The Art of Survival

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Last week the war was returning to where it had come from. A mighty ally of Czechoslovakia had advanced within a hundred miles of her eastern frontier. Five years, to the week, after German boots had hit the cobblestones of Prague, and the solar plexus of the world, the Czechoslovak Government ordered its people to join, in "an armed uprising," the approaching "Army of Liberation."

The call came from London. The "Army of Liberation" was coming from Soviet Russia. There was not too much reason to expect that the call can be heeded by nine million Czechoslovaks who, in chains and humiliation, are forced to produce huge quantities of weapons for their German masters. There was some doubt whether Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov's forces will be, unequivocally, an army of liberation. But all the way from London to Russia, throughout the human mass of tension and torture that is Europe, there is little doubt that Czechoslovakia's experience with liberation will answer the one fundamental question: What is victory?

The Czechs thought they knew. To survive is an obsession with them; it is also their greatest talent. One of the smaller of Europe's peoples, they never had notions of grandeur, always realized that their role is to react rather than to act: to adjust themselves to conditions not of their making--and to survive. Unlike their next-door Slav neighbors, the Poles, the Czechs never believed in having more than one superior enemy at a time, never dreamed of going down in a romantic blaze of glory. Their national history is one long, continued search for allies. To them, foreign policy is not an appendix but the core of national policy.

The man who administers Czechoslovak foreign policy may set a powerful precedent for the liberation of Europe. Foreign Minister and No. 2 man of the first Government in Exile preparing to go home is Jan Masaryk. In his person, career and present predicaments the whole Continent might recognize itself.

Father, Son and Dr. Benes. Most likely the best pianist among contemporary foreign ministers, and very probably the most accomplished cook (specialties: risotto, stews, soups; secret: powdered garlic), Masaryk tries hard to live down his name. He is a chip off a colossal old block: Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, his father, was not just the creator of Czechoslovakia but a sage of world stature.

The late fabulous Charles R. Crane of Chicago, wealthy plumbing man and world traveler, brought the Professor to the U.S. In 1902 Masaryk was called to occupy, for a year, the chair of Slavonic Studies that Crane had set up at the University of Chicago. (Twenty-two years later, young Masaryk met and married Crane's daughter Frances Crane Leatherbee; they were divorced in 1931.) Thus began Masaryk's conquest of the U.S. for the cause of his people's rebirth. It ended, in 1918, with President Wilson's acceptance of that cause and Masaryk's Declaration of Czechoslovak Independence in Washington. Supported by 1,500,000 Americans of Czechoslovak descent, and by parallel Czechoslovak action in Russia and France, an aged philosopher had performed one of the major miracles of the epoch: the deliverance of a nation across 3,000 miles of water. The son of a Slovak coachman restored the pride in nationhood King Charles IV had brought to Bohemia 600 years before.

Burdened by a father who belonged to history, young Jan preferred to clown his way out of such embarrassment. He is as handy with unprintable stories as the Great Old Man was with the terms of Aristotle.

Today, "young" Jan Masaryk is 57 and the most popular diplomat in London--the most welcome of all those Continental statesmen who habitually visit the U.S. Full of bounce and zest and a bravura that was once described as "something out of the pages of Dumas," the tall (6 ft. 2 in.) extrovert has a selling power that could make Eskimos buy iceboxes. He looks like, and has all the making of, a successful American business man, an elegant European bon vivant, a world-famous orchestra leader, a magnetic political boss. But from his thin lips sometimes come words of genuine wisdom, and around his dark eyes are shadows of more experience than a playboy knows.

Equally at home in a waterfront tavern or in the salon of British kings (he was a personal friend of the late George V), he knows the world because he was bitten by it. When the Professor came back from Chicago, 20-year-old Jan got $80 from him and went to the U.S. The high-tension intellectuality of his father's house was too much for him ("the house was full of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Dostoevski"). His preference for America was motivated by more than the Continental legends of the Wild West and his father's limited U.S. experience: Jan's mother, Brooklyn-born Charlotte Garrigue (Thomas Masaryk had respectfully added her name to his), had brought an American atmosphere right into the Masaryk home. "Mother always had confidence in me," remembers Jan, "and I did everything in my power to destroy that confidence, but it wasn't any good."

In the U.S., Jan made a living as an ironworker and works manager in the Crane Co. (as a movie pianist on the side). "The only thing I know about diplomacy," says Minister Masaryk, "I learned in the iron foundry of the Crane Co. There were Slovaks, Swedes, Poles, Norwegians--absolutely everyone. I bought a blackboard and four times a week I taught them to read and to write. That was the strongest influence of my Europeanism."

Caught in Austria by World War I, he unwillingly served in the Austro-Hungarian infantry, was nearly sentenced to death for "political unreliability." When the Old Man became the head of the state, Jan's spirit of adventure had to be channeled into more representative endeavors. He worked in the Prague Foreign Office, as charge d'affaires in Washington, as Dr. Benes' private secretary, in the Czech legation in London. From 1925 until he resigned in protest against the Munich deal, he was Czechoslovak envoy to the Court of St. James's. In a dinner speech after his resignation Jan Masaryk said, in spite of everything: "I want nothing better for the world than that all countries should have the same qualities as these islands of England."

For this western orientation he had already been prepared by his father. T.G.M., in a life work of comparative sociology, had done more than anyone else to convince the Czech people that their future was not tied to the blood brethren in the East but to the West's bright horizons. Though Old Masaryk was the first European statesman to realize that Russian Bolshevism was here to stay, and must be reckoned with as a force in firm control of a mighty world power, he never fell for Pan-Slavism, unceasingly taught his people to consider themselves a part of the democratic, Christian, western world.

Thomas G. Masaryk's faithful aide, never-tiring Dr. Eduard Benes, was the second-greatest intellectual influence on Jan's life--the father's pupil teaching the father's son. As Thomas Masaryk's Foreign Minister, and later when he became President himself, Dr. Benes encouraged Jan's wider western orientation; personally Benes was inclined to put all Czech eggs into the French basket.

Accordingly, Dr. Benes' despair over the French betrayal at Munich was bottomless. What Jan Masaryk, at home in the Anglo-Saxon world, rightly thought a mistake, French-oriented Dr. Benes considered a crime. He was shocked to the roots of his being. It will take much, perhaps more than the West ever can offer, to satisfy Dr. Benes that the Czechs can again rely on Western guarantees.

From Munich to Moscow. Once the Nazi pressure is removed from the center, energy will radiate from the East and the West--from Moscow and from Washington. Czechoslovakia's response may commit the Continent.

Summarizing, in February 1939, what had been done to his country, scholarly Diplomat Benes found for the western democracies the tough descriptive term "decadence." A few weeks later, Hitler slept in the castle of Prague. When post-Munich Czechoslovakia was carved to pieces, Soviet Russia recognized "independent" Slovakia. But at that moment, the "decadent" democracies began to wake up from pacifist follies and appeasement nightmares. Their encouragement put life into the Czechoslovak Government in Exile.

Appointed its Foreign Minister (in July 1940, while he was visiting the U.S.), Jan Masaryk impressed the democratic world with a concise European program: a disarmed, decentralized German confederation; Central Europe reorganized around a Czech-Polish confederation; similar regional federations in the Balkans, in western Europe, in Scandinavia; all these regional federations ultimately to form a Federation of Europe; inclusion of Russia in a cooperative European settlement.

From 1939 through late 1942, the London Governments in Exile made some neat progress in such constructive arrangements. But by 1943 Hitler had lost his war in the East, Soviet Russia had started her triumphant comeback. And regional federations were growled down by rising Russia.

Though culturally and economically facing West, Czechoslovakia felt herself finally drawn into the military and political power fields of Russia. Last December, the Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance was formally signed. To the Czechs it meant Russian guarantee of Czechoslovakia's pre-Munich borders. To Moscow it meant Czechoslovak compliance with Russia's policy in Europe.

To Where? Winston Churchill's speech last February suggested, more bluntly than any Czech statement had, that Eastern and Central Europe might be conceded as legitimate spheres of Russian leadership. Faced with such a British attitude, and the complete lack of an American attitude, the Czechoslovak Government in Exile, unanimously backing the Soviet-Czech pact, was last week readying itself to enter Czechoslovakia in the footsteps of the Red Army and two affiliated Czechoslovak brigades. The Czechoslovak Communists, with headquarters in Moscow and a branch office in London, seemed to have a good chance of entering the Government.

A middle-class nation if there ever was one, the Czechs never were given to grandiose social scheming, to the strain of collectivism. There is an individualistic peasant and a shrewd entrepreneur in every Czech; and, if anyone does, Jan Masaryk personifies this Czech flair for individualism and good living.

In Prague, people say every other Wednesday they have to "keep an appointment with Honza" [Jan]: that is the day the Foreign Minister broadcasts to his countrymen. In these broadcasts Jan Masaryk, who never belonged to any political party and, if he has his way, never will, speaks of delivery and of the thereafter. Economically, he thinks, "thereafter" will mean a lot of Governmental planning. "I am not opposed to individual enterprise, but things are going to be different--not only in Czechoslovakia but all over Europe."

But besides his individualism, there is also in every Czech a frightened, resentful victim of Teutonic aggression--and not just since Hitler. The Czech might struggle along without social security, but he insists on national security. He'll take it wherever it may come from.

It may come from Russia. Last December, in New York, Jan Masaryk said: "We intend to live our own life in our own way and we know that Russia will respect our way of living." And added: "Russia is fighting with us . . . to destroy once for all time the German Drang nach Osten and we know that without Russia in Europe there is no stopping it."

The Czechs would prefer their security to come from both East and West--from Moscow and Washington. When a high U.S. policymaker, somewhat concerned, asked him about the Czechoslovak pact with Soviet Russia, Jan Masaryk supposedly offered to put his name on a blank piece of paper--if Roosevelt would write any sort of treaty above the signature. He knew, of course, that the U.S. President has no such power. But he also knew the haunting fear of his own people and of the whole Continent: that the U.S. might withdraw from Europe after the war; abstain from making any commitments on European security; condition Great Britain to follow course. Europe then would have to deal with only one protagonist--Russia.

Where's Home? Sad and sweet, the Czech national anthem sings of landscape and homesickness: "Kde Domuv muj?"--"Where is my home?" But another song, popular with the Czechs long before Joseph Stalin was born, gave martial warning: "Hej, Slovane"--"Hey, Slav, the Russian is with us, and he who is against us will be smashed by the French."

For there was always the German ruffian around, and the little Czech was always in need of a Big Brother. In fact, he always wanted more than one. Unwritten rule No. 1 of the Czechoslovak Republic's foreign policy was to avoid a lopsided dependency on just one big power that would put a small nation wholly at the mercy of the potent protector. Said Jan Masaryk: "I hope I am a European before I am a Slav." To have a decent home, the Czechs need Europe. But right now they are concerned with having a home at all.

As motto of the Republic he created, Jan's father selected two humbly confident words: "Pravda vitezi" ("Truth prevails"). One truth is: the Czechs are a liberty-loving European people. Another truth is: the Czechs are prepared to conform with any power that assures their national security. Another and most immediate truth is: to this day, the only power current to reach Central Europe with respectable voltage comes from Russia.

Whatever truth prevails, the Czechs are above all resolved to survive. Asked what his postwar program was, shrewd, sensible Jan Masaryk gave students of the craft the most pointed diplomatic statement of modern times: "I want to go home."

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