The Hunted

In the tiny Bohemian village of Lany last week a man of good will was buried. He was intelligent, industrious, tolerant, futile. His life & death was a parable for his tragic time.

Over Jan Masaryk's open grave, a huntsman raised his horn and blew out into the chill spring the wistful air of the Czech national anthem Kde Domov muj? (Where Is My Home?). Because he was never quite sure where his ideological home was, Jan Masaryk had been hunted to his death by men who were very sure of theirs.

In Prague, a few hours earlier, Masaryk's coffin had rested on a black bier in the black-draped, vaulted pantheon of the National Museum. Stretching beyond its doors, through 3 1/2 miles of Prague streets, perhaps 500,000 people waited with flowers, babies, and tears for a glimpse of the coffin. In the museum, partially lighted by four guttering candles in tall silver sticks by the bier, two speeches were made.

Of Hate & Love. One was by an old soldier, onetime comrade in arms of Jan Masaryk's great father, Thomas, who won for Czechoslovakia her twice-killed independence.* The veteran spoke of love: "When Thomas Masaryk died, Jan told us, 'I have always loved you. Today I must love you even more to make up at least partly for the love of my father.'"

The other speech was by Czechoslovak Prime Minister and Communist Boss Klement Gottwald; it was filled with cynical distortions and unconcealed hate. Said he: "I can prove to you that Jan Masaryk clearly and without compromise agreed with the action program of the new government. . . . This was his unforgivable sin in the eyes of the enemies of the republic. We have seen for ourselves how the press of the West started an organized campaign against Jan Masaryk. . . ."

But the best obituary of Jan Masaryk had been composed years before, by his father. Thomas Masaryk had written :/-

"Modern man . . . staggers between belief and disbelief, revolt and humility, anarchy and obedience. . . . The people of our age are restless, excitable and fatigued. . . . Many fall into despair and cast themselves of their own will into that post-mortem darkness. . . . [Modern man], in his equality with God, either becomes a tyrant or joins the army of the despairing and dying."

Of Books & Girls. As a youth, Jan Masaryk was a bright but inattentive student. He was good at cards, but he usually passed on the money he won to needier friends. At 20 (1906) he left Charles University and came to the U.S. where he spent seven years. He worked in an iron foundry, played the piano in a nickelodeon, managed an iron works. The seven U.S. years he summed up: "I set out to become a captain of industry but that was a great shipwreck. Making money meant nothing to me. Of course, I didn't like to be without it. If I saw a book I wanted, I liked to be able to buy it. If I saw a pretty girl, I liked to be able to buy her a lunch."

After Czechoslovakia became a nation, he entered his father's government, first as a civil servant (secretary to then Foreign Minister Eduard Benes), later as a diplomat. His post was London, where he was enormously popular. In a crowd he sparkled, but sometimes among small groups and after a few drinks he became deeply, almost tearfully melancholy. Near war's close someone asked Jan Masaryk what his postwar plans were. Said he simply: "I want to go home."

He told a friend: "I do not know whether I shall be Foreign Minister after the war. But I am a man of limited ambitions. All I need is a living room large enough for a piano on which to play, enough books on the shelves, a kitchen in which to prepare my favorite dishes and a bedroom with a bed large enough for entertaining."

Thomas Masaryk had written:

"Modern man wants only to live and to let live, but it is very often because of this that he takes his life"

Something for the Nation. Eduard Benes and Jan Masaryk certainly had no leanings toward Communism. But they were convinced that they must snuggle up to Stalin and try to take the middle path between East and West; they would be "realists." In Moscow they made the Soviet-Czech pact on Dec. 12, 1943. For the next four years Czech Communists, who now had the might of Russia behind them, jostled, maneuvered and crowded until they took over.

Last week, the 98th anniversary of Thomas Masaryk's birth occurred. At his grave in Lany, Gottwald & Co. assembled for a propaganda field day. They said: "If Thomas Masaryk were alive he would approve us." Jan Masaryk was not among them at the grave, but the fact that he was in the Communist Cabinet lent validity to the Communist use of his father's name.

The dust of Gottwald & Co.'s departure from Lany had not settled when Masaryk's black Packard pulled up at the little white-fenced cemetery. His grey Homburg in his hand, Jan Masaryk stood staring at his father's grave, at the clusters of farm buildings that dotted the countryside, and suddenly he bent over and began to sob. For 45 minutes he wept. On his way back to Prague he muttered over & over: "For me nothing matters now. I only wish I could do something for the nation."

Thomas Masaryk had said:

"As a rule, in politics men take up a position either to the left or right. Then the wiseacre comes along and combs his beard with his hand and says: 'Children, neither to the right nor to the left: the golden middle way.' This man with the beard has no outlook of his own. The right and the left have their definite opinions; the tactical gold-seeker slips or creeps in between them. He needs the radical oppositions so that he can skip to and fro. . . . The modern era . . . is the age of permanent revolutions. Reaction itself is a form of revolution . . . whence the high comedy of the golden middle path."

Two days after his visit to his father's grave, on a bright sunny afternoon, Jan Masaryk went to see Benes at his peaceful country home. They remained alone for an hour, talking. During the two intervening days Masaryk had complained repeatedly of insomnia. When he left Benes' country home for the 60-mile drive back to Prague, Masaryk offered his bodyguard a cigarette. "I can't smoke on duty," said the guard. "You can smoke with me," said Masaryk. He took a puff or two, stamped it out, and slumped in sleep. He awoke as his car reached Prague's outskirts, surprised to learn he had slept an hour.

The Damned, Damned Communists. That night the lights in Masaryk's third-floor apartment in Czernin Palace burned all night. Next morning, his father's old worn Hussite Bible was found open by his bed. The upturned page was part of the Epistle of Paul to the Galatians, and verses 22 and 23 of chapter 5 had been marked. They read: "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law." His body was found at 6:20 by a guard on the stone-flagged court 60 feet below his bathroom window.

Most of the indications pointed to suicide. Some skeptics insisted it was another case of Bohemia's famed "forcible defenestration."* Whether it was suicide or murder, the fact was that Jan Masaryk had become enmeshed in exactly the kind of trap his father had warned against: he had been destroyed by trying to compromise with forces with which no man could compromise.

In Prague, death clothed Jan Masaryk with a renewed dignity. Two weeks before, Prague residents had muttered: "He's no fighter. Must be staying because he likes the job." But while his body lay in state in Czernin Palace, people did not conceal their feelings. Five peasant women leaned over a balustrade in the palace; one of them said loudly: "The damned, damned Communists killed him. They are worse than the Nazis."

The Broken Wheel. At the funeral a children's choir sang Thomas Masaryk's favorite folk song, a simple ballad with a haunting tune, Ach Synku, Synku (Oh, My Son, My Son):

Oh, my son, home so soon?

Have you been plowing, been plowing?

Have you been plowing all afternoon?

Father, the wheel broke, Father, the wheel broke, We'll have to strengthen each spoke.

*At Lake Success last week, Chile filed charges against the Soviet Union with the U.N.; accused it of threatening world peace by instigating the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The U.S. announced it would support the Chilean demand for a Security Council debate.

/-Thomas Masaryk's first book, printed in German in 1881, was an examination of the causes of "suicide as a mass phenomenon." He later put some of the material into a collection of essays called Modern Man and Religion.

*On July 30, 1419, followers of John Huss inarched through the streets of Prague. Stones were thrown at the Hussites from the windows of the town hall. The incensed populace stormed into the hall, threw the burgomaster and several councilors from the windows into the streets where they were immediately killed by the crowd. On May 23, 1618, two royal councilors, Czech Catholics, and the secretary of the royal council, were thrown from the windows of the council room of the Hradcany into the moat 50 feet below. Not one of the three was killed by the fall. This defenestration was the beginning of the Thirty Years' War.

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