THE FIREMAN OF PRAGUE
Bowie, Beverley
The Fireman of Prague By Beverley M. Bowie IT IS an art to be an exile; and in this art, as in some others, timing is all. You must know when to arrive. For the iron law of diminishing attention...
...Yet it is apparent that to restore democratic government to Eastern Europe by means of war is equivalent to rearranging a badly-run china shop with the aid of a hand-grenade...
...Later, they transferred him to Buchenwald...
...The hydrogen missile presents him with the further awesome equation to solve: how much misery on the part of the enslaved does it take to justify the vaporization of 10 or 20 square miles of Europeans per bomb...
...Zenkl kept his fingers crossed, rif was happy, being home, being ac| tive, being re-united with his wifes| The only shadow on his horizon wag his profound distrust of the new Communist "line...
...for more drastic nationalization of industry and commerce...
...It is hard to read it as meaning anything else than an ultimatum to Russia to withdraw her troops from Central Europe, to call off her Communists, and, in effect, to disband every 'people's democratic government" in her satellite area...
...It is indicative of his spirit and of the spirit of Czechoslovakia itself that his parting words should be these: "Preserve spotless the character of the nation...
...He was not to see his office, his wife, his friends for another six years...
...the Army and the Police were alerted, and then by terror, lies, and distortion they forced the acceptance of the resignation of 12 Ministers representing three political parties and the formation of a new Cabinet of Gottwald consisting of Communists, Quislings, and powerless puppets...
...He speaks against the wind, and he wftt doubtless die before the wind sub...
...At headquarters they made him stand with his face to the wall, his hands above his head...
...the apologetics and the legalization...
...Educate your children to be honest citizens...
...Do not allow yourselves to be so deceived as not to be able to recognize what is freedom and what is tyranny, what is right and what is wrong...
...The Kremlin summoned the Czechs to discuss "economic relations...
...For the iron law of diminishing attention operates here, and it spares neither kings nor commoners: the first exiled statesman is a hero...
...From the vantage-point of our present attainments in the field of organized repression, the "tyranny" of the Hapsburgs must, of course, appear the merest tap on the wrist...
...They may have put the cart before the horse...
...the neighbors were invited to vote "Ja" —or, in Czechoslovakian, "Da...
...All the states of the world are on the time schedule of Russian policy...
...he has turned them all down to keep himself free for his unpaid political labors...
...it should be possible, they reasoned, to utilize one to acquire the other...
...Now he was "free" to witness the full spectacle of its political degradation...
...but the appointment of a staunch democrat like Zenkl as Deputy Premier was welcome reassurance...
...his reckless reaction may yet be ours...
...Accordingly, there was set up the Czechoslovak Social Security System, with Zenkl as General Manager...
...Admittedly, pan-Germanism was no new story to the Czechs and the Slovaks...
...No chronicling of six years in a concentration camp can convey more than a fraction of its horror...
...But the question—and this is a question of life and death for millions of Europeans-—is whether it will be done in a couple of years or only in a couple of decades of years...
...but it gave back to the Czechs a little of what they had lost at Munich...
...It seems a dim, pedantic kind of subversion...
...now, however, appraisals made by their own Minister of the Interior and Minister of Information indicated they would be lucky in the spring elections of 1948 to hold their own...
...But the authorities did not treat it as a joke...
...As the Red Army rumbled into the suburbs, the citizens of the capital rose with their revolvers, their shotguns, their stolen submachineguns and disputed the streets with the German rearguard...
...For two days he stayed there, hearing the tramp of boots on the floor above, hearing the search-dogs yapping on their leashes, hearing the orders on the loudspeaker...
...and, if they had had only their obstreperous "Aryan" minority to deal with, they could doubtless have handled it without much trouble...
...It was impossible to shake his guards...
...armed Factory Militia were ordered into the streets...
...After all, what did they have to lose...
...In the camp he had at least been spared seeing what was happening to his country...
...At a private audience with Stalin, Gottwald sold out...
...Accordingly, the Communist bloc in the Cabinet initiated those cynical parliamentary maneuvers in which Reds everywhere have always taken such delight...
...II But Zenkl was marked for death even as "liberation" seemed certain...
...They wanted him just to step down to headquarters to answer a few questions...
...they dreaded infection...
...Should the West employ this satanic gadget for the liberation of Czechoslovakia, Dr...
...Such facts did not go well with their advance publicity—spread over many months— which boasted of capturing the Government in a landslide...
...Zenkl was put under close police surveillance...
...True, he was, with Mazaryk and Benes, one of the chief architects of the late Czechoslovak Republic...
...It may be that, in his passionate desire to see truth triumph and the totalitarian lie go down, Zenkl will end up as a proponent of "preventive war...
...He has no faith that they will "wilt away" in the near future...
...Unemployment and political power were alike concentrated in Prague...
...in 1938 he entered the cabinet as Minister of Social Welfare...
...uniform mass telegraph messages and resolutions were produced and paid from public funds...
...workers from factories, shops and public offices were herded together and brought to these meetings in trucks under the threat of losing their jobs...
...But no one, I think, can fail to respond to the profound dignity, the awkward honesty of Zenkl's exhortation to his far-off countrymen...
...But we cannot leave Zenkl at that...
...Twenty-four hours later, he stepped out of a plane at an airport near London, whence he left soon for home...
...Czech Communists, aware that their electoral strength was steadily slipping, began to ready themselves for a putsch...
...great population shifts had to be arranged...
...The world looked to Czechoslovakia as a working model of cooperation between center and left-of-center parties...
...the second is a curiosity...
...As one who stood firm against Haps-burg, Nazi, and Communist alike, Petr Zenkl has surely earned the right to speak...
...The eighth of 10 children, Pen-had by 1907 attained his doctorate of philosophy and had plunged into teaching...
...They resigned...
...The former National Front of all political parties was liquidated and replaced by a new National Front under the exclusive Communist command...
...For the hall-marks of the Czech national character have always been—in contradistinction to the Republic's more flamboyant Balkan neighbors—sobriety, common sense, moral stamina...
...As a Czech, however, he had been living (and he knew it) on borrowed time...
...Ordinarily, it was fairly safe from Nazi intrusion...
...Sirovy's "caretaker cabinet" came in, Zenkl served on it at the Pres-ident's personal request...
...Zenkl might have some difficulty even in locating his country on the map, or the democratic principles in which he believes anywhere on earth...
...Its principal feature was the radical new notion of unemployment insurance, paid jointly by the unions and by the state: the so-called Ghent System...
...One can isolate beatings, deprivations, betrayals, murders...
...When the troops of Petrov's Third Ukrainian marched in, they were greeted by men and women who held their heads high...
...Zenkl bore the title proudly—and soon added others to it...
...Off to Moscow went Premier Gottwald, Jan Mazaryk, and their associates...
...He came after Mikolajzyk of Poland, Nagy of Hungary, Dimitrov of Bulgaria, Fotitch of Yugoslavia, Ra-descu of Rumania...
...I venture to say that modern civilization will be extinct in Europe, in spite of all Marshall plans, if the world democracies decide to wait until Communism will thus, in a natural fashion, wilt away...
...A pity, perhaps...
...The non-Communists had the votes, but they seemed unable to cope with men who didn't care a hoot for Roberts' Rules of Order...
...if, on the other hand, we enter fully into his experience, we may yet glean more from it than he has grasped himself...
...With the help of some camp criminals he had befriended, Zenkl found his way to a trap-door and lowered himself down into a section of stinking sewer-pipe laid beneath the barracks...
...It was a weird situation...
...Only toward the end, when grapevine reports told of steady Allied progress across the face of Europe, did the incredible seem possible...
...The expedient wisdom of selecting a Communist like Gottwald for Premier was understood...
...But are we sure such an ultimatum will bring results, and, if it does not, are we prepared to carry through on the alternative: war...
...More than that, he did not like to think of the consequences for them if he succeeded...
...Your creches, your working-class kindergartens, your play-grounds, your housing project, your free meals, your old-age and jobless insurance—these are the biggest obstacles we face...
...Zenkl went to the camp warehouse...
...But let us go on to examine some of its implications: "The plague of Communism," declares Zenkl, "will be overcome as any other plagues...
...Czech and Slovak were linked in a common objective that ran beyond the destruction of the old regime and the riddance of Magyar and German domination...
...From what he had learned of them in prison—and many of them were the same Buchenwald collaborators—he could not believe they had abandoned so easily their ambition to take over the State, whether with a legal majority or not...
...He himself has been offered lucrative and secure posts at various universities...
...For the new city of Prague (hitherto a hodge-podge of some 46 towns and villages) he organized the foremost municipal welfare program on the Continent...
...At his immaculate little apartment in Washington, his self-effacing wife, who escaped with him, cooks his meals, bakes the rich Bohemian cakes and cookies that adorn their tea-table, and worries quietly about their refugee-friends, Zenkl tries to find jobs for them and acts as a kind of combined clearinghouse for information and an employment agency...
...True again, it was scarcely his fault that he was tardy: during the six months prior to his escape, the Communists had him under close arrest...
...As head of the Council of Free Czechoslovakia and as the prospective chief of Central Europe's exiled statesmen, he has become—and will increasingly become—a focal point of protest in this country against the Communist regimes behind the Curtain...
...Yet he wants those Eastern European governments overthrown "in a couple of years," not in a "couple of decades...
...In the chill shadow of such speculation, Petr Zenkl immerses himself in work...
...In this cause Zenkl wrote histories of Czech literature, compiled anthologies, taught secret seminars, and strove to reestablish the "purity" of the Czech language...
...He is a guest of this country and can hardly come out openly with a plea that we start shooting in behalf of his enslaved fatherland...
...But when the calm days come again, there is more chance that others will still be speaking the language of liberty...
...Guards took him away for questioning...
...Edward Murrow of CBS, who was among the group of correspondents who found Zenkl, had a rough time convincing him that, for his own safety, he would have to leave at once: reports had come to the Americans that the Communists planned to rub out Zenkl before he told all that he knew of their collaboration with Commandant Koch and his henchmen...
...It does not sit well upon a plumpish Czech in striped trousers, piped vest, and Homburg...
...He is not naive enough to believe that the citizenry can or will rise successfully against a modern police state unrocked by war...
...This had no great effect on the war's time-table...
...Seven times he tried to escape, and failed...
...As each concession by Prague evoked only a new demand, the Czechs became aware that their fate was not in their own hands...
...and the new pattern we make may not be too much of an improvement on the old...
...In his own mordant phrase, he has been "thrown out upon the garbage-heap of history...
...On the side, they proceeded to organize and arm "workers militia" and to weed out all "dubious" personnel from the Army and the police force, replacing them with tried-and-true Communists...
...the third is a bore...
...But to the naive inhabitants of the fin-de-siecle, who could not foresee the great contributions which modern technology would yet make to the science of enslavement, the antiquated jail and truncheon and censorship seemed bad enough...
...Zenkl wanted to stay on at Buchenwald to help, as only he could help, with the reorganization of the camp and the alleviation of its misery...
...the degradation...
...It was teaching with a difference...
...What does this add up to...
...But Benes prevailed upon him not to make it public...
...The sound of the explosion may prove satisfying to many of the shop's ex-employes...
...Thomas Mazaryk in AmeS-j ica, Eduard Benes at the PsW jfiwA-tables, and the Czech Legion flitting westward across disintegrating Russia effected a global squeeze-jplay in beautiful coordination with the uprising at home...
...and its execution appeared to be going forward with less confusion and more common-sense might have been feared...
...he became an attendant in the children's wing...
...You are, damn you, the fireman of Prague...
...The West recognized Benes' need to come to terms with his eastern neighbor in the field of foreign affairs...
...The trapdoor closed...
...On the surface it was respectable enough...
...for more radical land reform...
...Left alone, you would quench our whole movement...
...As the world knows, the abrupt exit of the Hapsburgs failed to catch Zenkl and his compatriots \i% surprise...
...True, he was Deputy Premier and head of the largest political party in the land...
...On the third day, friends smuggled him into the typhus ward...
...there was little he would not do for Benes...
...So, on the eighth and last attempt, he solved the problem by taking them with him...
...The lesson to be learned by all refugee VIP's is a simple if bitter one: come early and avoid the brush-off...
...It was a little like abandoning one's house to a burglar and telling him sternly to sit still and be good until one returned with the neighbors...
...If their allies could not call the German bluff, then the game was near an end...
...the hope and the hopelessness...
...indeed, that they might easily drop to 10 or 15...
...Prague was something to come back to...
...And he wants to see us stand up and resist any further Soviet encroachment...
...But with a manhunt in progress, one couldn't be sure...
...When the Cabinet's majority, led by Zenkl, voted to nullify these illegal changes, the Communist Minister of the Interior quite simply refused to carry out their orders...
...and are not susceptible to decisive financial pressure...
...He knows that these satellites are tied ever more firmly to the economy of the U.S.S.R...
...Only the mopping-up remained...
...If the Republic survived, it was because men like Petr Zenkl had foreseen the threat and had readied themselves to meet it...
...Nor will he let us...
...he feared, he said, its effect on the people of Prague...
...As the depression deepened, and the dole proved increasingly inadequate, they raised more...
...But it had faith in his desire and his capacity to maintain freedom of political action within the country...
...if they didn't get it...
...For Zenkl the next six months constituted a kind of misery that even Buchenwald does not seem to have rivalled...
...Teach them—and you yourselves never forget—to distinguish between good and evil, If the character of the nation to preserved, everything else will be restored...
...It may be that the regime he despises will never be overthrown, though it may undergo modification...
...Ill It was the beginning of the end, and the end was not long in coming...
...we will have to do the picking (if we win...
...It was best to keep moving...
...the Nazis wanted him out of the way...
...Freed once, he was ordered to be re-tried...
...By 1926, however, Zenkl and the logic of events had convinced the Government that something much more was needed...
...the stagnation...
...For everything the moderates proposed, they could always up the ante—and yell "Reactionaries...
...The humble study-groups, the embryonic political parties, the athletic associations had created and kept alive a sense of unity and of purpose indispensable to the formation of a state tailor-made from the shreds and tatters of the Dual Monarchy...
...Mme...
...Zenkl, of course, is no fool...
...It didn't pay much, but the measure of its effectiveness could be discerned by the degree of resentment it aroused against Zenkl among the Communists...
...It may be simply that his hopes and his plans will come to acquire the mellow irrelevance of Kerensky's...
...There they learned the ugly facts of life lived in collaboration with the Soviets...
...Well, that is a wholly understandable viewpoint...
...He will fail, surely...
...It is not easy to associate with the burgerlich dignity the meticulous respectability of a Zenkl...
...You can be sure that you are on the time schedule and that is enough to know how to deal with Russia...
...sides...
...When Gen...
...A consummation devoutly to be wished...
...the welcome mat had been rolled up and put in the attic...
...there he found on its proper hanger the same gray suit he had worn the day the Gestapo picked him up, six years before...
...What happened has been succinctly described by Zenkl himself in his own brand of English: "The Communist machine was set in motion at a full speed: so-called spontaneous people's mass meetings were commandeered together...
...In his words: "After what happened to Czechoslovakia, a deeply democratic country with all the democratic traditions, there is no more an excuse for anybody who believes in collaboration with Russia...
...It is a language Petr Zenkl heard from birth—heard it the more insistently because it was denied his people...
...Zenkl tendered his resignation the day the Government accepted the terms of Munich...
...But there was another side of interest to the Imperial gendarmerie: the fostering of Czech nationalism...
...In thinking, be free men...
...In four-hour shifts around the clock, Gestapo interrogators worked on him...
...But across the border the paranoiac of Berchtesgaden was screeching bloody murder, howling over mythical wounds to the heccen-volk and parading his panzers...
...and, as a result, you don't know Zenkl from the third baseman of the Baltimore Orioles...
...Jurabek, a Communist Party leader, complained: "We esteem your work, but we shall always be your enemy...
...They got no guarantees...
...I cannot tell you how he did it...
...And the values for which he stands shine a BEVERLEY M. BOWIE, presently a free-lance writer, was wartime Acting Chief of the Central European Section of the Office of Strategic Services...
...I would not if I could...
...If his life has no meaning for us, then we have lost touch with the reality of our own predicament...
...the fourth, fifth, and sixth are malcontents unable to get along in their own countries and bent upon exploiting America's hospitality for dubious ends...
...The Government's program of progressive nationalization of the economy seemed to have found a wide basis of agreement among all parties...
...Zenkl and Benes and the other members of the Government returned to share in the sense of uplift, of self-confidence, of hope that swept the city...
...A "doctor" in the pathology section exchanged Zenkl's credentials with those of a recent corpse and helped him alter his face and appearance...
...Henlein and his Sudeten Germans kept everyone aware of that...
...It was a period for him of fulfillment and reward...
...for government ownership of all printing presses...
...Only after that would come federalization with the other free states of the postwar era...
...That such a man as Zenkl, after long years of service to the Republic, and after six years of unbroken resistance in the human abattoirs of Buchenwald and Dachau, should be forced to flee the nation he helped to found—this is the very essence of Central Europe's tragedy...
...It was an understandable timetable for a people starved for identity, but the brutal economic facts of the '20s and '30s made it seem rather unreal...
...True, he is now chairman of what amounts to the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile, and he is likely to be chosen leader of all the Iron Curtain "shadow cabinets...
...Yet it is just because Zenkl so well embodies these middle-class qualities that he represents (far more than could the valiant cosmopolite, Jan Mazaryk) the tragedy of Czechoslovakia...
...they were deposed and Zenkl re-elected Lord Mayor by an overwhelming margin...
...He wants to arouse in us the same loathing he feels so acutely himself for the new totalitarianism...
...If the point was obvious before, it is horrendously clear now that the hell-bomb is on its way from the blackboards to the production plants...
...We must leave it at that...
...his defeat was our defeat...
...All his fears found sudden confirmation the week that the Marshall Plan burst upon the world...
...We must evaluate that protest...
...He was 54, in good health, immensely active...
...little brighter for his testimony...
...Nevertheless, the uncomfortable fact remains: Zenkl was late...
...New businesses had to be started...
...He went with them...
...A little later, Benes brought him back into the cabinet as Deputy Premier...
...Tragedy, I concede, should always come to lean men in togas...
...Though a national election was imminent, in which basic issues could be decided, they pessed for immediate ratification of the still undefined Constitution...
...Zenkl's books were confiscated, and in 1918 he himself was arrested and haled before a military court...
...Tragedy . . . But the spark which illuminates the cataclysm is the will of a Zenkl to fight on, not with the flourishes of melodrama, but stolidly, matter-of-factly, implacably...
...but it is we who will foot the bill...
...1, 1939, when two Gestapo agents called for him...
...Like Paris, it had had a final fling at liberating itself...
...He is the author of a novel, "Operation Bughouse," an hi' larious satire on intelligence activities In the Balkans dur-- ing the period of World War II, and of a number of magazine articles and book reviews...
...You not only propose programs: you carry them through...
...Petr Zenkl arrived late—in September 1948—and it may be difficult to interest you in him...
...Indeed, he must—and does—specifically disavow any desire to foment a new conflict...
...And then the world-wide depression of the '30s hit the groggy little economy hard...
...Jan Mazaryk plummeted from his window...
...Yet he will not be silent...
...It aimed positively at a Central Europe unified but free...
...At their peak, they had polled 38% of the popular vote...
...He was born in Tabor, a town of Bohemia, in 1884, when Bohemia was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Czechs a suppressed minority, their tongue and their history proscribed...
...Then a peculiar thing happened...
...In 1936 he became Lord Mayor of Prague...
...Zenkl merely states that "God and good people" helped him to get over the border—clad in the same gray suit he had worn to and from the Nazis' concentration camp...
...As a forcing move, they decided to withdraw from all Cabinet sessions until they received guarantees that majority decisions would be observed...
...Trained in the social sciences, Zenkl stepped into the Ministry of Social Welfare in 1918 and for eight years served as thief of the division in charge of aid to underprivileged youth...
...Communists had occupied the mayoralty after the revolt...
...The Czechoslovakian Cabinet—Communists and non-Communists—voted unanimously to participate in the Marshall Plan: Gottwald, dementis, Kopecky, Nasek, Siroky, Ne-jedly, Dolansky—all of them...
...Against the kind of steam-roller that has flattened his career and his country, Zenkl has no weapons but an aging voice and the imperfect command of an alien tongue...
...Communism will, as any other movement, lose its momentum and its spontaneous growth among backward peoples like the Chinese peasants, after it has become clear enough that neither Communism nor any other man-made and man-directed movement based on propaganda and lies and broken promises and terror and bribes, can improve the condition of men and that such an improvement can be achieved only and exclusively by steady day-to-day progress on the basis of decency, justice, and respect for the individual and his dignity...
...The honeymoon lasted nearly two years...
...For the nationalism of the truncated little states of Eastern Europe, expressed in material terms, meant high tariffs and low production, restricted trading areas and expanding unemployment...
...The Kremlin's demand that Czechoslovakia reject the Marshall Plan was accepted...
...Czechoslovakia, left with industries now bereft of a hinterland of consumers, found itself saddled with a million idle workers—a staggering percentage of its labor force...
...But one cannot begin to re-create the meaning of the days between: the boredom...
...and Zenkl has ample reason to express it...
...Small wonder, then, that they felt cheated and outraged when Zenkl—on the threat of his own resignation—compelled the City Council to step up the jobless payments many-fold...
...For his life touches yours and mine more intimately than we may imagine, and the lesson of his life has urgent meaning for us...
...It may well be that Zenkl will never return home...
...They had been raising a goodly amount of hell...
...but his values are our values...
...Mazaryk insisted that, for Czechoslovakia, the first stage (lasting perhaps 40 years) must be the development of a national culture, an independent "personality...
...the reporters were bored...
...The slogans of Zenkl's and Benes' party were ranked in significant order: Nationalism, Humanitarianism, Socialism...
...Four shifts of two police agents each shadowed him night and day...
...Only the war's end and the collapse of the monarchy saved him...
...What lever, what explosive, then, can he be thinking of to do the job, if it is not war or threat of war...
...The groundwork for the new nation had been well laid...
...There will be a great many bits and pieces to pick up...
...His greatness is his own...
...He was there when the first Sherman tank crunched through the Camp gate...
...the unremitting fear...
...Drtina, the Minister of Justice, tried to commit suicide and ended up in a prison hospital...
...Hopes of revolur-tion rose high...
...the steady pressure of de-humanization...
...What Zenkl wants is clear enough...
...When they tired of this, they sent him off to the concentration camp at Dachau...
...Zenkl was still working methodically at his job Sept...
...They were acclaimed...
...The burglars were in control...
...There were other reasons for optimism...
Vol. 14 • April 1950 • No. 4
