There was a woman by the window. She had not spoken. “Ask her,” the others said, “ask her what happened to her.” I could see she was weeping. But when she turned to speak her face was carved with anger. “Look,” she said, “the Henlein police go about the street; they own the street and the village and the country. And so you are walking on the pavement. So one came up to me like this,” and she drew back her arm, “and struck me across the face, and said I was a dirty Czech and they would make the Czechs, all the Czechs, so small,” her hand reached to the ground, “in concentration camps. I had seen it before, and I feared for my child. I came here with her, walking, with nothing but the clothes on our backs, and there she is. My daughter has no home, no school, no country. Are the French and the English happy now?”
At Kladno, a small, dismal town halfway between Prague and the new frontier, the refugees were all over, wherever there was room. They had housed a few hundred in the old folks home. The refugees wandered about among the old women with their kerchiefed heads and the old pipe-smoking men, lost and bewildered. The old people did not care any more: this home was their safety against a mad, uncertain world. But the refugees slept on straw in the clean, bright basement, and worried about tomorrow.
“They cannot send us back to Germany,” a gray-haired Czech said. “I cannot go. My son was a soldier in the Czech army. He went home after the demobilization with three comrades. He did not know I had escaped. He walked into the house to see me and get clothes, and they arrested him. Only one of the three got away. He has told me. No one is safe,” he said, “none of us; they cannot send me back.”
The refugees from the German occupied territory were also in the German school at Kladno (there were even German schools, it seems, in these preponderantly Czech towns), Czechs and Germans mixed together, closely bound by disaster, fed by Czech women, and no one cared about their nationality or politics. I have seen the war refugees live in America when the Mississippi rises and drives them from their homes. These people were fleeing too, from something they had not made, as innocent as the people who escape the danger of the rising river.
There were two tiny blond children, too small to speak, who bumbled around on fat legs and got in everyone's way, and everyone loved them. They were called Hansel and Gretel because their names had gotten lost in transit. They had come here with their blind grandmother, who was now in a hospital with pneumonia; no one knew where their parents were. There was a tall green-eyed boy who kept his shoes neatly shined, who somehow kept his hands and face washed and his shirt clean. (Sleeping on straw, of course, washing when and as he could, waiting in line for his daily soup.) His green eyes were sad and he was very alone. His mother was sick and had to stay behind in German territory; his father was in Prague.
“What is your father?” I said, meaning what is his trade.
“A Liberal,” the boy said, like saying, “A man doomed.”
The boy was living there and waiting. He was a student of chemistry. The school was in this town; it would have to open again sometime. He said, with a quick flash of obstinacy, standing there alone against a world that was upside down and mad and cruel, “I will sleep on hay and I will eat soup and I will be dirty and without my family and without my friends. But I will finish my studies. I am going to learn.”
And at Postelberg I got a look at the frontier. You couldn't believe it: it didn't make any sense. Just barbed wire stretched across an open road, and on one side was Czechoslovakia and on the other side what had suddenly become Germany. A crowd of Czechs stood on their side of the barbed wire and stared; they were like people who doubted a dream. One young German soldier leaned on his rifle on the other side of the fence. He was very embarrassed by all these eyes; he tried to look confident and only looked awkward and uneasy, shifting from foot to foot. So the Czechs stood there staring into that land that had been theirs and was now no longer theirs, a land that had suddenly filled with darkness and terror for them.
It was not easy for them to understand. They knew that there were four new concentration camps already on what used to be Czechoslovakian soil where a concentration camp could never have existed: two near Carlsbad, one at Eich, another at Elbogen. And that people like them were already in these camps. They knew that the Henleinists roamed their new territory, drunk with power and the strange brutality that can come over men but which the Czechs do not understand anyhow. They knew that Czech women were forced to clean the village town halls and barracks on hands and knees, bullied and insulted by Henlein women (but how can it be, they thought, that women are so different?). They know that Czechs were made to kneel before the statue of Masaryk, and defame the statue of the man they loved most, and swear allegiance to an alien conquerer. They knew (with shame and with disgust and with fear) all the miserable record of beating, abuse and torture that went on. They knew that men who believed as they did were in desperate danger on the other side of a piece of barbed wire. And they stood like people stunned, and somehow it was terribly frightening.
Because the land was as green across the fence, the smooth Bohemian plain. The fields were as neat, the villages as sober, practical and gray. But there was something going on over there that horrified them, and you felt youself that no one was safe any more. One strand of barbed wire cannot keep a whole system of life away. On one side of the fence was a life they knew and believed in: freedom and justice and truth and the right of every man to say what he thinks. But for how long, they thought, how long? Hitler is not a man to these people. He may be a god to the Nazis, but to the Czechs he is the power of darkness, and they have no arms left to fight him.
“The German soldiers were very correct,” a woman said to me, standing there with the barbed wire between us and the dark young German and his rifle. “The Henleinists and the Gestapo have done all the cruelty, but the soldiers have not aided them.”
“No?” I said.
“No,” she said. “Of course they do not help our people, but at least they do not strike them.”
“That is fine,” I said.
But the heart is heavy and the brain refuses to accept these things. The day before in Prague they brought a young girl out of a hotel on a stretcher; she had killed herself in her room, after her husband had been arrested in German territory. A newspaper editor and his wife who ran a German liberal paper swallowed veronal, but they did a bad job and it took them three days to die. A man I knew came up to me in a hotel lobby in Prague and said, whispering as if he were afraid to hear it, “I took a girl out to dinner; I used to know her father—he was a lawyer in the second zone.” The second zone, I thought, what a way to name a piece of land: the second zone of invasion. “But he didn't get out before the Germans came and she said she was wild for a time, but tonight she was very gay, oh, very gay.”
“Her father is all right, then?”
“No,” my friend said. “But she has eight poison tablets in her purse, that she bought, and she says no one will every get her into a concentration camp.”
“Listen,” I said, “I've heard enough, so don't tell me any more. I can tell you names of Jewish doctors and Social Democrat lawyers who had suicided in the Sudeten territory; I can tell you stories about beatings and brandings and executions with names and addresses attached to them. I know of simple people who had neither the money nor the information to use poison, so they just threw themselves under the trains that were supposed to take them back to Sudetenland. I've seen an old man with his front teeth knocked out and his ribs almost showing through a mess of red meat on his side and his arms black and swollen from the beating, and I can't bear to hear any more, see?—not for a while anyhow.”
So I stood at the frontier with the woman and we looked over into that new country across the barbed wire.
Prague is a beautiful city. Do you know Prague? The Hradsin Palace on the hill where Benes lived glowed against the night, and the cathedral spires beside it went up like lances into the sky. The bridges shone over the river, and parliam
ent and the great white opera house were cut out of the darkness. (But the city does not shine this way any more, because the main electric power station of Prague is now in German territory.) In the old town you saw the great baroque buildings hugged against the hill, the narrow streets pierced with arcades, the flower market, the small cobbled squares with the houses flat and quiet around them. People were very happy and at ease in Prague, never noisy because the Czechs are a sober people, never elegant or dazzling because they dress in a practical, enduring way, but well fed and serene and busy and at home.
In the gray early morning you watched the people going to work in the new town. It wasn't the way you remembered it. Nothing had changed in the city: the automats were the same; the Bata shoe store stood where it always had; the same handsome leather goods were on display; the same clothes dummies posed in the windows, draped in masses of glittering cloth as they always were. But the people looked different. There was something new in Prague: fear.
They were afraid to talk in restaurants because who knew what kind of person was listening at the next table? Their mail was censored, and their newspapers. They could not take their money from the bank; they could not leave the country without permission. The foreign consulates were crowded with people begging for visas. As a foreigner, everyone you met spoke to you about leaving—could a man find work in America? . . . They had loved their country and worked to make it fine. But now they hoped to get out before their country ceased being a republic, even in name. Already anti-Jewish demonstrations had begun, the old ugly story of broken windows and shouted idiotic slogans; already whispering campaigns ran through the city, against Benes, against democracy. The Liberal and Left parties are outlawed; certain newspapers cease to print; politicians and public figures whose democratic faith was strong are already in flight. It is all coming, as it had to come. Even the taxi driver had said, with what sorrow, “Democracy is dead. We will have a dictatorship here too.” Czechoslovakia is no longer an independent state. People are afraid.
You began to add up the disaster. The military defenses were gone and the country was now utterly helpless. The army was demobilized, and without the defenses could never be used again. Over one million Czechs who had lived in their own country in September and had been citizens of a republic now found themselves, not through choice, citizens of Germany or of Poland or Hungary.
There was no way of telling how many refugees there were, but hundreds of thousands of Sudeten Germans had never belonged to the Henlein party and now they were either in concentration camps or fleeing toward a brief uncertain safety in the remnant of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs from the annexed territories were also moving, crossing the frontier at night; no one knows how many have come or how many will still find their way back to the homeland. There are 10,000 Austrian and German exiles, all of them marked men and women, most of them escaped from prison or concentration camps, who had been safe in the republic of Czechoslovakia. But Czechoslovakia cannot protect these people. Even Benes was not safe. And, besides, this small mutilated state cannot even temporarily house and feed and clothe hundreds of thousands of refugees. The economy of Czechoslovakia is as shattered as its military defenses.
The great executive didn't look his part: he was of medium height, slender, neat, very accurate and shy. He received me in a board room that was furnished in huge mahogany and the walls were covered with maps. New maps, with incredible erratic crayon lines drawn on them: he showed me the frontier with a strange smile and did not comment.
Then he began to talk in a gray, matter-of-fact voice. He spoke like a professor, making his points on the map. There were only two ways that people spoke in Czechoslovakia, and this was the second way. When they talked they all spoke with terrible and violent control; but later, as the story went on, the control snapped, and people—these serious, quiet, inarticulate people—wept as they talked, with fury and helplessness. Or else they talked coldly, stating facts, trying to keep their voices and their minds dead.
So his hand moved over the map and his voice went on: “40 per cent of the metallurgical industry lost, 60 per cent of the soft coal lost, 63 per cent of the textile industry lost, 100 per cent of the porcelain industry lost, 57 per cent of the glass industry lost, 30 per cent of the sugar industry lost, 40 per cent of the chemical industry lost, 63 per cent of the paper industry lost. . . .” All the work gone, the twenty years of patience and effort come to nothing.
“What will you do?” I said.
“Start again.”
“How?”
“Somehow,” he said, weary and proud. “Somehow.”
The railroad lines were in red on the map, and you could see how it worked out, as if you were watching a movie, as if you saw the trains pulling the freight cars through the flat fields and the pine woods. Now the two railroad lines that linked northern and southern Czechoslovakia were cut: they both ran through the new Germany. You looked at it again, to make sure, and suddenly you realized there was no communication. It was as if the railroad from New York to San Francisco were cut at Chicago. He showed me Morava Ostrava, a great iron and steel town, stuck up foolishly on the side of Czechoslovakia, entirely surrounded by the new Germany and the new Poland.
“The iron comes from the Slovakian fields,” he said, and his finger traced an oval to the south, in the center of the country. “But you see the railroad is cut. The iron ore must be changed five times, onto five different trains, before it gets from the fields to the factory at Morava Ostrava.”
It went on and on, from a millionaire manufacturer to an economist, to a farm leader, to an exporter, an advertising agent, down to simple people who only knew their own small corner in the world, their own pigs and flax and hops, their own tiny shoe store or paper shop. A million hectares of timber land gone: hops, flax, fruit, vineyards, tobacco land ceded to Germany.
So you saw it, not as statistics, not as railroads lost and mines and factories gone, but in terms of human life. You saw it as unemployment and a falling standard of living and as labor camps and diminished wages and hardship and homelessness. You knew that not only a democratic military power had been wiped out, but you saw that a flourishing and successful trade rival had been destroyed. It was a very thorough job. I remember the boy who had been sitting with friends in a Prague restaurant; they were bowed over a map and were working with pencil and paper figuring up the losses. He was a boy who would normally play football and be deeply interested in having a motorcycle. And suddenly he rose from the table with a white face and fuious eyes, and shouted out for everyone to hear, “If we had fought alone and been defeated, it could not be worse.”
The German frontier is now three miles from the Skoda works at Pilsen. They will never make armaments for the Czech army again. Skoda transports the coal from what mines remain to them by truck because the railroad has been cut between Pilsen and Klatovy. Workers who lived in the Klatovy section, a sort of suburb to Pilsen, where they had small homes and gardens, used to commute into Pilsen, a trip of two hours. Now that trip takes ten hours, having to make a wide semicircle to avoid the new Germany, and so workers must move to Pilsen or lose their jobs.
Outside the factory two men were leaning on their bicycles. One of them had cleaned up and wore a bright blue shirt without a collar, held in place by a shiny brass collar button. The other was grease-stained and dark. They seemed in no hurry to leave. They were going home into Germany. A week before they lived in Czechoslovakia and were Czechs and now they lived in Germany and had to get a printed permission from the German military authorities to cross into Pilsen to work. When they got on their bicycles they sailed down the fine concrete road past the bridge, on their way home, as they always had, but when they started to pedal up the hill they were stopped by two German soldiers in steel helmets, who asked for their papers. Just suddenly, there on the road, their country ended. Where they lived it had always been Czech.
They were talking together and the foreman translated for me.
; The worker in the blue shirt was talking. “I tried to get my wife across with the little girl yesterday but I'm not allowed.”
“Why?” I said.
“I do not know,” he said. “We are not Germans, but they will not let us take anything away with us, and when we try to leave, even leaving the mattresses and the pots and pans and the bed clothes and our winter coats and everything there, they will not let us come. We have no politics either. But we are Czechs.”
The unwashed worker, who seemed very tired, said he was not easy in his mind. It seemed that he knew an old peasant named Janisek who had three sons. The sons had fled into Czechoslovakia before the German invasion. But the oldest son was the father's inheritor and the old man needed help on the farm. The oldest son was guaranteed safety if he returned, and so he came back. He was arrested as he entered the door of his father's house and taken away. They had not seen him since; they did not know where he had gone and they were afraid to ask.
“The old man is crazy,” the dark worker said. “And he cannot do the work alone.”
“You see how it is.” The foreman made sweeping zigzagging movements with his hands. “Our frontier. Crazy, isn't it. It has nothing to do with races or minorities, all that stuff. But is it not crazy? The country is cut up to ruin it. And there is already that trade agreement with Jugoslavia. They have to sell everything they have to Germany, and they may not even buy goods that are not manufactured in Germany, without Germany's permission. They are not invaded, but they are slaves too. There is that offer to Lithuania of fifteen years’ nonaggression in return for another of these trade treaties. Treaties!” he said, with fury.
“Do you see how it is now? From the Baltic to the Black Sea he will run us all, with money, with commerce, with what people live and die by. We will all be good or we will starve.”
On that morning Edouard Benes drove from the Hradsin Palace for the last time. He stood up in the open car, with his wife beside him, and the car went slowly through the great stone courtyards out through the carved gates. The citizens of Prague had come to say goodby. They stood along the curb and waited for this man who was a symbol of their state and their freedom. When he passed, they bowed their heads as people do for the dead. The crowd wept. Madame Benes held her head high and looked at the people, but her face was marked with tears. The president stood in the car and saluted his people and they did not speak or wave or cheer; they had come to say goodby and they wept for him and for all that was lost. Below them the city lay in the autumn mist, gray and silver with the dark fine steeples of the churches rising into the gray sky. The car drove slowly into the country.
The View from the Ground Page 7
