The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust

6. The Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London: Attitudes and Reactions to the Jewish Plight

6The Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London Attitudes and Reactions to the Jewish Plight There is consensus that during the five years of his exile it was Beneš himself who acted as the central figure and architect of his government’s policies.∞ His personal secretary in those crucial years, Edvard Táborský, wrote about him: ‘‘As of 1939 until in late 1944 nothing of political importance, insofar as it depended on the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile, could be decided without Beneš.’’≤ Indeed he was president, premier, foreign minister, and at times ambassador; he maintained contacts with the Czech and the Slovak Home Resistance, the Protectorate Government, the Moscow-backed Czechoslovak Communists, the German emigrants in London, and the Jewish organizations in the free world.≥ Beneš saw the undoing of Munich and its consequences as his raison d’être, hence the struggle waged for international recognition for the legal continuity of the First Republic and its pre-Munich boundaries became his objective and obsession; he ‘‘kept thinking of it literally day in day out.’’ All through the years spent in exile he went on describing the events as he saw them, and which, in e√ect, became so fateful in shaping his policy in the postwar years.∂ Deeper insight into the subject emerges in the diaries of Jaromír Smutný, who served until the end of the war as Beneš’s chef de cabinet and who meticulously recorded the president’s conversations with politicians and other prominent personalities, adding his own comments.∑ From his long personal acquaintance with Beneš, Smutný saw him as a statesman with a pragmatic, realistic approach to international a√airs. About his personal character and approach to people, Smutný has the following comment: the czechoslovak government-in-exile in london | 161 Beneš is a brilliant master of tactics and strategy, the greatest Machiavelli of our time, but he is unable to awaken the enthusiasm of the masses . . . He does not inspire confidence. Sensitive people in his presence feel that he always leaves things unsaid, that Beneš exploits them for some purpose of his own, which he does not mention . . . People leave him persuaded, but not feeling entirely with him, full of confidence but without a√ection . . . and we recognize that he is head and shoulders above us, distinguished by his intelligence , tenacity, and dedication to his aims.∏ Forty years later Beneš’s close associate Prokop Drtina, who acted as Minister of Justice in the postwar government, published a memoir entitled Czechoslovakia My Fate, providing interesting insights into Beneš’s policy.π Throughout the whole of this important memoir and in the documentary literature, the Jewish question is almost entirely absent. In spite of its broad, general implications , the struggle of the national Jewish group for representation on the State Council (Státní rada) is scarcely mentioned—and then only as part of the complex problem of the minority issues.∫ It could be safely asserted that the Jews per se as positive and loyal citizens did not present any problem in the foreign policy of Czechoslovakia in the period of the First Republic (1918–38).Ω Moreover, the freedom and democracy accorded to minorities, including the Jews, was a matter of great satisfaction to world Jewry and augmented the esteem in which the young republic was held.∞≠ In the late thirties, however, Beneš was particularly disturbed by the posture of the German and Hungarian minorities, exploited eagerly within the framework of the expansionist propaganda of the Third Reich.∞∞ Those among the Jewish population who spoke German or Hungarian, or claimed to belong to the latter national entities, lent additional force to the complaints and petitions submitted by these ‘‘unruly’’ ethnic groups to the League of Nations.∞≤ Beneš viewed the dismemberment of the republic as a personal insult and humiliation; it also determined his attitude to the Jewish question, linked as it was to his global strategy of undoing the wrongs of Munich and preventing any such repetition. the ‘‘czech transfer’’ and recruiting czechoslovak citizens in palestine Among the first issues involving the Czechoslovak National Council ’s representatives in London, both Beneš and Jan Masaryk, were the question of prospective Jewish immigrants stranded in the occupied Protectorate and the mobilization of former Czechoslovak citizens living in Palestine. 162 | the czechoslovak government-in-exile in london The emigration of several thousand Jews in the years 1939–40 came about under the terms of the so-called Czech Transfer...