January, 1933

I have recorded in my diary the terrible charge which Father Hlinka brought against Beneš as to the manner in which General Stefanik met his death. I had neither the opportunity nor the authority to investigate his indictment, but I would not feel justified in suppressing it. The fact that he believed in it explains much that followed. I greatly admired Beneš’s behavior at the Conference, and it was certainly extremely fortunate for the Czech people to have such a resourceful leader.]

“One of the difficulties that will confront you when the time comes to reopen the question will be the documents you have filed with the Conference,” I suggested as delicately as I could. “Voicing the wishes of your national committee, both you and Stefanik are on record as asking for union with Prague for many and cogent reasons— the ever-increasing disorders, the encroachments of the Bolsheviki…” * Poor Hlinka groaned. “I know, I know. We did that very thing. May God forgive us. The Czechs spoke us fair. They said that in union there was strength, that many, very many Slovaks had fought with them on many fronts. We had been brothers in war, and now that peace was at hand, a troubled peace to be sure, why not stand together? ‘It is only a temporary measure at best—or at worst,’ they explained. ‘It should be regarded as a trial marriage, and then should the union prove irksome, we could each go our several ways without let or hindrance.’ But in three months, indeed, after only three weeks, the veil was lifted. In this short time we have suffered more from the high-handed Czechs than we did from the Magyars in a thousand years. Now we know extra Hungariam non est vita (outside of Hungary there is no life for us). Remember these words, time will prove their truth. Beneš is an ambitious knave. He even wants to absorb Polish Teschen.” [And as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, he did.]

“But your union with the Magyars—that sins against the principle of ethnic solidarity which is in such high favor now,” I suggested.

“I know, I know,” interrupted Hlinka. “It runs counter to the popular current. We cannot mix with the Magyars and we do not want to, but economically, and above all religiously, we can get along with them better, much better, than we can with the irreligious free-thinking Czechs who, as we now know, have no respect for God or man. We have lived alongside the Magyars for a thousand years and the traditional tie is strengthened by the lay of our respective lands. All the Slovak rivers flow toward the Hungarian plain, and all our roads lead toward Budapest, their great city, while from Prague we are separated by the barrier of the Carpathians. But the physical obstacles are not as insurmountable as are the religious barriers, which shall, I trust, always keep us Catholics apart from those who were Hussites and now are infidels.”

Although I tried to turn his thoughts away from the unfortunate move, he and some of his adherents had made in the hour of victory, I was not successful, and he returned to it time and again.

“Yes, I did sign the declaration which went to the Powers a few days after the Armistice. I did say, may God and my unhappy people forgive me, that we Slovaks were a part of the Czechoslovak race and that we wished to live with them with equal rights in an independent * state. Why did I do it? I cannot explain—not even to myself—but I will tell you some of the reasons that swayed me then unfortunately. In the Pittsburgh declaration of our independence which the American Slovaks sent on to us, I read that Masaryk had guaranteed the independence of Slovakia and had further agreed that we should be represented at the Peace Conference by our own delegation. Even then I had my doubts as to the wisdom of the step I was taking, but what else was I to do? When the people in Prague saw that I was hesitating and the reason why, they reassured me by saying, ‘This is merely an emergency move, and you can make it with mental reservations. When Europe settles down you can make your own final decision.’

“And of course, I saw the plight of Hungary. Having accepted the role of cat’s-paw for the Germans, she was powerless, while the Czechs were in a strong position. Some said to me: ‘We must spread our sails to the prevailing winds,’ and I agreed. God has punished me, but I shall continue to plead before God and man for my people who are innocent and without stain. For long and fateful years we fought for our religion and our freedom shoulder to shoulder against the Magyars. Our relations with them were not what they should have been, but during all those years we did not suffer one tenth of the wrongs that we have had to bear at the hands of the Czech soldiers and the Prague politicians in the last few months.

“The Czechs regard Slovakia as a colony, and they treat us as though we were African savages. Abroad they shout that we belong to the same race, and yet at every opportunity they treat us as helots. Within the borders of what they are pleased to call Czechoslovakia, they only treat us as hewers of wood and drawers of water for their High Mightiness of Prague.”

(The fact that the people of Prague speak of the newborn state as Czechoslovakia and not as Czecho-Slovakia, is a grievance which also rankles.)

Three days later, still under escort, I was back at the mysterious monastery bringing to Father Hlinka a copy of the Covenant in Slovak, with the article indicated through which, upon the assembling of the League, he would be entitled to ask for a review of the decision and, indeed, of the treaty. The Father was now sitting up and, to explain his physical condition and his delay in reaching Paris, he told me many details of the hardships he had experienced on his three-months’ journey. It was a checkered land-Odyssey, but unlike the second Korean Mission headed by my old friend of Seoul days, General Pak, which never got beyond Lake Baikal, the Slovaks, though battered, and limping, and above all, late, had now arrived.

“We had the best of reasons for knowing,” explained the Father, “that the new people in Prague would not assist us with passports; in fact, we were confident they would throw every possible obstacle in our way; so, we sneaked out of our villages by night, and wandering across country, often on foot, through Teschen, we came to Warsaw. Here we were well received by Marshal Pilsudski. He had many troubles of his own. His people were, as you know, in a desperate plight, and so he was only able to give us words of encouragement. Even the French traveling passports which he asked of the French Embassy were refused. His parting words, however, sustained us in many a trying hour of our journey. ‘You are entitled to your independence as much as we are,’ he said. ‘I shall instruct our delegation in Paris to assist you all they can.’

“We also received kind words from another great man, Achille Ratti, the Papal Nuncio in Poland.¹ He gave us his Apostolic blessing. He, too, deplored that Christendom had placed the devout Slovak congregations under the tyrannical rule of the enemies of the true Church. But he begged us to give up our journey, at least for the moment. He asserted that conditions were too unfavorable; that for the present they could not be overcome. He urged us to stay with him, to watch and pray, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem. This we regarded as a counsel of despair, and so we pushed on, without credentials and with little or no money. Often our poverty-stricken countrymen, exiles in strange lands, saved us from starvation and by their contributions enabled us to travel many stages of the journey at least in fourth-class cars; but progress was slow and often, very often, we had to stop and retrace our steps because of the political conditions by which we were confronted. Germany we knew was unsettled. We were warned there was not one chance in a hundred of getting through there. The longest way around gave better promise, and so we wandered on through Yugoslavia to Italy and at last to Switzerland. Once there we did not have to sleep out under the stars or go supperless to bed, as had become our habit. A committee of good people from our unfortunate country took us in charge, arranged for our stay with our brothers in Christ, and brought us to Paris in that relative comfort—which we had not enjoyed for so long …”

Five days later I called again on Father Hlinka, for no reason in the world but that I wanted to have one more, and what I feared would be a last, look at what they would call in Maryland his “honest affidavit face.” And now I needed no guide and could reach the monastery unescorted. It was the Paris home of the Pères du Saint-Esprit, with whom evidently the Catholic Slovaks had close affiliations. The gatekeeper wanted to send me away in short order. “The Slovaks are gone,” he said. But I insisted on seeing the Abbot, and from him, between his lamentations and self-reproaches, I learned what had happened.

“A week after our dear brothers arrived,” he explained, “we had to make room under our roof for those who came to take part in the annual assembly of our Order. We secured rooms for our Slovak visitors in a little hotel a few steps down the street. There we hoped they would remain as our valued guests until once again there would be available space for them under our roof. They were loath to leave, and now too late we recognize how right they were. Apparently, their presence was immediately announced to the police by the keeper of the hotel and they were called upon to show their papers at the prefecture. These were not in order; in fact, they had none, and so, twenty-four hours later, in spite of our protest, they were escorted to the station and placed on an eastbound train.

“It was a great triumph for Beneš and his infidels,” lamented the Abbot, “and we shall never forgive ourselves for unwittingly assisting them. Father Hlinka was sure that Beneš brought about his expulsion and so am I. But how could a country, how could France, that at least until recently was the eldest daughter of the true Church, lend itself to such a dastardly act?”

I chose to think that neither the government, except in a perfunctory, routine way, or for that matter Beneš, had anything to do with the expulsion. Perhaps Hlinka and his friends were simply victims of the newspaper crusade against unregistered aliens and others that the Paris press had preached, with the warm approval of the delegates to the Peace Conference, as a result of the murderous attacks upon Clemenceau, Venizelos, and other delegates. Reproached for their criminal laxity, the police with many indiscriminate rafles now made a clean sweep of the lodginghouses of Paris. I trust this is the explanation of the unhappy and most untimely expulsion of the Slovak Mission, but I must admit, that the good Abbot would not accept it and as long as I stayed with him kept repeating, “Beneš and Tardieu, Tardieu and Beneš, they are the villains.”

Tardieu, at least, I think was guiltless and had not the remotest idea that the Mission had been in Paris, for when some days later House broached the subject of their dissatisfaction with the St. Germain settlement, he thought it was based entirely on protests that had reached us from the American Slovaks, residents for the most part of western Pennsylvania.

Colonel House was impressed by Father Hlinka’s story and deeply touched by some of the details of his hazardous and necessitous journey which I gave him. “I had thought,” he said, “that all roads led to Paris and that the Conference was easy, perhaps too easy, of access— but at least in this instance I’m mistaken.”

When the Colonel recovered his health, the Slovaks had been expelled, but he brought the memorandum which I drew up for them to the notice of our delegation and also called the matter to the attention of Tardieu when he came to the Crillon on one of his frequent calls. Tardieu admitted that he had heard of the schism between the Czechs and the Slovaks, which was increasingly apparent, but had consoled himself with the thought it was due merely to a misunderstanding which could and should be cleared up.

“At times,” suggested the Colonel, “I fear you are not going about the foundation of a strong Czechoslovak state in the best way,” and Tardieu promised to study the matter very carefully, indeed “prayerfully.” He admitted that he had been startled and impressed by the plea of the Slovaks.

“Of course we knew,” he went on, “that a plebiscite would disclose a number of minorities in the new state. There are the Germans and Hungarians, and those strange Carpatho-Russians, all very difficult to understand, much less to assimilate. But what could we do other than what we have done? It would be absurd to turn this section of Europe into a hodge-podge of governments, a crazy quilt of little nations. On the other hand, the government in Prague is a liberal one. It was and is our staunch ally and we have every reason to believe that in an autocratic world it will prove a bulwark of democracy. It seems to me that we have the right, even the duty, to make that government as strong as we can.”

[1938. On their arrival in Vienna, the expelled delegates separated, Hlinka going to his native village of Ruzomberck to work with his people, while one member of the delegation was sent to Budapest to keep in touch with the Magyars. Hlinka decided to enter parliament and there, in what he was told would be an open forum, fight for the liberties of his people. Some weeks before the election, however, Czech soldiers broke into his house at midnight and, before his adoring peasants had any idea of what was happening, carried him off to a distant prison. This high-handed act provoked an insurrection that was only suppressed after much bloodshed. Hlinka remained in prison for many months and was treated with such cruelty that he never recovered his health.

He fought on, however, and in 1938 came his hour of triumph. Some American Slovaks brought to Europe the long-concealed original draft of the Pittsburgh Pact between the Slovaks and the Czechs, reached in 1918. It demonstrated the fact that, although he had taken some part in drawing it up, Masaryk was honestly mistaken as to its terms and that Hlinka was fully justified in maintaining that complete autonomy had been promised his people and further that they were assured that on a basis of equality they would sit with the Czechs at the Peace Conference. Andred Hlinka died a few days later. With his last words he again demanded the plebiscite too long denied. Even had it been granted it would now have proved too late. The discord between these two branches of the Western Slav family, which would have taken years of fair and friendly dealings to remove, made the conquest of their common country by the Germans in 1939 a matter of but a few days.

I retain pleasant memories of my intercourse with the Slovak priest. At times I think of him as the most sympathetic of the many agents of the scattered and disinherited ethnic fragments with whom I was brought in touch. He had dark luminous eyes of rare beauty; they were indeed the windows of a soul that was transparently sincere. His speech was straightforward and convincing, but here was the rub. It was not words alone that could set his people free, and apparently his bitter memories made it impossible for him to listen to, much less accept, the compromises and the adjustments the situation demanded and which might have saved it to the ultimate advantage of all.