Madeleine Albright - Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

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TO THOSE WHO

DID NOT SURVIVE

BUT TAUGHT US HOW TO LIVE

AND WHY

MEMORIES OF PRAGUE

How long since I last saw

The sun sink low behind Petn Hill?

With tearful eyes I gazed at you, Prague,

Enveloped in your evening shadows.

How long since I last heard the pleasant rush of water

Over the weir in the Vltava river?

I have long since forgotten the bustling life of Wenceslas Square.

Those unknown corners in the Old Town,

Those shady nooks and sleepy canals,

How are they? They cannot be grieving for me

As I do for them...

Prague, you fairy tale in stone, how well I remember!

PETR GINZ (19281944)

Terezn

Contents

B EFORE M ARCH 15, 1939

An Unwelcome Guest

Tales of Bohemia

The Competition

The Linden Tree

A Favorable Impression

Out from Behind the Mountains

We Must Go On Being Cowards

A Hopeless Task

A PRIL 1939 A PRIL 1942

Starting Over

Occupation and Resistance

The Lamps Go Out

The Irresistible Force

Fire in the Sky

The Alliance Comes Together

The Crown of Wenceslas

M AY 1942 A PRIL 1945

Day of the Assassins

Auguries of Genocide

Terezn

The Bridge Too Far

Cried-out Eyes

Doodlebugs and Gooney Birds

Hitlers End

M AY 1945 N OVEMBER 1948

No Angels

Unpatched

A World Big Enough to Keep Us Apart

A Precarious Balance

Struggle for a Nations Soul

A Failure to Communicate

The Fall

Sands Through the Hourglass

I was fifty-nine when I began serving as U.S. secretary of state. I thought by then that I knew all there was to know about my past, who my people were, and the history of my native land. I was sure enough that I did not feel a need to ask questions. Others might be insecure about their identities; I was not and never had been. I knew.

Only I didnt. I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to makechoices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.

I had been raised a Roman Catholic and upon marriage converted to the Episcopalian faith. I hadI was surea Slavic soul. My grandparents had died before I was old enough to remember their faces or call them by name. I had a cousin in Prague; we had recently been in touch and as children had been close, but I no longer knew her well; the Iron Curtain had kept us apart.

From my parents I had received a priceless inheritance: a set of deeply held convictions regarding liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law. I inherited, as well, a love for two countries. The United States had welcomed my family and enabled me to grow up in freedom; I was proud to call myself an American. The Czechoslovak Republic had been a beacon of humane government until snuffed out by Adolf Hitler and thenafter a brief period of postwar revivalextinguished again by the disciples of Josef Stalin. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution, led by Vclav Havel, my hero and later my cherished friend, engendered new hope. All my life I had believed in the virtues of democratic government, the need to stand up to evil, and the age-old motto of the Czech people: Pravda vtz, or Truth shall prevail.

FROM 1993 UNTIL 1997 , I had the honor of representing the United States as ambassador to the United Nations. Because I was in the news and because of Central Europes liberation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I began to receive mail about my family. Some of these letters had the facts wrong; others were barely legible; a few requested money; still others never reached me because staff membersstrangers to the languagecould not distinguish between correspondence on personal as opposed to public issues. By late in President Bill Clintons first term, I had seen several missives from people who had known my parents, who had the names and dates approximately right, and who indicated that my ancestors had been of Jewish origin. One letter, from a seventy-four-year-old woman, arrived in early December 1996; she wrote that her family had been in business with my maternal grandparents, who had been victimized by anti-Jewish discrimination during the war. I compared memories with my sister, Kathy, and brother, John, and also shared the information with my daughters, Anne, Alice, and Katie. Since I was in the process of being vetted for secretary of state, I told President Clinton and his senior staff. In January 1997, before we had time to explore further, a hardworking Washington Post reporter, Michael Dobbs, uncovered news that stunned us all: according to his research, three of my grandparents and numerous other family members had died in the Holocaust.

In February 1997, Kathy, John, and Johns wife, Pamela, visited the Czech Republic; they confirmed much of what had been in the Post story and identified a few errors. That summer, I was able to make two similar though briefer trips. For me, the moment of highest emotion came inside Pragues Pinkas Synagogue, where the names of our family members were among the eighty thousand inscribed on the walls as a memoriam. I had been to the synagogue before buthaving no causehad never thought to search for their names.

That episode is recounted in my memoir Madam Secretary and will not be elaborated on here. The core revelation, however, is central because it provided the impetus for this book. I was shocked and, to be honest, embarrassed to discover that I had not known my family history better; my sister and brother shared this emotion. Nor was I entirely reassured by the many people who spoke or wrote to me of having had comparable experiences concerning secrets kept by their own parents. I could accept without being satisfied that there was nothing inexplicable or unique about the gap that existed in my knowledge; still, I regretted not having asked the right questions. I also felt driven to learn more about the grandparents whom I had been too young to knowespecially since by then I had become a grandparent myself.

Having decided to delve more deeply into my familys history, I soon realized that I could not do so without placing my parents within the context of the times in which they had lived and especially 19371948, the era encompassing World War IIalso the first dozen years of my life.

IN THE LATE 1930s, the global spotlight was drawn to Czechoslovakia, a faraway place that few people in such capitals as London and Washington had visited or even knew how to spell. The country was familiar, if at all, in the guise of Bohemiaa land of magic, marionettes, Franz Kafka, and Good King Wenceslas. But to those knowledgeable about Central Europe, the nation was respected for its thousand-year history and valued for its location as a crossroads between West and East. It was also the scene of a long and at times bitter rivalry between Czechs and Germans. In that struggles climactic chapter, Adolf Hitler demanded that the government surrender its sovereignty by opening its borders to his troops, thus creating for all of Europe a moment of hard reckoning. To the major powers in the West, Czechoslovakia was not thought to be worth fighting for, so it was sacrificed in the quest for peace; yet still the war cameand with it the near total destruction of European Jewry and ultimately a realignment of the international political order.