The frightening novelty of the regime convinced the Havel family to remove young Václav and his little brother Ivan from the hell-hole of Prague to the relative tranquillity of their country house, near Tišnov in Moravia. Havlov served for a time as something like a rural retreat. The half-wooden, white-plastered villa with green window-frames and a swimming pool was tucked away within a forest, above a little stream called Bobrůvka, within hiking distance of old Pernštejn Castle. The house was also within walking distance of a school in the nearby village of Žd’árec, which Havel began attending during the first week of September 1942. The decision to move the children and send them to a country school was his mother’s. Božena Havlová, like many other thinking Czechs, tried to act as if life were normal, all the while knowing that the world was now being divided, violently and irreversibly, between those who valued human omnipotence and those for whom utter powerlessness was a simple fact of life.
Reinhard Heydrich, who prior to his rule of Czechoslovakia had been among Himmler’s closest collaborators, was emblematic of the trend.28 Here was a new type of ruler, unfamiliar to most Czechs, a man convinced of his own omnipotence and skilled in the art of repeatedly insulting his opponents to demonstrate to everybody that they were not merely flesh-and-blood opponents but ‘objective enemies’. Those who knew him personally — the Havel family did not — confirmed his habit of regarding friends as potential foes, and rivals as enemies, ‘not as individuals, but as carriers of tendencies endangering the State and therefore beyond the pale of the National Community’.29 His obsession with ‘objective enemies’ evidently led down the path of reducing them to nothing, or killing them in ‘self-defence’. This meant the extermination of whole categories of flesh-and-blood mortals. Heydrich was of course temporarily interested in Jews and in Romanies — thousands of whom reportedly died from ‘typhus’, which meant beating, starvation, transportation to Auschwitz as slave labourers, gassing in nearby Birkenau, or being burned, tossed into latrines, or buried in mass graves in forests. But the list of future potential victims was infinitely expandable. It was well known to the Havel family, and to others in informed Prague circles, that as early as 1941 proposals had been circulating among the Nazis to treat the entire Polish population as Jews: making them the objects of compulsory changes of name if they were of German origin; forcing them to wear the P-sign, which would function like the yellow star worn by Jews; and making sexual intercourse between Germans and Poles punishable by death. Many Czechs, the Havel family included, naturally began to fear that they might be next in line.
Their fears were laced with rumours, deliberately planted by the German authorities, that they would deport or eliminate hundreds of thousands of Czechs. Driven by expectations of total victory in Western Europe, plans for the deportation of the Czechs — what later would be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ — were indeed drawn up. The Havel family knew that tens of thousands of Czech workers were being compulsorily drafted into work teams and sent to the Reich. They knew that Jews were receiving orders to hand over their typewriters and musical instruments, furs and microscopes, that they were now forbidden to enter certain streets and parks, that they were now prevented from disposing of their property, or making gifts. The family also knew that the once-small fortress town of Terezín (Theresienstadt) was being transformed into a ‘self-administered’ ghetto for Jews, even those who considered themselves Czechs and Christians. The Havels knew as well that Jews were cruelly saddled with the jobs of selecting candidates for ‘resettlement lists’, which meant transport to death camps elsewhere, and of apportioning the starvation rations of a few grams of bread and potatoes and teaspoonfuls of soup to inmates too old or exhausted to work.
The implication was clear: the punishment of non-Germans and ‘unfit’ Germans was a precondition of the triumphant will to total power over others. World conquest required breaking down the division between the conquering regime and the conquered territories. Even the distinction between ‘at home’ and ‘abroad’ had to be dissolved. A totalitarian conqueror like Heydrich had to act as if the territory he had conquered were his very own home — by eliminating strangers who did not belong. And so the Nazis’ ultimate aim — as Heydrich clearly stated in his first speech after assuming office — was to undo the work of young Czechs like Havel’s father, to ‘Germanize’ Bohemia and Moravia by incorporating them fully into the Reich. Hitler’s ‘table conversations’ about the Czechs made it clear that while the Nazis aimed within their borders to build a suave totalitarianism, this involved no sympathy or respect for the Czechs. ‘Germanizing’ them meant expelling or exterminating elements of the population ‘unsuited’ for Germanization. It also meant acting like locusts within the country’s rich fields of political culture and inherited republican parliamentary institutions. The final aim was to be linguicide. ‘By firmly leading the Protectorate,’ said Hitler during the third year of occupation — young Venoušek was now five and a half years old — ‘it ought to be possible in about twenty years to push the Czech language back to the importance of a dialect.’30 All this required that the Nazis had to be cruel. But, in order not to trigger explosions, or simply to avoid strikes and sabotage, or even guerrilla warfare behind the lines of the German army, the Nazis had to be kind. They had merely to be cruel by stealth. The aim was to kill the Czechs with kindness. So although the Führer stressed just how useful threats of expulsion of the Czechs from their homeland were as a means of government, he also instructed his Prague henchmen that Czechs should not be involved directly in the war effort. If that happened, they would likely raise their demands. Better then to seduce the Czechs into obedience and hard work by ‘good treatment’ and ‘double rations’.31
The dilemma hiding within the Nazis’ conquering power over the Czechs mirrored a dilemma lurking within the ranks of the conquered, young Václav included. From the side of all Czechs of (potential) anti-Nazi sentiment, threats of arrest, deportation, murder, imprisonment and extermination were self-evident from the moment of occupation. Like the man who worked in the crematorium in Prague at the time of the Nazi occupation — the ‘hero’ of Ladislav Fuks’s novel, The Cremator32 — virtually every household was touched by the thought that individuals, groups, indeed the whole population would suffer interrogation, or arrest, or extinction. Various reactions were thinkable, including stashing weapons in sofas, cupboards and coffins, and martyrdom in the form of open resistance. Yet the nasty experience of the Poles when resisting Nazi occupation, combined with the fact that the Czechs themselves had already been the victims of appeasement at Munich, made many Czechs think twice about this option. It encouraged them to conform, to tiptoe across puddles of blood, to take the road of self-abasement in order to guard themselves against the dreaded outcome.
At Havlov, Havel’s parents heard through radio reports of the huge rally of 200,000 Czechs packed into Wenceslas Square in the mid-summer of 1942, singing the national anthem whilst pledging allegiance to the Third Reich and giving the Hitler salute. It depressed them. The rally demonstrated to them, and to every thinking person, that collaboration in the exact sense of the word was widespread among Czechs. Sometimes the cooperation assumed crude forms, symbolized by the case of Colonel Emanuel Moravec, a former prominent nationalist member of the Czechoslovak Legion, who accepted from the Nazis the job of heading the Ministry of Education and the new Office for Public Enlightenment.33 Such arse-crawling by Czech stooges and quislings was abnormal. Quite a number of Czech governmental and political-party figures, for instance, saw instead that their interest lay in keeping calm, maintaining order, keeping the population politically alert, and, wherever possible, subtly ‘throwing sand into the cogwheels’. The response of many civil servants ran in a parallel, but different direction. They certainly knew that if they caused trouble they would lose their jobs and suffer police action. So they stayed at their desks not out of simple opportunism but rather because they were titillated by the vague hope that the country would survive in the eye of the storm of totalitarianism if they zipped their lips and kept their heads down.
Then there was the disquieting response of those whose reaction to total power is best described as zoological: better to live well fed and quietly than not to live at all. As a type of collaboration, zoologism was a complex matter hedged in by dimly expressed motives. Zoologism supposed a tacit agreement between rulers and ruled that peace and quiet served the interests of both. Bearers of the ‘contract’ understood that it was renewable daily by possible annihilation and the impossibility of calm calculation; that fear ate the brain and soul; and that when the fear-stricken ruled thought about it at all, martyrdom in the face of total power seemed pointless, simply because their own superfluousness had been decided in advance. For these ‘reasons’ alone, plenty of Czechs adjusted their lives to the simple obligatory maxims of zoologism: Powerless of the Great German Reich! Quietly comply! Conform and be dull! Tell yourselves as you look in the mirror each day that it is better not to die. Forget about a most basic freedom, the freedom to tell others what they don’t want to hear. Get on with existing. Do whatever you feel like doing! Shave, wash, work, shop, cook, eat, drink, chat, bathe, make love, fall asleep. Keep your chins up. Keep your noses clean. Clink glasses. Grumble quietly. Tell jokes, if you can. And no matter what happens, avoid thinking, let alone uttering the word collaboration. If you do, regard it as a meaningless slip. Then quickly change the subject. Define away questions about whether co-operation with the powerful is ever shameful, or treasonable. Above all, regard collaboration as a non-existent word.