You have penetrating perception; but that in itself wouldn’t amount to much, there are people running about the streets who invite such perception, but you have the courage of your perception and above all the courage to see beyond it, beyond that perception; seeing beyond is what matters most, and of that you are capable….
—KAFKA, BRIEFE AN M1LENA
Czechoslovakia was under increasing pressure from National Socialist Germany. In the course of 1937, the demands made by Konrad Henlein, the National Socialist leader of the Sudeten German party, became more and more exorbitant. In 1938, the crisis attained its climax when Henlein promulgated the so-called Karlsbad Program, providing for the full “legal” independence of the Sudeten German territory (northern Bohemia with its predominantly German population).
At the same time, it became evident that despite the defensive alliance concluded between France and Czechoslovakia in 1921, France and England had no intention of defending Czechoslovakia against Hitler. In May 1938 German troops were concentrated on the Bavarian and Saxon borders of Czechoslovakia. It was obvious that an invasion was planned. Prague reacted by massing its forces on the Czech side of the frontier with a speed and efficiency that can seldom have been equaled by any mobilization in history. This on the night of May 20, the day before the Czech municipal elections. There is reason to suppose that Hitler originally intended to invade Czechoslovakia on the twenty-first when the Czech security forces would be kept busy by the elections, though he later denied this to Chamberlain and accused the Czechs of persecution mania.
Shortly before these agitated days in May, Milena went out into the provinces to report on the popular mood. She summed up her impressions in an article entitled “From a Bohemian Village.”
“In this little village of roughly 700 souls some eight men were called up for a special military exercise. No one knew what had happened; all were sure it was war. They were not due to report for several hours, but fifteen minutes after receiving the order, they knocked at the schoolmaster’s door: ‘What are we waiting for? Come on, let’s get going.’ They had their reservists’ shirts, their socks and underwear under their arms. They handed over their domestic responsibilities to their wives, and off they went. The schoolmaster wanted time to pack his bag, but what could he do in the face of such eagerness? There was still plenty of time, but he went with them all the same. One peasant was still in his potato field when his mobilization notice came. ‘Hand me the soap, Mother, I’m off to the army,’ he said, washed his hands and went.
“Their fighting spirit is marvelous. These quiet, peace-loving people wouldn’t think of sidestepping their duty. Their courage is a matter of course. They are on their own soil, they want peace, good harvests and life, but they take up arms as casually as if they were going to lunch. No dramatic farewells and no patriotic songs. Hardly anyone in the village knew that eight men had gone. Within half an hour they had reported for duty….”
At the end of the article, she speaks of an exemplary officer. “I spoke to a man who had fought in the world war. He was not at all enthusiastic about soldiering and killing. The joints of his hands and feet were as knotted as tree roots, his face was like a weather-beaten stone. He told me how his officer had treated his men. He slept with them, ate with them, talked with them. You’ve got to remember that officers were a caste of their own, there’s a world of difference between an officer and a common soldier: ‘different tobacco, different pronunciation, white gloves,’ as it says in the film La Grande Illusion. But our officers seem to have realized that our people needed officers who were soldiers before they were gentlemen. I don’t know where that fine man’s allegiance was, but I do know that he wrote letters for his men, because their horny hands had trouble holding a pen, and they were not very good at putting their feelings into words. He ate the same food (which wasn’t bad, by the way) and smoked the same cigarettes. For two of his men he wrote a petition to clear up some difficulty with the tax collector. Without their knowledge he appended a recommendation and a request that the matter be expedited as much as possible. And, wonder of wonders, when the soldiers returned home, the matter had been settled to their satisfaction. Apparently it’s possible to get things done without brutal orders and shouts of hurrah. I don’t know if there are many such officers. But I do know that they are what’s needed to make a good army.
“Our people won’t need any prodding if the hour none of us is hoping for strikes. They will fight as a matter of course, as willingly as they responded to that mobilization order in May.”*
The preparedness of the Czech people had its effect. After the May mobilization both the British and the French governments showed—for a short time, at least—a little more backbone. A spokesman of the French foreign ministry went so far as to say: “If German troops cross the Czech border, it will automatically trigger off a war, for France is prepared to give Czechoslovakia all the help it needs.” But this spirit was shortlived and the danger was averted only for the moment. The firmness of the Allied governments gave way to new hesitations; because of their unforgivable ignorance of the National Socialist mentality, the Allied leaders were taken in by Hitler’s solemn protestations. In the next few months the tension mounted. Henlein stepped up his demands and ended by categorically demanding the Anschluss of the Sudeten territory to the German Reich.
In panic fear of a war for which they were not at all prepared, the British and French governments implored the Czech government to make every possible concession to Hitler. In July 1938, it was decided that England alone should negotiate with Hitler on the problem of Czechoslovakia, the idea being that England would be able to take an “objective” view, since it was not bound by any treaty with Czechoslovakia. Without consulting the Prague government, Chamberlain sent a commission under Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia to find out whether it was true, as Henlein and Hitier claimed, that the Czechs were terrorizing the German population of Czechoslovakia. Lord Runciman, who knew nothing about the situation in Czechoslovakia, avoided any meeting with representatives of the Czech community and made no attempt to familiarize himself with the political, cultural, or social situation. He hobnobbed exclusively with the German aristocracy of Bohemia and crowned his mission by meeting Konrad Henlein, the National Socialist leader, at the castle of Prince Max von Hohenlohe.
As a reporter for Přítomnost, Milena visited the frontier zones and observed the bitter hostility between Czech and German populations. This hatred often divided families. In one case, the husband was a German, the wife a Czech, and the children, lashed by nationalist propaganda, called their father an “enemy of his country” or despised their mother, who was boycotted by the whole village, as a traitor, because she had married a German. “Parents and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters threaten one another with, ‘Just wait. It won’t be long before we stop your mouths!’ On the way to school, children call one another ‘Czech whore,’ ‘Marxist pig!’ and worse, or throw stones at one another….
“Two people were killed in Eger. The Henlein crowd are saying openly—I’ve heard it myself—: ‘We need a few more deaths, that will start the ball rolling.’ They need martyrs. They need heroes. Two deaths aren’t enough for them…. But it’s no wonder those two were killed. With such a climate of bottomless hatred, boycott fever, organized terror, with this horrible situation in families, in factories, workshops, where all political or even national thinking has been swept away by psychopathic madness, it’s a miracle if no one gets killed. Son draws knife against father, brother against brother….”
In Eger, Milena met a German who was not a Nazi, not a supporter of Henlein. Forbidden to take part in sporting events and torchlight parades of the Sudeten German party, his children had become outcasts. “But,” she writes, “even such parents don’t dare explain to their children that they are Germans but not Nazis, because the schoolteachers tell their pupils to report everything they hear at home … and children vie with one another in spying on their parents….”
In the next paragraph she deals with the situation of the Jews in northern Bohemia: “Now that Germany has gained in power and that power has been further inflated by propaganda, the Germans walk the earth like arrogant conquerors, claiming that their blood is better than other people’s. In Germany the Jews have been uprooted, forbidden to work, deprived of their rights, and condemned to walk the earth full of fear and grief. They wander from frontier to frontier, nowhere finding a haven, worse off than in the ghetto, for there, though persecuted, they were at least together.
“There are not many Jews in the north of Czechoslovakia. Still, there was anti-Semitism even before the Nazis came to power. Today, it has come to the point that the few Jewish residents, for the most part businessmen, doctors and lawyers, hardly dare leave their houses. I have spoken to a doctor in Asch, who has lived there for twenty years. For miles around there is hardly anyone who has not gone to him with his ailments. Today everyone avoids him, people lower their eyes when they see him and cross the street to avoid having to greet him. He has hardly any patients left. When one does turn up, it is from far away. His daughter, now an adult, a cultivated woman, attended the local school; none of the other children would have anything to do with her. Later on, she made a friend. Her parents received the friend into their house as if she had been their own child…. Since March 13 of this year, this friend has stopped speaking to them. She didn’t even bid the family good-bye. Yes, there are such people in the world today. The National Socialists undoubtedly regard them as honorable and heroic.
“In a small farming town near the German border, I learned the meaning of calumny. The rumor was spread that a young Jewish doctor was hiding a ‘Communist arsenal.’ No one stopped to ask where he could have kept it in a three-room apartment. Ridiculous as it was, the rumor spread like wildfire. From then on no one greeted him; when he entered a cafe everyone fell silent, the storekeepers waited on him grudgingly, making it clear that they could do without his trade. Calumny is a cruel weapon, more cruel than a dagger. When a man is murdered, he is taken to the cemetery, and there he can rest. A victim of calumny has to go on living, but his life is made unbearable.
“Henlein’s paper Der Kamerad has a regular section devoted to denunciations like the following: ‘We wish to report that the daughter of X, the mayor of such and such a town, has become engaged to a Jew.’ ‘Y, employed by such and such a firm, has bought matches in a shop belonging to the Jew Z.’ Just these brief announcements without commentary. The names, of course, are given in full. The effect is immediate. The ‘guilty’ parties are systematically boycotted. Some people comply with the boycott out of political conviction, others for fear of being boycotted themselves.
“Such boycotts affect not only doctors, lawyers, and businessmen. With the cruel logic of all totalitarian measures, they also strike the poorest of the poor. There is a dressmaker living in the town of R. with her blind mother. She is German and Aryan. Sixteen years ago, a Jew had promised to marry her, got her with child, and abandoned her. Since then she had worked long days at her sewing machine and managed to bring up her child and feed three people. And then the proud Nordic race, with its heroic ‘trample the weak’ ideology, fell on the poor woman. Her ‘offense,’ for which she had been paying all her life, was discovered and revealed to the Nazi public. Since then, no one has given her any work, and her little boy, who had been serving as an apprentice artisan, has been dismissed….”
Milena witnessed the increasing persecution of the local Jews even before the German occupation of Bohemia. She had no difficulty in imagining what their life would be when the Nazis took over. A year later, in March 1939 when all Czechoslovakia fell to Hitler, she knew one thing: It was her duty to help all those who were threatened, and the Jewish population most of all. And something else she had learned: Up until then she had thought of the army as a necessary evil, Now she awoke to the importance of national defense and came to look with new eyes on the Czech officers’ corps, these representatives of a caste which had always been totally alien to her. In 1939, when Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, it was she who recognized the political importance of saving at least a part of the well-trained Czech army, its officers and fliers, in order that they might contribute to the defense of England in the war that had become inevitable.
In this Milena demonstrated an almost prophetic clear-sightedness.
She also criticized the Prague government for its failure to deal intelligently with the German minority. In an article entitled “Germans against Germans—Czechs against Germans—and alas!—Czechs against Czechs,”* she describes the situation in the north. “The Czechs are boycotted by all—the only exception being the democratic Germans. But in the interest of the truth it must be admitted that no adequate attempt was made to build a democratic bloc including the democratic-minded Germans. The cardinal error of our propaganda and of the Czechs inhabiting the frontier zone was failure to understand that it was not yet too late to bolster up those elements in the German camp who, though speaking a different language from ours, shared our political outlook…. If that had been done, Hitler’s propaganda may not have fallen on such fertile soil….
“Wherever I go, the people are agreeable if I speak German to them. If you speak Czech, they shrug their shoulders and leave you standing. But once they see a Czech taking the trouble to talk German to them, they melt. I’ve tried it any number of times. The man in the street is touchingly grateful when he hears a Czech speaking German. His tight-lipped hostility evaporates. In nineteen cases out of twenty, he shrugs his shoulders and remarks with a friendly gesture: ‘So why should we argue? You’re a Czech, I’m a German. Let me live in peace and I’ll let you live in peace.’
“And that’s the crux of the matter. We should have realized sooner who these people are and what we wanted of them. If we had regarded them as German citizens of the Czechoslovakian Republic….” Here the Czech censorship stepped in and cut seven lines out of Milena’s article, a sign of the nervousness that had taken hold of the Czechoslovakian government. The article goes on: “… The Germans love their language, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t respect that love. They are Germans but not Nazis….” (Here the nervous censor stepped in again and deleted twelve lines.) “These people and their families,” she goes on, “could have been carriers of democratic propaganda, they could have become ethical, social and cultural props of Czech democracy and of democracy as such in the north of our country….”
After 1918 the government of the Czechoslovakian Republic tried to find a democratic solution to the problem of the German minority, but alas, they went about it too slowly, deterred by the anti-German feeling of the Czech population, carried over from the days when their country was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But it was not until 1933, with Hitler’s seizure of power, that the problem became really acute. Hard hit by the world economic crisis of the thirties, the Sudeten Germans offered fertile soil to National Socialist propaganda. Though the seditious character of the Sudeten German party could not be held in doubt, President Masaryk, in the name of his democratic principles, refused to suppress it. In the general elections of 1935 Henlein won two-thirds of the German vote, and in 1938 the figure rose to 92 percent. Whatever historical or political reasons there may have been for the development of the crisis in the Sudeten German territory, the situation in 1938 was disastrous, as was made clear at the municipal elections of May 21, when the armed totalitarian enemy was on the borders.
Despite the menacing situation, Milena had not in the summer of 1938 given up hope that the Czech army and people would be able to resist Hitler. She failed to see that the battle was already lost.
With an excess of optimism, she concluded her article: “One thing is not in their [Henlein’s party’s] power: just what they most fervently hope for, namely, a repetition of what happened in Austria in 1938, the occupation without striking a blow, the Sieg-Heil promenade, the concentration camps, the banishment of masses of people from their country, the ‘Jews, keep out’ signs. In a word, they cannot possibly effect an Anschluss….”
The attitude of France became more and more pusillanimous. It took only a slight push from outside to make the French government cave in completely. This push was provided in September 1938 by an article in The Times (London), inspired no doubt by the Chamberlain clique. It suggested that it might be better for Czechoslovakia to get rid of the border territories with foreign populations and thus become a homogeneous state. The writer of the article chose to forget that these border territories were bilingual, inhabited by Czechs as well as Germans. Soon after the appearance of this article, Chamberlain went to Berchtesgaden for a first conference with Hitler. England and France favored a settlement of the conflict, and that meant granting the Sudeten Germans self-determination. After these first concessions, there was no holding Hitler. On September 22, at the second meeting with Chamberlain at Bad Godesberg, his demands were so outrageous that in an access of courage even the defeatist representatives of the Western powers sent a secret warning to the Czechoslovakian government, advising it to prepare for resistance. This led to the second general mobilization of the Czechoslovakian army on September 22. The whole population heaved a sigh of relief and once again, exactly as in May, the men complied immediately with the mobilization order. That day there were demonstrations of joy in the streets of Prague. No one foresaw the tragedy that would descend unopposed on the Czech nation in a few days. At the Munich Conference on September 29, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia was consummated. With the consent of the French premier Daladier and Chamberlain, in the presence of Mussolini, Hitler decreed that between October 1 and October 10 Czechoslovakia must cede to Germany those frontier regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia that were inhabited by Germans.
This was the beginning of the end. But in France and England it was greeted by rejoicing. Peace had been saved. … A wave of refugees swept across the new frontiers of Czechoslovakia. Thousands left the Sudeten territory, democratic Germans as well as Czechs and Jews. From Carpathian Ruthenia and Slovakia, which at the beginning of October declared their autonomy, came more refugees, seeking safety within the shrunken borders of Czechoslovakia.
In Munich, Chamberlain and Hitler had signed a nonaggression pact, supposedly guaranteeing the integrity of Czechoslovakia. It would be seen before long how seriously Hitler took this pact. In Munich he had become convinced of one thing: that where Czechoslovakia was concerned, Chamberlain and Daladier would put up with anything he demanded. Later he said of the two, “Our adversaries are worms. I saw them in Munich.”*
Hitler regularly sent for the foreign minister of the Hächa government to give him orders. He put systematic pressure on Prague. The Hächa government resisted certain demands, but gave in to many others, such as the legalization of anti-Semitic agitation and authorization of a National Socialist party. The Sudeten German Kindt, a henchman of Henlein’s, set himself up as the “Führer” of the 250,000 Germans living in Czechoslovakia, and did his best to influence the government on Hitler’s behalf. A strict press censorship was introduced and almost all independent newspapers suppressed. The newly founded papers carried hysterical anti-Semitic propaganda and were scarcely distinguishable from the Völkischer Beobachter.
After the catastrophe of Munich and the betrayal of the Western powers, in whose good faith she had trusted, the tone of Milena’s articles changed. As early as October 5, she drew up a calendar of the September events. This article is in a sense her master’s thesis in political journalism. A week later, in “Beyond Our Strength,” she drops all her old optimism and looks squarely at the crushing facts, admits that mutilated Bohemia can hardly hope for a future, but nevertheless tries to save what can be saved and to give good advice. To avoid despair, she stresses the few remaining positive factors and passes merciless judgment on the guilty parties, the Germans, the Western powers, and the opportunists in her own camp.