The Prague Post Online: Opinion: No comparison

July 4th, 2008

Reader's Survey^NEW Endowment Fund Book of Lists ONLINE Reservations Classifieds Subscriptions

No comparison

Minimizing the Holocaust is too easy in the Czech Republic
Commentary | Search restaurants | Archives

By Adam Daniel Mezei
For The Prague Post
March 21st, 2007 issue

Six million is too many. A modification, if you will, of the infamous World War II–era immigration policy of the government of Canada, which condemned boatloads of European Jews to their deaths during the Holocaust. “One is too many,” was the official Canadian policy of the time.

Here in the Czech Republic, the increasingly popular notion continues to spawn that love-ins of the Holocaust or Shoah era are flooding the marketplace for scholarly ideas. It’s a canard that continues to gain traction in this Central European country and is positively frightening when one considers the horrifying phenomenon of Holocaust-denial conferences being convened around the globe of late. Take the recent one in the Iranian capital, Tehran, for instance, kickstarted by the efforts of mullah-manipulated Shia demagogues such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his bearded minions.

In the Czech cultural sphere, a tight coterie of pseudo-scholars seeks to do something quite similar by channeling the debate about the war toward the Draconian period of the Beneš Decrees. Enacted in the immediate post-1945 era, the decrees were the brainchild of Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš. They heralded in a harsh postwar policy of eye-for-an-eye justice that effectively led to the expulsion of more than 3 million ethnic German citizens after the war.

Among that group, thousands had eagerly collaborated with the Nazis in the implementation and enforcement of anti-Jewish policies in the Czech lands during the Protectorate era from 1939 to 1945. But thousands of others had not. All were citizens who once dwelled peacefully in the Sudeten Highlands on Czechoslovakia’s German and Austrian borders for centuries, devoted to the Masarykian multicultural ideal that had taken root in Central Europe over the two decades of the First Republic’s lifespan.

Jews? Germans? The Beneš Decrees? What’s the connection here?

Last month’s Protectorate-era “city lights” sign campaign — an ironic spoof of the Nazi-era diktats imposed on Bohemian and Moravian Jewry spearheaded by the creative genius of Jan Binar of the McCann Erickson advertising agency — instigated a flurry of angry feedback from hecklers convinced there’s been too much “Jew talk” dominating the airwaves of late. The dustier skeleton in the Czech closet, according to them, is the Beneš Decrees.

While the progeny of these Sudeten deportees bang loudly (amid other seekers) at Prague Castle’s iron gates demanding their rightful historical recompense, little has been done to right this historical faux pas. Czech and Slovak Jews (though to a practically nonexistent extent in the latter case) have been recognized, acknowledged and compensated too excessively, they pine. The Volksdeutscher are due to receive their just deserts.

But ah, you see, there’s the rub.

Amid the clamoring for mehr geld — more money — the spotlight has been craftily shifted away from the 40 years of what the locals euphemistically refer to as “former times.” It’s often forgotten how robust the solidarity was between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Those historic ties between Czechs and their Teutonic cousins were reestablished during the Cold War, leading to the curious phenomenon during the pre–1989 revolution times of Czechoslovaks speaking German — not English — as their second or third language, depending on their proficiency in Russian.

Collaboration among East Germans and Czechoslovaks in the scientific, cultural and espionage spheres was prolific, not to mention the common scandalous treatment of their own athletes. The latter were experimented on like guinea pigs as part of the German Democratic Republic’s national doping project, superbly documented in American Steven Ungerleider’s award-winning exposé titled Faust’s Gold.

Has the bitter past been dealt with?

Not officially, to be sure. However, once-weak branches were strengthened, and the basis for rapprochement between the two nations was clearly sown. Today’s successor state to Czechoslovakia, the Czech Republic, refuses to reopen the discussion on the Beneš Decrees with a united Germany. This is disturbing in the extreme, though it can hardly be described as “swept under the carpet,” as these pseudo-scholars claim.

To equate Shoah-era memorializing with the Beneš Decrees is not only misleading but disproportionate. The decrees were not a systematic attempt to eradicate an entire people. Say what you will about the buffoonery of Beneš and his questionable leadership during Munich and the Czechoslovak government in exile in London, but a mass murderer he was not.

Czechoslovakia had been occupied for six brutal years. Beneš was putty in the millions of hands of furious, vengeful Czechoslovaks who wanted nothing more — perhaps rightfully so — than to vent their frustrations upon their recent vicious overlords. Beneš was caught up in that swell, and it would have been his head on a platter had the decrees bearing his name not been passed at the time.

The Wehrmacht’s combined defeats at Stalingrad and in the North African desert prevented the Nazis from reaching the Middle East. Had Hitler’s huns reached that far, the continued slaughter of the ancient Jewish communities of British-controlled Egypt and Palestine, Vichy-controlled Lebanon and Syria, and, finally, British Iraq — in that order — would have been violently unleashed. The writing was clearly on the wall, and history has proven this.

Using cruder terminology, the Czech Sudeten scandal can be compared to a “virus” that the Czechoslovak leaders wished to expunge from their midst. The instant it was removed, the so-called problem was solved. But a state-sponsored and enduring campaign of annihilation the Beneš Decrees were certainly not. Not since Hussite times and the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 have Czechs been a militant race. Bloodshed and rapaciousness are anathema to their national character. That is what makes the harshness of the Beneš Decrees so historically salient.

According to the Final Solution’s genocidal proponents, however, together with their willing East European henchmen, European Jewry was instead looked upon as a “cancer” needing eradication. To highlight the absurdity of Nazi evil and the extent of the Jewish manhunt, so-called “Jews” kneeling at the church’s altar beneath gigantic statues of Jesus were dragged away kicking and screaming by Gestapo agents in Poland, Germany and Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia, carted off to their eventual deaths. People who hadn’t been Jewish for generations were caught up in this dragnet. Like an old shtetl saying of the time said: “Want to know who’s a Jew? Ask the non-Jews, they always seem to know best.”

The Beneš Decrees were a knee-jerk reaction to a terrible historic injustice. Tales of what transpired in Czechoslovakia’s border regions are legendary in their cruelty. The photographic evidence exists in all its barbaric zeal. The persistent refusal of the modern-day Czech Republic to examine its macabre past is as perplexing as it is injurious to the future generations of the once-expelled.

Lambasting Binar’s recent sign campaign as excessively Holocaust-oriented is not how to resuscitate the Sudeten dialogue. Let it be clear: The Shoah and the Beneš Decrees do not travel along parallel tracks. The reason why is obvious. While one set of boxcars led to the West and a chance at life — albeit a drastically diminished one, with its concomitant travesties and deprivations — the others led eastbound to the hellfires of the gas chambers, where life as we know it on this earth was obliterated for all time.

Somehow, according to the crooked calculus of the aforementioned pseudo-scholars, these two historical tragedies seem to add up. Ironically, Kafka would have been proud.

We should be appalled.

Adam Daniel Mezei can be reached at @praguepost.com

Be the first to add a comment!

Most e-mailed articles
Czech entomologists arrested in India Brno companies hunt for tech workers A healthy break from mediocrity

Related articles
Inflation may push up prices by 5 percent Letters to the Editor

Most visited in Book of Lists

The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.