* It is revealing that Chamberlain thought he had impressed Hitler. In fact, the führer commented to an aide, “All he wants to do is fish. I don’t have weekends, and I don’t fish.”
* Churchill was one of many who nominated Beneš; however, the Nobel Committee decided not to designate a winner in 1939—when World War II began—or in any of the next four years.
* Ripka’s letters to and from my father were among the documents made available to me in 2011 by the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. The correspondence—parts of which are blacked out—had been maintained in the files of the Foreign Ministry until being removed, sometime in the 1950s, by the Communist secret police.
* In Czech, the party’s name was Národní Souručenství. To many Czechs, the NS badge, worn upside down, stood for “Smrt Nĕmcům,” “Death to Germans.”
* Fifty years later, a march to commemorate Opletal’s sacrifice also veered out of official control, leading directly to the Velvet Revolution.
* One of Dáša’s former teachers was brave enough to go to the Deimls’ house and tutor Milena. Greta entrusted her with the family’s letters, which were returned to Dáša after the war.
* The House of Commons did not, at that time, have a recording system. Some historians have suggested that the BBC hired an actor, Norman Shelley, to impersonate the prime minister reading his most famous speeches. In fact, when Churchill lacked the time to record a speech on tape, the broadcasters simply summarized and quoted from his remarks. For archival purposes, many recordings of Churchill were produced following the war. However, Shelley does deserve an honored place in history: he was the radio voice of Winnie-the-Pooh.
* Recipe from an 1825 Czech cookbook: Scale and split the carp, cut into pieces, rinse and sprinkle with salt, and leave it salted for half an hour; then wipe each portion with a clean cloth, roll in flour, then in beaten eggs and bread crumbs; then fry in hot butter until golden.
* One of the Czech exiles who served with the French military and then the RAF was Karel Mahler, the eldest child of Marta Körbelová, my grandfather Arnošt’s older sister. Following the war, Karel moved to Brazil, where his son, Pedro, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren live today.
* The British, schooled in the classics, may have heard in Hitler’s words an echo. As Herodotus told the story, the king of Lydia, a man named Croesus, was noted for his wealth and power. Wishing to attack Persia, he sought guidance from the Great Oracle at Delphi. “If Croesus goes to war,” the Oracle predicted, “he will destroy a great empire.” Infused with confidence, the king did indeed go to war, and, of course, the empire he destroyed was his own.
* Jaroslav was the father of Jan Stránský, whose adventures during the fall of France are described in chapter 10.
* The missing umlaut explains why, on some British documents, my father’s name is spelled “Koerbel.”
* The Roosevelt administration responded to the British and Soviet decisions by appointing a full ambassador to what it still referred to as a “provisional” regime, again suggesting that the Hácha government was legitimate and had more domestic support than Beneš. Not until October 1942 did the United States drop the “provisional” and begin to address Beneš as “president of the Czechoslovak Republic.”
* For fear of losing their belongings, inmates at Terezín liked to keep them close. This tendency moved one poetically minded suitor to complain: “My darling, I’d love to kiss you so / But you’re all wrapped from head to toe. / Five panties, two dresses, a cap and a hat / How can a chap get his arms around that?”
* Redlich maintained a diary from January 1942 until his death early in October 1944. His acerbic and often moving words, written on sheets of office calendars, were not discovered until 1967, when workers found them—stashed in a woman’s purse—in an attic in Terezín.
* One of those sent from Terezín to the family camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau was nineteen-year-old Jiřina Smolková. In July she took her place among the prisoners lined up for “showers” in the gas chamber. Unaware of their impending fate, the prisoners were not in an especially fearful mood. When a German guard smiled at Jiřina, she gave him a wary smile back. A few seconds later, she found herself pulled from the line. Shortly thereafter, she was sent to a newly opened subunit of the Neugraben concentration camp. Women there were assigned various duties, including home building, pipe laying, and clearing the rubble caused by Allied bombing. In February 1945, the SS transferred the women to another subcamp (Hamburg-Tiefstack), then on to the grotesquely overcrowded women’s prison at Bergen-Belsen. On April 15, the camp was liberated by the British army, which found 60,000 prisoners, many desperately ill. Among those who had perished during the previous month were Anne Frank and her sister, Margot. Jiřina was not in Bergen-Belsen long enough to succumb to the lack of sanitary conditions and rampant disease. Once again, she survived. After liberation, she met Vilém Holzer, also a Czech and also a survivor. Vilém had been arrested at the outset of the war and sent to a labor camp in Plzeň. In the autumn of 1939, he had been forced to take part in a German experiment that involved the injection of typhoid bacteria. He was one of the few who did not die. He spent most of the war in Buchenwald. Jiřina and Vilém Holzer made a new home for themselves in Argentina. Their granddaughter, Mica Carmio, now works in my Washington office.
* Patton’s exact words were “Goddamn! That [Chaplain] O’Neill sure did some potent praying.”
* Four U.S. tanks entered Prague on May 7, but this was to convey news of the German surrender in Berlin to local Nazi officials. The Americans said that U.S. troops would not be liberating the capital. That disappointed the Germans (who were terrified of the Soviets) as much as it did the Czechs.
* My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Olga Ptačková.
* I should note that U.S. soldiers were otherwise wildly popular. Unlike the Soviets, they had their own supplies and could be generous in handing out such novel items as Hershey bars and cans of flavored soda. For a time, the most popular tune in Czechoslovakia was “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”
* When, in the first chapter of his history of World War II, Churchill quoted Plutarch (“Ingratitude towards their great men is the mark of strong peoples”), he did so in reference to France; it is possible that he had another country in mind.
* In the protectorate, under Nazi rule, those sentenced to death had been granted but ninety seconds to address the court.
* The Slovak justice system, which was separate from the Czech, did include the right of appeal. Its rate of execution was 41 percent.
* His title was later lengthened further to include “and Albania.”
* While in college in the late 1950s, I went on a date with a boy of Hungarian ancestry. We would have had a good time had he not accused Czechoslovakia of having stolen his country’s land after World War I. There was no second date.
* From his release in 1960 until his death twenty years later, Drtina did all he could to aid the revival of Czechoslovak freedom, writing a memoir that was published in the West and—in 1977—bravely adding his name to Charter 77, a protest that served as a precursor of the Velvet Revolution.
* When Goldstücker was released in 1955, he was, in the words of a friend, “so small and skinny that he looked like a small boy.” Undaunted, he resumed his academic career. As chair of the Writer’s Union he successfully championed the idea that Franz Kafka should be honored instead of dismissed as a “decadent bourgeois” writer. He also played a leading role in Prague Spring. I renewed my acquaintance with the old ambassador in the early 1970s, when I interviewed him in England for my dissertation. Until he passed away in 2000 at the age of eighty-seven, Goldstücker continued to defend Communist beliefs, arguing that the principles were right even if the i
mplementation was not.
Prague Winter Page 49