RE: [Cz-L] The making of the Powidla

When we left Czernowitz on the Czech Legion armoured train we eventually got
to Liberec (Ex-Reichenberg) and I,as a kid,became friendly with a Sudeten
boy name of Roland Kusebauch.Over time I found his family was not exactly
popular with the Nazi regime because they regarded themselves as Czech
citizens who happened to be of German origin.Like all Sudeten Germans they
were later expelled to Germany.Many Sudetens deserved this..but not all!!
Cornel

-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-63634141-8441035_at_list.cornell.edu
[mailto:bounce-63634141-8441035_at_list.cornell.edu] On Behalf Of Charles Polak
Sent: 26 August 2012 11:55
To: 'hedbren_at_zahav.net.il'; Czernowitz-L_at_cornell.edu
Subject: RE: [Cz-L] The making of the Powidla

Hedwig, I'm sure you're right. I've twice encountered Czech Jews married to
Bohemian/Moravian German ladies, obviously none of the classic hate there!
With the minority of them who were self-conscious liberals or socialists,
I'm sure anti-Semitism was felt to be as horrible and reactionary as it was.
And my parents never really learned to think of German-speakers as
'foreigners' (as might well have been nearer to the facts of how those
people felt themselves), even though they were both native Czech speakers.
My experience of Sudetendeutsche included the shock of hearing a woman
teacher of my own age, accompanying a party of German schoolchildren on a
language-learning exchange visit with an English school where a friend was
German teacher, laughing out loud at the ridiculousness of expecting her to
continue to talk to me once she'd learned I was Czech (I'd volunteered this
after she'd said her family was "aus Böhmen"); she merely turned away!

Unfortunately, it is on record that 97.2% of Bohemian and Moravian Germans
voted for Konrad Henlein's "Filiale" of the Nazi party, and that they had a
particularly "distinguished" record in concentration/extermination camps,
Einsatzgruppen and death marches. The reason may be that they especially
resented being a minority in a majoritarian democracy where the majority
were Slavic Untermenschen, and suddenly having rights exactly equal to
theirs and to those of the even more untermenschlich Jews may have
particularly stuck in their throats. The 1920s-1930s were the worldwide
high-water-mark of racism, and Lord Runciman's 1938 report to the British
government on the status of the Czech Germans was fully sympathetic to this
very point of view and therefore recommended that the "Sudetenland" be
stripped from Czechoslovakia without a plebiscite - more even than Hitler
had been asking for Chamberlain's government to approve!

The Czechs never produced a pro-Nazi militia - as the Ukrainians, Romanians,
Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians all did; nor a bona fide
collaborationist government, like neighbouring Slovakia (which has a
near-identical language but a very different nationalist tradition).
Travelling to Kyiv/Kiev 2 years ago and having quite a lot to do with
expatriate Ukrainians, I've found that wartime collaboration, fascism and
antisemitism are things that a lot of Ukrainians rather agonize over: a
vulgar deviation which many of their compatriots have pursued, unworthy of
their national ideals. Unfortunately, Dovid Katz has found that in the
Baltic countries, antisemitism is a middle-class thing too, a reassertion of
what some quite well-educated people think of as their national ideals; and
in Hungary, the Jobbik fascist party (definitely with the connivance of the
purportedly respectable centre-right government!), though full of vulgar
thugs, does seem to have won a wide audience for an equivalent point of
view. I don't know Romania at all; no one could admire its wartime record,
but you Czernowitzers are good at giving credit where credit is due.

I can read German, though not easily. I'm sure that you have a very
interesting story to tell! Please send me any link, if you've got it
on-line.

[Charles Polak]

-snip-
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Received on 2012-08-26 06:21:58