighters who jumped into hell on Omaha Beach and who battled through the snows of the Ardennes to secure victory over a tyrant. Let us recall the aviators and soldiers who, from exile, fought to restore the honor of their country—and the shopkeepers who hurled pieces of cobbled stone at tanks in a mad effort to reclaim their homeland. Let us salute the quiet English stockbroker who, while others did nothing, single-handedly devised the means for saving the lives of my cousin and hundreds of other innocent children. Let us reflect on the courage of a middle-aged woman navigating the streets of occupied Prague with contraband in her purse, the fate of brave men on her mind, and cyanide in her pocket. Let us recall the boys and girls who had the nerve to write poetry and create works of art, and the adults who cared enough about life to debate philosophy, devote themselves to healing, and share their meager belongings—all in a prison expressly designed to crush their spirit. Let us refresh our minds with the image of Jan Masaryk breaking free from the company of appeasers, fascists, and Communists to tell a joke, pound the piano, and belt out songs at the top of his lungs about wood nymphs and water sprites. Let us imagine the soft voice of a Jewish prisoner singing a requiem beneath the stars while shoveling earth beside a fallen church in Lidice.

  “The soul is purified by misfortune and sorrow, as gold by fire.” So says the grandmother in Božena Nĕmcová’s novel. “Without sorrow there can be no joy.”

  I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life’s problems—personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth. Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to everything that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for sure. I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not at first and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because the goal we seek, and the good we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here.

  Guide to Personalities

  Bohemia

  KING VÁCLAV (Wenceslas) (d. 935)

  CHARLES IV (1316–1378): emperor and builder

  JOHN OF NEPOMUK (1345–1393): Catholic martyr

  JAN HUS (1371–1415): religious reformer and martyr

  JAN ŽIŽKA (1360–1424): Hussite warrior

  JAN KOMENSKÝ (Comenius) (1592–1670): educator

  JOSEF II (1741–1790): Austrian emperor and reformer

  BOŽENA NĔMCOVÁ (1820–1862): novelist and poet

  KAREL HAVLíČEK (1821–1856): journalist

  JAN NERUDA (1834–1891): novelist and poet

  Czechoslovak Republic, Protectorate, and Government in Exile

  EDUARD BENEŠ (1884–1948): foreign minister and president

  HANA BENEŠOVÁ (1885–1974): first lady

  KAREL ČAPEK (1890–1938): writer

  VLADO CLEMENTIS (1902–1952): deputy foreign minister

  PROKOP DRTINA (1900–1980): minister of justice

  ALOIS ELIÁŠ (1890–1942): prime minister, executed by Nazis

  ZDENĔK FIERLINGER (1891–1976): minister to Moscow, prime minister

  KARL HERMANN “K. H.” FRANK (1898–1946): Sudeten German leader during Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia

  EDUARD GOLDSTÜCKER (1913–2000): education minister, diplomat

  KLEMENT GOTTWALD (1896–1953): Communist Party head, prime minister

  EMIL HÁCHA (1872–1945): president during Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia

  VÁCLAV HAVEL (1936–2011): writer, revolutionary, president

  KONRAD HENLEIN (1898–1948): prewar leader of the Sudeten Germans

  JOSEF KORBEL (1909–1977): ambassador to Yugoslavia and Albania

  JAN MASARYK (1886–1948): ambassador to Great Britain; foreign minister

  TOMÁŠ G. MASARYK (1850–1937): founder and first president

  GENERAL FRANTIŠEK MORAVEC (1895–1966): head of intelligence

  MARIE MORAVCOVÁ (?–1942): volunteer with the antifascist resistance

  GONDA REDLICH (1916–1944): youth leader at Terezín

  HUBERT RIPKA (1895–1958): state secretary, minister of trade

  EDUARD TÁBORSKÝ (1910–1996): personal secretary to Beneš

  JOZEF TISO (1887–1947): president of Slovakia during World War II

  Czechoslovak Parachutists

  KAREL ČURDA (1911–1947) (Vrbas)

  JOZEF GABČÍK (1912–1942) (Little Ota)

  JAN KUBIŠ (1913–1942) (Big Ota)

  ADOLF OPÁLKA (1915–1942)

  JOSEF VALČIK (1914–1942) (Zdenda)

  JOZEF TISO (1887–1947): president of Slovakia during World War II

  United Kingdom

  CLEMENT ATTLEE (1883–1967): postwar prime minister

  ALEXANDER CADOGAN (1884–1968): undersecretary in the Foreign Office

  NE
VILLE CHAMBERLAIN (1869–1940): prewar prime minister

  WINSTON CHURCHILL (1874–1965): wartime prime minister

  SHIELA GRANT DUFF (1913–2004): journalist

  ANTHONY EDEN (1897–1977): wartime foreign secretary

  LORD HALIFAX (1881–1959): prewar foreign secretary

  BRUCE LOCKHART (1887–1970): liaison to Czechoslovak government in exile

  France

  ÉDOUARD DALADIER (1884–1970): president

  Germany

  HERMANN GÖRING (1893–1946): commander, air force

  REINHARD HEYDRICH (1904–1942): acting reichsprotektor

  HEINRICH HIMMLER (1900–1945): chief of security forces

  ADOLF HITLER (1889–1945): chancellor

  KONSTANTIN VON NEURATH (1873–1956): reichsprotektor

  Soviet Union

  VYACHESLAV MOLOTOV (1890–1986): foreign minister

  JOSEF STALIN (1878–1953): premier

  Time Lines

  Czech History

  NOVEMBER 8, 1620: Battle of White Mountain

  1836–1867: František Palacký’s History of Bohemia is published

  MARCH 7, 1850: Birth of Tomáš Masaryk

  MAY 28, 1884: Birth of Eduard Beneš

  OCTOBER 28, 1918: Czechoslovakia declares independence

  NOVEMBER 11, 1918: Armistice Day, end of World War I

  NOVEMBER 14, 1918: Tomáš Masaryk becomes president

  JUNE 1, 1925: Jan Masaryk becomes ambassador to Great Britain

  Prelude to War

  JANUARY 30, 1933: Hitler comes to power