America, Russia Puzzle Czechs Equally

The key to Czech foreign policy is Germany. I can't expect anybody in America to realize the intense batred these people have for the Germans. It's a mania. The three million Germans who were in CRS before the war and during the occupation were moved bodily back to Germany. Before the war the Germans here enjoyed national privileges. They had their own schools and churches and spoke their own language, (Kafta was one of them, but also a Jew.) The hatred is so great that German signs at international railroad cars have been painted over, German (which all the Czechs, speak) is never spoken, and even German music is not played.

CRS backed out of the Marshall plan when Russia sent over word that she didn't like the idea. What Benes said was that the Czechs are not between Russia and America, but between Russia and Germany, and Germany and America begin to mean the same thing when the US starts planning to reindustrialize the Western Zones. The French feel the same way. At the bottom of it, you've got to realize that Germans were here for six years, that people in the street, the guy who runs the hotdog stand on the corner and all of Norman Corwin's little people are not so little. I don't know how many Czechs were killed, out of combat, by the Germans--about a million. Absolutely every family was affected.

I am staying here in a student house with a guy who spent two years at Auschwitz. He's no here, because most of the students here were in one place or another. Gas chambers and Crematoriums are something more than pictures from Life magazine. Some of the Czechs feel a little helpless that they had to throw in their lot with Russia. The Bohanes I mentioned in the first sentence is no gag name. He's a Socialist who doesn't like the idea of any Russian control here, but like so many Czechs he hates the Germans more than he hates the Russians.

One of the worst bits of melodrama is Parnell Thomas UnAmerican business, and you just can't possibly go around telling every European that the guy is a crackpot and that most of the people don't think that way or that there are many honest liberals in America. UnAmerican investigations come over here as a story almost of terrorism, of restriction of political freedom (which it is); and people are honestly harmed. If there are 400 thousand Communists in CRS or a million in France, they're Communists because they want to be--or they've legally voted that way--and they don't exactly like the idea of Communists in America getting the ax. On the other hand, they know that Republicans are not being tolerated in Russia, and not a few are critical.

Nationalism Before Politics

Nationalism always comes before politics, and a Communist in CRS thinks a French communist is all wet, but he's going to turn brown when DeGaulle starts sending the opposition to the guillotine. Taber is another one who went through Europe like butter through a tin horn and started blowing off about how content and happy everyone was and how they all had sufficient to eat, whilst he warmed the cushion of a bar stool in an officers' club in Germany. You can't go around telling everybody that John Taber represents some people sitting around a cracker barrel in Oneida, N. Y., and perhaps not even them, and that he doesn't speak for everyone in America. There were too many irresponsible fools in Europe just serving to gum up the works. They appeared in print all over the place and they added nothing but confusion and bad feeling to the situation. And I don't mean criticism by the Moscow New Times, I mean by reasonable, intelligent papers like Combat and Le Monde in Paris.

Behind it all sits the atom bomb, something everyone knows about and about which nobody says anything. I was riding through the Czech countryside one evening and in the distance I saw a great lighted building. I asked the Czech I was with what it was. "It's a factory," he said. Then I asked him what it produced. "Oh . . . I don't know," he said, and then, "Yes, yes, well they make . . . how do you say . . . guns . . . yes, machine guns. But not only guns. They make machines and other things, too." Here's a guy apologizing because we discoved a factory in his country making guns.

(This is the concluding part of a letter sent to the CRIMSON from Czechoslovakia by Stanley A. Karnow '45.)