Murky Waters in London and Prague
The Jewish Politics of the Czechoslovak Government,
1938–1948
Jan Láníček, Czechs, Slovaks and the Jews: Beyond Idealisation and Condemnation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 265 + xi pp.
Reviewed by
Anna Hájková
A
s an old man, George Korper, a native of Prague, remembered how, when he was still a boy named Jiří, he would go
with his mother for walks around the Prague Castle. One
day they encountered Tomáš Masaryk, the first Czechoslovak president, riding a horse. They greeted him and Masaryk stopped
to talk to them; when he rode on, Marie Körperová and Jiří looked at
each other and, overcome with emotion, started crying. George, who
was the third generation of an assimilated Jewish Czech family, survived the war in England, where his parents sent him on the Kindertransport. The parents were deported to the Terezín ghetto and later to
Auschwitz, where they were murdered. After the war George returned
to Prague and married Ruth Baecková, a survivor of Terezín. Ruth was
Leo Baeck’s Czech great-niece and also the first love of Gonda Redlich,
the head of Youth Care in the ghetto. In his eighties Korper extolled
the prewar Czechoslovak state: “The great democratic C.S.R. between
the two wars was indeed a golden age for us Czech Jews, and we grew
up with a strong love for the republic, its history and people — in our
eyes there was nowhere in the world to equal it.”1 Korper’s memories
are symptomatic: interwar Czechoslovakia, and by extension the state
1
Email of George Korper to the author, July 12, 2011; see also his interview at Voice/
Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive, University of Michigan, Dearborn, March 26, 2007, http://holocaust.umd.umich.edu/korper/ (accessed February 17, 2014).
139
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until 1948, has been handled as an exemplary success story, a haven of
democracy, and immune to the antisemitism so prevalent in the other
newly created post-Versailles states of eastern Central Europe.
Recently, scholars such as Melissa Feinberg, Nancy Wingfield,
Andrea Orzoff, Dagmar Hájková, Mark Cornwall, and the late Zbyněk
Zeman have critically examined the myth of the Czechoslovak democracy.2 Jan Láníček’s monograph on the Czechoslovak government-inexile is a welcome and informative addition to this trend. The book,
based on the author’s dissertation at the University of Southampton,
aims to widen the history of Czech and Slovak relationships with the
Jews between 1938 and 1948. Láníček’s title claims somewhat more
than the book delivers, namely, a political history of the Czechoslovak
government-in-exile and its conduct toward the Jews and reaction to
the Holocaust, as well as the postwar state’s treatment of the surviving
Jewish community. The study presents a disconcerting portrayal of opportunistic high-ranking state officials who saw the war as a chance to
redraw the ethnic map of the Czechoslovak state, and who were never
able to discern the larger picture of the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
The second Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, and his men only
implemented a deliberately Jewish-friendly policy when they needed
the backing of the large Jewish organizations for a diplomatic barter.
Czechoslovakia was the only state in post-1918 Europe that afforded Jews the option of defining themselves nationally as Jewish,
rather than tying national identity solely to language. In the 1930 census, the 356,000 Jews in the country represented 2.4 percent of the
population: 117,000 lived in what is today the Czech Republic, 137,000
in Slovakia, and 102,000 in Subcarpathian Rus’ (Ruthenia). In general,
2
Zbyněk Zeman with Antonín Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, 1884–1948:
Czechoslovakia in Peace and War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918–1950 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Nancy
Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the
Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009); Mark Cornwall, The Devil’s Wall: The Nationalist
Youth Mission of Heinz Rutha (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012);
Dagmar Hájková, “Constructing National Unity: Commemorations of Tomáš G.
Masaryk’s Death,” Střed, vol. 1 (2012), pp. 33–55; and also Kateřina Čapková and
Michal Frankl, Unsichere Zukunft: Die Tschechoslowakei und ihre Flüchtlinge aus
NS-Deutschland und Österreich 1933–1938 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2012 [2008]).
Murky Waters in London and Prague
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the more westward the Czechoslovak Jews lived, the more assimilated they were. By 1930, every second Jew in Bohemia was marrying a
Gentile, then the second highest rate of intermarriage worldwide apart
from that in certain Italian cities.3 Accordingly, only a minority of the
(Western) Czech Jews selected Jewish nationality in the 1930 census;
most of them identified nationally as Czech and religiously as Jews.
The “good” position Czechoslovak Jews enjoyed (and mostly we hear
the Czech Jewish voices in this context) was as much of their own making as it was of the Czech Gentiles’ and the Czechoslovak government’s
friendly attitude towards Jews. Indeed, Czech Jews were the foremost
believers in the myth of a democratic Czechoslovakia, making them
both a part and a proof of the success story by their attestations of experiencing no antisemitism in Czechoslovakia.
This idyll started to disintegrate during the Depression in the
1930s, fully crumbling after Edvard Beneš’s government went into exile
in London in the fall of 1938, after the Munich agreement. Beneš believed the fall of Czechoslovakia was caused by the national minorities:
he imagined the postwar state as ethnically homogeneous, without the
Sudeten Germans or Hungarians. The expulsion of these groups was
planned in London.4 In this context the government-in-exile rationalized the Czechoslovak Jews as a national minority rather than a religion or a culture, thus the handling of the Jews was seen as a postscript
to the expulsion of the Germans. In this plan, which largely shaped the
postwar policy, the Jews were to assimilate or to emigrate to Palestine
or elsewhere. The exiled politicians drafted their policy document on
the Czechoslovak Jews long before the liberation, as early as 1944, even
as the intelligence about the Nazi persecution of the Jews was coming
to light. Láníček shows an unsettling turn in the exiled Czechoslovak
politicians’ approach to “the Jewish problem,” which perceived Jews
as somehow un-Czech. This mentality took hold even though eighty
percent of the Czechoslovaks in exile in Britain were Jews: people who
3
4
Franz Friedmann, Einige Zahlen über die tschechoslovakischen Juden: Ein Beitrag
zur Soziologie der Judenheit, Schriften zur Diskussion des Zionismus (Prague: Barissia, 1933).
Jan Křen relates an anecdote of how he found Beneš’s first sketch of the “ethnically
cleansed” postwar Czechoslovakia written in London: Křen, “Deutschlandforschung in Bauwagen,” in Doris Liebermann, Jürgen Fuchs, and Vlasta Wallat, eds.,
Dissidenten, Präsidenten und der Gemüsehändler: Tschechische und ostdeutsche
Dissidenten, 1968–1998 (Essen: Klartext, 1998), p. 158.
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joined the British army, physicians and nurses aiding the wounded,
and journalists working in the Czech Section of the BBC.
While the author convincingly situates the change of view of the
Czechoslovak Jews as nationally different within the context of the rise
of the Czech nationalism of the Second Republic and the subsequent
occupation, he fails to examine the issue any further. This is unfortunate, given that some of the most interesting recent literature addressed exactly this point: how did the war and occupation affect the
perception and boundaries of nationality/ethnicity? Láníček cites the
studies of Chad Bryant and Tara Zahra,5 noting that the war made the
ethnic lines much firmer. Yet, he does not engage with Bryant’s and
Zahra’s stimulating theses on national indifference, ethnic amphibians,
and the wartime shift in the concept of what nationality is. In a situation where the Czech Jews, unlike their Polish counterparts, rarely
understood their Jewishness as an ethnicity, it would have been noteworthy to see the author’s explanation of this contradiction. Was the
governmental view informed by interaction with the representatives
of the (very small) Jewish Party? Did the German form of racism that
singled out Jews cause other protagonists to view the Jews as nationally
different, too? Or was Beneš’s position an expression of antisemitism?
It would have been important to hear more.
One of the book’s impressive features is in showing the connection between the Czech resistance at home and the government-inexile. Beneš walked a thin line between the Allies on one hand, fighting until 1942 to be recognized as a legitimate representative of the
country, and the resistance on the other, which he needed to control
in order to prove the government’s command over the population in
the Protectorate. The Czech resistance was often antisemitic, or at least
appears so in Láníček’s portrayal. The Czechoslovak politicians in London understood the news about anti-Jewish atrocities only in the con-
5
Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007); Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2008). On the category of national indifference, see also Zahra,
“Imagined Non-communities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,”
Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 93–119; contributions of Pieter M.
Judson and Tara Zahra, Robert Nemes, Rok Stergar, Caitlin E. Mudrock, and Tatjana Lichtenstein in Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 43 (2012), special section on
“Sites of Indifference to Nationhood,” pp. 21–97.
Murky Waters in London and Prague
t 143
text of the Nazi destruction of the Slavs and the war in general; they
did not see the Holocaust as a unique dimension in its own right. The
measure of suffering was Lidice, not Auschwitz. Beneš’s reaction to the
news about the Holocaust was often incredulity and went as far as stating that Polish propaganda exaggerated its reports about the massacres
of the Jews.
I am not entirely persuaded by the author’s characterization of
the Czech resistance movement as recurrently antisemitic. Many
Czech Jews joined Czech resistance groups, which is one of the reasons why a purely Jewish resistance group never developed, because
Jews were already integrated as Czechs.6 Those Czech Jews who were
arrested as political prisoners and deported to concentration camps
stressed their feelings of solidarity with fellow Gentile Czech prisoners. The Czech political prisoners reached out to all Czech newcomers,
including them because they were resistance members, independent of
whether or not they were Jewish. If the resistance had been as antisemitic as Láníček believes it to be, then the Czech political Jews would
have mentioned it. Rather, the survivors remarked on their shock at
experiencing Polish antisemitism. Marie Deimlová, for example, was a
Prague communist medical student who had gone into hiding in 1942,
worked for the resistance, and was captured in 1943. She was horrified when upon arrival in Birkenau, a Polish fellow prisoner answered
her friendly approach with the curse “You Jewess!” and beat her to the
ground.7
Láníček’s laudable aspiration to uncover new aspects of Czech
unheroic conduct during the war sometimes leads him to come to
premature and one-sided conclusions. In particular, the author’s topdown approach brings him to misleading generalizations, rendering
the events in one light only, without showing the needed contrasting
differentiation. Issues such as the antisemitism of the Czech resistance
go back to heightened wartime nationalism, and to make sense of them
we have to read them in a much more detailed context of everyday ac6
7
See Alena Hájková, Praha v komunistickém odboji (Prague: Svoboda, 1984), pp. 42,
184, 358; Jaroslava Milotová, “Protektorat Böhmen und Mähren: Widerstand im
besetzten tschechischen Gebiet 1939–1945,” in Gerd Ueberschär, ed., Handbuch
zum Widerstand gegen Nationalsozialismus und Faschismus in Europa 1933/39 bis
1945 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 157–166.
Interview of Marie Deimlová-Ch., Jewish Museum Prague [ŽMP], Vzpomínky,
532; see also interview of A.B.-U., ŽMP, Vzpomínky, 236.
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tions, working with a very different source basis. In her study of Czech
Jewry in the Holocaust, the late Livia Rothkirchen offered a somewhat
standard narrative of Czech fascism and antisemitism, perhaps because
her own biography — subsequent to her survival, she lived in Prague
for a decade — made her incorporate the Czechoslovak-Jewish master
narrative.8 Benjamin Frommer’s project on the Czech Gentiles and the
Holocaust in the Protectorate, which examines Czech participation
in the persecution and rounding up of the Jews into what Miroslav
Kárný named “the ghetto without walls,” offers some very interesting
conclusions.9
The last and strongest chapter returns the government to Prague
and the newly liberated Czechoslovakia and provides eye-opening
reading about the postwar treatment of the surviving Jews. The author
demonstrates that the threats to expel those Jews who in 1930 opted
for German nationality, and sometimes those who opted for Jewish
nationality, was by no means an accident, but rather a calculated decision already taken in London. Survivors who had barely returned
from the camps and were often still recuperating had to fight to keep
Czechoslovak citizenship. Many of them, exasperated by a betrayal of
their state and the sheer injustice of it all, chose to emigrate. What the
author does not quite realize is that several dozen, if not hundreds of
survivors were actually expelled to Germany, thus putting this horrifying treatment into action (p. 149).10 One woman from the former
Sudeten region, returning after years in the camps, was sexually assaulted by four Czech men and afterwards expelled to Germany; she
could understand the German atrocities, but never why Czechs did
what they did to her.11
8
Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem and University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
9 Miroslav Kárný, Konečné řešení: Genocida českých židů v německé protektorátní
politice (Prague: Academia, 1991), p. 50; Benjamin Frommer, “Verfolgung durch
die Presse: Wie Prager Büroberater und die tschechische Polizei die Juden des Protektorats Böhmen und Mähren isolieren halfen,” in Doris Bergen, Andrea Löw,
and Anna Hájková, eds., Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Großdeutschen
Reich 1941–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013), pp. 137–150.
10 David Gerlach, “Juden in den Grenzgebieten: Minderheitenpolitik in den Böhmischen Ländern nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg,” Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente, vol. 15 (2008), pp. 12–47.
11 Interview by Lukáš Přibyl with anonymous, New York, private archive of Lukáš
Přibyl, and his email to Anna Hájková, January 16, 2014.
Murky Waters in London and Prague
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The decision to expel the “German” Czechoslovak Jews had an
economic motivation: the government did not want to pay restitution
to the German victims of Aryanization. In discussing the postwar years
and the descent into the communist takeover in 1948, the author thoroughly demolishes the positive image of Jan Masaryk. The Czechoslovak minister of foreign affairs and son of the first president used all
his political weight to manipulate, conciliate, and at times bully the
international Jewish organizations, who were protesting the postwar
treatment of Jews in Czechoslovakia, into staying quiet and acquiescing (pp. 158–163).
Another interesting detail of the study is the examination of the
Czechoslovak communist leadership operating in wartime Moscow
and their plans for a postwar order. As Láníček shows, the communists
moved from their former internationalist stance in which nationality
was secondary, but political beliefs crucial. By 1944 Klement Gottwaldt,
Zdeněk Fierlinger, and Rudolf Slánský came to adopt an increasingly
racialized worldview, in which the Czech Jews after the liberation had
to decide between assimilation and emigration, quite independently
mirroring Beneš’s views. The study at hand deserves mention for incorporating Slovakia in its purview, which in many historical studies
falls by the wayside or is touched on as a token example. Many of the
key protagonists in the book are Slovak and the Slovak developments
and antisemitism serve as an informative foil in contrast to the Czech
countries.
More problematic is the absence of the Jewish voices. In Láníček’s
representation, Jews appear only as Jewish world organizations — or
as suffering, often dying, passive protagonists. The one interesting
exception is the contrast between the conciliatory Czech Jew Arnošt
Frischer and the more militant Slovak Imre Rosenberg on which,
however, the author does not elaborate (p. 160). In its depiction of the
Czechoslovak government-in-exile’s Jewish politics, the book offers an
informative history of the bystanders, but the way the book does it is
a political, top-down history of a form of genocide where victims appear as objects. More than twenty years after Saul Friedländer’s call for
integrative history, this approach is disappointingly old-fashioned. The
omission of the individual Jewish perspectives, moreover, influenced
the author’s findings: one such example is the Czech resistance and the
Jews. The author’s characterization of the Czech Jews who opted for
German or Jewish nationality in the postwar years shows them as suf-
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fering, passive, or even committing suicide (p. 157). Czech Jews were
very much active protagonists in the postwar years: they fought to keep
their citizenship and successfully undertook efforts to become part of
the Czechoslovak state.12 Many were disappointed by the unjust treatment they encountered in their situation and some of them chose to
emigrate; yet others emigrated because of the rise of communism. Finally, many Czech survivors saw a great hope in the communist promise of a socially just new society, which they embarked on building with
great enthusiasm. In short, to understand the blatantly unjust Jewish
politics of the Czechoslovak state, we must incorporate the voices of
the “ordinary people,” the testimonies of the Jewish survivors which,
however, are absent in this study.
A further shortcoming of the study is the reductionist portrayal
of the postwar identities of the Czech Jews. The author works with
hard categories (pp. 32, 45, and language in chapter 6) which make it
difficult to conceptualize the intrinsically protean and interconnected
social, ethnic, and linguistic bonds of belonging. This analytical blank
is voiced in Láníček’s somewhat helpless statement that “Loyalty is a
messy category and the rules of what it means to be loyal are usually
stipulated by the ruling establishment and often also with a retrospective validity” (p. 148). The parts about ethnicities and nationalism
would have benefited from further reading and thinking. Recent constructionist scholarship on nationalism, including some of the most
interesting works on eastern Central European history, has greatly
contributed to our understanding of these issues.13 When specifying
the national affiliations of the Czech Jews, the author operates with the
language they (presumably) spoke. The language German-speaking
12 See my examination of the Czech Jews’ loyalties in “To Terezín and Back: Czech
Jews and Their Bonds of Belonging between Theresienstadt and Postwar Czechoslovakia,” Dapim, vol. 28, no. 1 (March 2014), pp. 38–55.
13 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond Identity,” Theory and Society, vol.
29 (2000), pp. 1–47; Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local
History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2002); Brubaker et al. Nationalists, Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Bryant, Prague in Black;
Zahra, Kidnapped Souls; see also Hájková, “Die fabelhaften Jungs aus Theresienstadt: Junge tschechische Männer als dominante soziale Elite im Theresienstädter
Ghetto,” in Christoph Dieckmann and Babette Quinkert, eds., Im Ghetto: Neue
Forschungen zu Alltag und Umfeld, in the series Beiträge zur Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, vol. 25 (2009), pp. 116–135.
Murky Waters in London and Prague
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Czech Jews used, nevertheless, was in a process of change before, during, and after the war, when individuals increasingly shifted towards
speaking Czech. In Terezín, even those Bohemian Jews who had not
spoken Czech well beforehand learned it fluently.14 Unfortunately,
this absence of a conceptual structure is characteristic of the study, as
evidenced when the author speaks about nationalism (p. 26) and “discourses” (p. 30).
The book is by and large a top-down political history of Jewish
politics in the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and the immediate
postwar period. It adds little analysis or contextualization to the historiography of the Holocaust or nationalism in eastern Central Europe.
The author relied mostly on Czech historiography which, while informative, can be often descriptive. Láníček does incorporate most of the
important recent analytical studies on Czechoslovak Jewish history,15
but while he does mention these studies, it is only as an aside in the bibliography and footnotes. This is unfortunate, especially given that some
of the most interesting recent studies are the soon-to-be-published
dissertations of Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, and
Tatjana Lichtenstein,16 which in my opinion will redefine our understanding of Czechoslovak Jewish history.17 Perhaps the most important
work in this field is on the economic motivation to deport the Jewish
population presented by Götz Aly and Christian Gerlach.18 Their work
is not acknowledged in the study under discussion, nor were David
Gerlach’s important studies, which were the first in the Czech context
to make a connection between economic interests, the expulsion of Su14 Reparation file of Eva Mahrer-Rohnenberg (pseudonym, born in Opava), Landesarchiv des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken.
15 Ezra Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993); Bryant, Prague in Black; Zahra, Kidnapped Souls.
16 Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Among the Nationalities: Jewish Refugees, Jewish Nationality, and Czechoslovak State-building (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New
York, 2007); Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Jews, Poles, and Slovaks: A Story of Encounters, 1944–1948 (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2008); Tatjana
Lichtenstein, Making Jews at Home: Jewish Nationalism in the Bohemian Lands,
1918–1938 (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 2009).
17 Anna Cichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence: Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia,
1944–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
18 Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel: Realpolitik, Ideologie und der
Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944–1945 (Stuttgart: DVA, 2002); see also Aly,
Hitlers Volksstaat: Raub, Rassenkrieg und nationaler Sozialismus (Frankfurt/
Main: Fischer, 2005).
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deten Germans, and the treatment of the Jews.19 Avinoam Patt’s study
of displaced persons is also missing, which would have offered further
context on the Czechoslovak government’s treatment of the DPs who
were allowed to pass through Czechoslovak territory.20
For any study, it is literally impossible to avoid factual errors —
this is why colleagues’ comments and the peer review process are so
crucial. Unfortunately, Czechs, Slovaks, and the Jews has some irritating mistakes that could have been easily avoided. The passages on the
Terezín ghetto and the deportations are erroneous, numbers often
wrong, and the tables misconstrued (pp. 77, 81). In discussing Terezín,
the author mixes up the numbers for the Czech Jews and those of the
entire forced international population. The only number he gives for
the Czech Jews deported here is a quote from the BBC, giving 90,000,
which the author does not correct to the actual 74,000. Polish Jews
were never deported to Terezín, but the Hungarians, who are not mentioned, were (p. 153). Láníček writes about the “Terezín substance” (p.
154), the funds which the SS used to finance the ghetto, which came
from the money stolen in the Protectorate and the Altreich, and a part
forcibly provided by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland
and the Prague Jewish community. But while the author points out how
the Czechoslovak state tried to keep these funds rather than returning them to the Jewish community, he does not explain the events exactly, therefore offering a confusing narrative. The “Terezín substance”
has a complicated history both during and after the war, but when
we write about state-led theft and robbery, it is necessary to develop
a clear and documented argumentation. The author has also all but
ignored the now copious literature on the Terezín ghetto. Since I have
dedicated most of my work to this aspect of Holocaust history, I might
be accused of taking this too much to heart. Yet, given the author’s
claim to writing a history of Czech-Jewish relations between 1938 and
1948, including Terezín, mistakes and omissions like these should be
avoided.
19 David Gerlach, “For Nation and Gain: Economy, Ethnicity and Politics in the
Czech Borderlands, 1945–1948” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2007); Gerlach, “Working with the Enemy: Labor Politics in the Czech Borderlands, 1945–
48,” Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 38 (2007), pp. 179–208; Gerlach, “Juden in den
Grenzgebieten.”
20 Avinoam Patt, Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).
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Láníček’s study offers a wealth of interesting information, but it
remains a description. However, let it be said, the author set out to
break the myth of the benevolent Czechoslovak treatment of Jews, and
here he succeeded. While this contribution is important, the author’s
zeal to attack the Czechoslovak state authorities — and, by extension,
Gentile Czech behavior toward their Jewish compatriots — at times
leads him to slip into moralizing judgments, which is ironic, given the
book’s somewhat awkward subtitle. The crucial problem of the study
lies in the top-down approach, and a conventional political history
using conservative sources. Most of the material the author uses is
governmental documentation, newspapers, or politicians’ correspondence. This is a shame, since the monograph is based on rich archival
research in forty archives in eight countries.21 This selection of sources
sketches the actors as rigid and inflexible and obscures the look at other, smaller actors, in particular the Jews. The text sometimes reads as
if moving from one document to another, summing up the contents
rather than analyzing them. These caveats are intensified by stylistic
shortcomings; the book would have benefited from a thorough copy
editing. Láníček is one of many historians writing in a language that is
not their mother tongue, and his writing style is at times detrimental
to the reader’s understanding.
Czech, Slovaks and the Jews is a pedestrian study of the murky
waters of the Czechoslovak government’s marginalizing and neglectful
treatment of Czechoslovak Jewry during the Holocaust and the early
postwar era. The book lacks a macro-level and fails to put forth larger
statements that may add to our understanding of the Holocaust, nationalism, people’s loyalties in wartime — in short, the human condition. A more audacious, theoretically informed framework would have
enabled the study to grow into an examination of interactions between
the major actors at hand: the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, the
British and American governments, the international Jewish organizations, Czechoslovak Jews in England and those “at home,” and finally
the Czech and Slovak resistance. The interesting point is that while
the positions of the Czech Jews actually had no impact on the Jewish
position of the Czechoslovak government, the state’s often abominable
21 Some of the well-known archives are signified, somewhat unhelpfully, by unfamiliar abbreviations (CNA for the National Archives in Prague, TNA for the National
Archives in Kew), thus forcing the reader to keep looking them up.
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treatment of the Czech Jews had little lasting impact. No one cherished
the memories of democratic Czechoslovakia more than the Czechoslovak Jews abroad. They have passed these memories on to their children and grandchildren, as demonstrated in the hundreds of Israeli
and American grandmothers and grandfathers who have been coming
to Prague since the 1990s, reclaiming their citizenship, and showing
their children a magical country that never was. In the end, people
prefer to have good memories and positive attachments. And can we
blame them for that?