Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (7 page)

“The Führer behaved like a father,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “I am grateful to him for that. Right now that’s just what I need. I have spent an hour in the car, driving a long way and to no purpose. Then I have one more long, sad phone call to make. I shall be tough, although my heart is breaking.”

“He wept!” wrote Lída. “He wept like an ordinary person.”

When he called to tell her it was over because he had given the Führer his word, she lost consciousness.

The next day she was taken to a mental hospital.

When she came out she was summoned by the police. “You are banned from performing in the movies or on stage,” she heard. “You cannot appear in public.”

She fainted. After that, the only thing that could calm her down was a shot of morphine.

She stopped receiving letters.

A ban was imposed on showing any of the movies she had made for the UFA studio.

She took only cash and her handbag.

In Prague, she stood outside a house that was unfamiliar to her. It had been her parents’ job to spend her wages on
a house, and they had bought a fantastic modernist villa—it resembled a ship, with a surrounding terrace that looked like a deck. There were no right angles; the kitchen was semicircular and the bedroom circular. The windows were round. Outside the house grew roses of the Lída variety.

Her sister was cold towards her. “Do you know what we’ve been through?” she asked. “Do you know what the Germans did to us?”

Seven years younger, her sister Zorka Babková—with the new surname Janů—was also an actress.

By “us” she meant the country.

When, as a result of the betrayal by Britain and France, Czech Sudetenland was suddenly occupied by Germany in fall 1938, Jews, Czechs and anti-fascist Germans fled from there deep into Bohemia. Those who ran away too late were arrested by the Nazis. Those who managed to escape earlier were left with no home, no food and no chance of employment. Agencies were set up which specialized in rapidly sending the refugees who had ended up in Prague abroad (“I can send doctors, lawyers, and Israelite tradesmen to the other hemisphere immediately. I have a permit.”)

“Even the soldiers cried. Lída, do you know how unhappy people are who have to run away?”

Lída didn’t know.

“I’m very sorry,” she replied helplessly. “I had so many problems of my own,” she added, “that I could no longer picture your situation.”

•   •   •

The question which, during her conversations with Lída Baarová shortly before her death, had interested Helena Třeštíková, a filmmaker from Czech Television, and Stanislav Motl, a journalist for the TV Nova television station, as well as dozens of people who had once known her and, since the 1990s, were willing to talk about it, was this: was Lída Baarová stupid?

She herself claimed that she was.

But she was the last person to be believed. For her that could have been a very convenient answer.

On the night of March 14 to 15, 1939, Hitler forced Czechoslovakia to capitulate. He demanded that President Emil Hácha come to Berlin, and threatened to bomb Prague if the Czechs did not submit. The country had been carved up after Munich, had no border defenses to the north and no chance of resistance. Early in the morning, before Hácha got back from Berlin (his train was held up at the border for a long time, supposedly because of a snowstorm), Hitler was already at the castle in Prague. From the start, it was clear that the Czechs wouldn’t defend themselves. Their closest friends, France and Great Britain, were siding with Hitler, so now they had two options: to follow the example of Jan Hus, thirteenth-century priest and martyr—save face and go up in flames—or capitulate and survive.

At 8:15 a.m., the German army was driving down Prague’s National Avenue.

There were crowds walking along the streets, but nobody stopped, nobody looked around. On Old Town Square, at the
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, people were laying piles of snowdrops and weeping.

There was no fear in the air, no sounds of lament or despair. There was just sorrow.

“Each one of us took a major task upon himself on the fifteenth of March,” the reporter Milena Jesenská wrote a few days later in the weekly
Přítomnost
.

The task was this: to be Czech.

“The only gesture which Czech men could have made on the fifteenth of March 1939 would have been a suicidal one. It may be a beautiful thing to shed blood for your homeland. I don’t even think it’s particularly hard to do that. But we must do something very different. We must live. We must save every person we have, every bit of strength, great and small. There are not enough of us to allow ourselves to make gestures. There are only eight million of us here—too few, far too few for suicide. But quite enough for life.”

And so the task was to work as usual, and whenever possible, to cheat the regime. Above all, not to become German.

Before noon, Lída Baarová was also driving down National Avenue. Even though she had been back in Prague for two-and-a-half months by now, she hadn’t yet removed the German license plates from her car. As soon as she stopped the vehicle, the passers-by took one look at the plates and thumped their fists on the roof in anger.

The summer of 1939 was not yet over. Lída went to a soccer match with the singer Ljuba Hermanová. By now everyone was talking about war. “But a while earlier Lída had started to speak Czech badly,” recalled her friend. “She was always
mixing up Czech and German words. That day we were sitting in the stands, when she suddenly started shouting in an affected way: ‘Herrgott, now they could shoot a … 
wie sagt man das auf tschechisch?
… yes, a goal!’ That should have given us, her friends, a clue. At least about how stupid she was. I can’t imagine anyone in the least bit intelligent destroying her own life to that extent.”

At a later point, the director Otakar Vávra remembered her in Prague using a powder compact with a photo of Goebbels on it, though naturally he bore no grudge against her. She was just a woman. She lost her head. She was in love. She forgot her principles.

Czech society was supposed to work solely for the benefit of the Third Reich.

“How do you explain why so many Czechs come in here and greet us with ‘Heil Hitler’?” a German asked Milena Jesenská.

“Czechs? You must be mistaken.”

“No, I’m not. They come into our office, stretch out their right hand, and say: ‘Heil Hitler.’ Why is that? I could also tell you about a writer who makes a persistent effort to have his plays performed on the Berlin stage as soon as possible. I could tell you about all sorts of people who do far more than they have to—eagerly and tirelessly.”

Perhaps Baarová wasn’t stupid, but just wanted to make life comfortable for herself? Perhaps because she believed that Hitler was bound to have the final word in Europe?

“No, no. She was just a young woman, that’s the only explanation,” said her defenders years later.

According to Stanislav Motl, the journalist who wrote a book about her: “As a star, she felt she was exempt from thinking about important things.”

Later on, people kept saying that on March 15 Lída Baarová had welcomed Hitler at the castle in Prague—this is not true.

In November 1942, when Goebbels came to Prague for a three-day visit, Lída was forbidden to leave the city for the duration—this is true.

At the Lucerna Palace, where the movie world used to meet in the bar, she was boycotted, and there were lots of people who refused to sit next to her—this is partly true.

She did have some good friends. She was helped by Miloš Havel, uncle of the five-year-old Václav, and founder of Barrandov Studios, “the Czech Hollywood,” who also owned a movie theater that she used to visit as a little girl (with raspberry candy smeared on her face to make her look grownup). Now he was wriggling like an eel to rescue Czech cinema at his own studio, where the Nazis had taken 51 percent of the shares away from him. His diplomacy was successful: of forty Czech movies made in the period from 1939 to 1945, not a single one had Nazi content. (Though it wasn’t possible to show Jews in a positive light, and students were a taboo topic. In 1939, after demonstrations on the national holiday, the Germans had closed down all the Czech colleges, and 1,200 students had immediately ended up in concentration camps. The Czechs were meant to be nothing but a German workforce.)

In the Protectorate, Baarová made her four best Czech movies, in all of which she played vamps.
^†
She also received offers from Italy, and acted in movies directed by Enrico Guazzoni and Vittorio de Sica.

Another person in Lída’s circle was the actress Adina Mandlová, the friend who didn’t want her ashes to spoil anybody’s garden.

One day, Lída and Adina were having a conversation about men. Lída joked that the concert hall at the Lucerna wouldn’t be big enough for a gathering of all her lovers.

“You’d have to hire the whole stadium at Strahov,” said Mandlová, “with the rallying cry, ‘Every Czech should go to Strahov at least once in his life!’ ”

At the time, two Czechs were trying to get her attention, the head of President Hácha’s chancellery and the minister of industry. One of them apparently said: “That’s a woman with class. Power attracts her, and the loss of it repels her.”

We don’t know if she satisfied the minister’s hopes. Baarová was discreet. What we do know about her emotional and sexual life was forced out of her.

In April 1945, once the Red Army had reached Bratislava, Lída was warned that she must escape. “But I haven’t harmed
anyone. The Germans didn’t want anything to do with me—they were the ones who threw me out of the movies. And it all happened before the war began!” she explained. She couldn’t foresee that as soon as some of the Nazis disappeared after the war, she would be regarded as someone who knew their secrets.

However, when more than two million Germans began to flee from Bohemia, she left by car with a family she had befriended. They stopped at a village. The Americans had blown up the bridges and she couldn’t get all the way to Munich. For a month she helped in the fields of the farmer with whom she was staying. There she met an American soldier called Peter, who fell in love.

She let Peter and his fellow soldiers watch as she bathed in a stream.

Peter and his fellow soldiers were part of the Counterintelligence Corps, forerunner of the CIA.

Then Peter’s boss, intelligence officer Major Malsch, fell in love with her. She left the soldier and moved into the major’s villa in Munich, where they lived together for more than two months, while he mixed her favorite cocktails and never stopped asking questions.

After her arrest, the Americans told Baarová that Goebbels and his wife had poisoned their six children and then committed suicide. Then they informed her that she was on a list of war criminals, and sent her back to Czechoslovakia.

Stanislav Motl spent ten years looking for the relevant documents all over Europe.

“There isn’t a scrap of evidence to prove that Lída Baarová collaborated with the Reich during the war,” he says. “Her crime was that she lived for her career and nothing else.”

For her, the Nazis were a movie audience.

While Baarová was in a Prague jail, hearing the same two remarks again and again, “You stupid cow” and “You whore,” her friend Adina Mandlová went off to visit some friends outside Prague.

Throughout the occupation, there had been a rumor going round that Mandlová was the lover of Karl Hermann Frank, the Reich minister for Bohemia and Moravia. In a small town called Beroun, a policeman spotted her and shouted: “The bird is flying after Frank!” Guards armed with bayonets dragged her across the marketplace, straight to the station, to transport her back to Prague. People for whom she had performed here a year earlier shouted: “Where’s Frank when you need his help?” The crowd even threw stones at the train.

At the jail, news photographers were brought to see Adina, who was made to pose while doing physical labor.

After her acquittal in 1946, Adina Mandlová’s health declined. She was often seen drunk. In Czech and German the word
Mandel
means “almond,” so people started saying: “Baarová has
mandlové/
almond eyes, and Mandlová has
barové/
barroom eyes.”

Two pieces of news reached the jail:

Lída’s mother had died of a heart attack during her interrogation, as the interrogator continued to shout at her: “Where is Lída’s jewelry?” She was fifty-six years old.

Her sister Zorka Janů was having a successful stage career. She was on her way to a rehearsal when her path was blocked by actor and communist Václav Vydra. “No sister of Lída Baarová can be a Czech actress!” he declared, and wouldn’t let Zorka go inside the theater.

She drank gasoline, but her life was saved.

After his wife’s funeral, Karel Babka ended up in the hospital. To stop the cancer from spreading higher up, his leg was amputated. When he returned home, he found that Zorka hadn’t been eating; she was wasting away, and several times a day she suffered frenzied fits of obsessive bathing. She would dry herself and then get straight back into the bathtub again, constantly repeating: “I’ve got to be clean!”

He was making dinner when, from the corner of his eye, he saw a large towel fall from the bathroom window to the ground outside. He heard the towel land with a dull thud against the concrete steps. She was twenty-three years old.

Lída Baarová’s problems after the war also resulted from the fact that her nation had a problem with itself.

In a country robbed of land by its neighbors, including Poland, the ordinary Czech performed his duty of “being a Czech”—just as Milena Jesenská had wished. He worked in order to survive. (The resistance movement promoted the slogan: “Work slowly.”)

A Czech could either work for the Germans, or work for the Germans.

As soon as he graduated from high school in 1942, eighteen-year-old Josef Škvorecký—later a famous writer—was assigned a job at a munitions factory. He had the choice of an arms factory in Bremen, where there was constant carpet bombing, or a factory making parts for German Messerschmitts in his own peaceful town of Náchod.