Living History (58 page)

I encountered similar sentiments among others who survived years of Nazism and communism, when good and evil were so easily defined. There cannot be a more chilling testimony to evil than the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

Documentary and movie footage of the surprisingly mundane brick buildings of Auschwitz and the long, silent railroad track of Birkenau cannot convey the horror of these places where Jews, dissident Poles, Gypsies and others were delivered to their deaths. I visited rooms filled with children’s clothing, eyeglasses, shoes, dentures and human hair―mute but damning testaments to the Nazi atrocities. I felt numb and sick when I thought of the millions whose futures were so brutally stolen. As we stood along the railroad tracks leading to the gas chambers, my guide told me that when the Allied troops were liberating Poland, the Nazis dynamited the crematoria to destroy the evidence of what they had done.

When I was about ten I remember going with my dad to a roadhouse bar and restaurant on the Susquehanna River near the Rodham cottage at Lake Winola. As the bartender talked to my dad, I noticed the tattooed numbers on his wrist. When I later asked my dad about them, he explained that the man had been an American prisoner of war captured by the Nazis. I asked more questions, and my dad told me that the Nazis also tattooed numbers on the arms of millions of Jews and killed them in gas chambers or used them as slaves in concentration camps. I knew that my grandmother Della’s husband, Max Rosenberg, was Jewish, and I was horrified that someone like him could have been murdered just because of his religion. Coming to terms with the existence of such evil at a distance is difficult, but at my next stop in Warsaw, I met people for whom that challenge had become profoundly personal.

Waiting in a meeting room of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation Jewish Community Center were twenty people who had learned in recent years that they were Jewish. A man in his fifties had been told by the woman he knew as his mother that his biological parents had given him to her, to spare him from the Holocaust. A teenager had learned from her parents that her maternal grandparents pretended not to be Jewish in order to avoid being sent to concentration camps. Now this young woman would have to decide who she was.

On a return trip to Poland in October 1999, I visited the Foundation to recognize the reestablishment of Judaism in Poland. After the Polish press reported on my speech, the Foundation received calls and letters from Polish Jews living in the countryside who said that until they read about my visit, they had thought they were the only Jews left. Just as societies were facing their histories, so too were countless individuals.

In fact, Madeleine Albright, whom I met in the Czech Republic, would share a similar experience. Growing up, Madeleine had no idea that her parents were Jewish. She had been raised Catholic but would soon learn―through a journalist working on her biography―

that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps. Her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia to England and ultimately to Denver, where Madeleine finished high school before enrolling at Wellesley. Although she was surprised by the news of her Jewish heritage, Madeleine told me that she understood her parents’ anguished efforts to protect their children.

Madeleine and I met with President Vaclav Havel, the playwright and human rights activist who had spent years in prison for his dissident activities. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 that peacefully trans formed Communist Czechoslovakia into a democracy, Havel became the nation’s first President. Three years later, when Czechoslovakia split into two separate countries―Slovakia and the Czech Republic―he was elected President of the new Czech Republic.

I first met Havel in Washington at the dedication of the Holocaust Museum in 1993.

He was a great friend of Madeleine, who spent her early childhood in Prague and spoke fluent Czech. By then an international icon, Havel was shy, yet eloquent, funny and utterly charming. I found him enormously compelling, and he and Bill bonded over their mutual love of music. Havel gave Bill a saxophone on Bill’s first trip to Prague in 1994, when they visited a jazz club that had been at the center of the Velvet Revolution. Havel insisted that Bill play with the performers and then accompanied him on the tambourine!

Bill’s renditions of “Summertime” and “My Funny Valentine” and other songs they played together were made into a CD that earned cult status in Prague.

Recently widowed, Havel invited Madeleine and me to his private home for dinner, rather than dining at the official presidential quarters in the Prague Castle. When my car pulled up, he was waiting on the sidewalk with a bouquet of flowers and a small gift, a sculpted headband made out of aluminum by one of his artist friends.

After a lively dinner, Havel led us on a walk through the old city and across the famous Charles Bridge, a popular destination for musicians, teenagers and tourists. During his years as a dissident, the bridge had been a gathering point where people could play music or swap records and tapes acquired through the black market―and where they could exchange messages undetected by the authorities. Music, particularly American rock music, was instrumental in keeping hope alive after the 1968 Soviet crackdown. In 1977, Havel led protests following the arrest and trial of a Czechoslovakian rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe, named for Frank Zappa lyrics. Having signed a human rights manifesto known as Charter 77, and been sentenced to hard labor for being a “subversive,”

he drew on his literary and intellectual ideas to sustain him. A collection of letters he wrote from prison to his late wife, Olga, is now a classic of dissident literature.

Havel, a political philosopher as much as a playwright, believed that globalization often exacerbated nationalistic and ethnic rivalries. Rather than uniting people in a common global culture, a mass culture in which everyone wears the same jeans, eats the same fastfood and listens to the same music doesn’t inevitably bring people closer. Rather, he argued, it can make them less secure about who they are, and, as a result, lead to extreme efforts-including religious fundamentalism, violence, terrorism, ethnic cleansing and even genocide-to validate and retain distinct identities. Havel’s theory had particular relevance to the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe, where intolerance and nationalistic tensions had begun to flare up, particularly in places like the former Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.

Havel successfully lobbied Bill and other American leaders to move the headquarters of Radio Free Europe from Berlin to Prague. During the Cold War, the U.S. government had sponsored Radio Free Europe to challenge Communist propaganda throughout the Soviet empire. In a post-Cold War Europe no longer divided by an Iron Curtain, Havel reasoned that Radio Free Europe should take on a new role―promoting democracy. Both Bill and the U.S. Congress agreed with Havel’s logic, and in 1994 approved the move of the RFE headquarters to Prague, where it was housed in the old Soviet-style Parliament at one corner of historic Wenceslas Square. This is where Soviet tanks had parked after rolling into the city to squelch a budding democracy movement in the summer of 1968.

Havel understood political symbolism.

I spoke at Radio Free Europe headquarters on July 4―an Independence Day message broadcast to twentyfive million listeners in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. I applauded the role Radio Free Europe had played before the revolution, when many Czechs held their radios toward the window so they could pick up the RFE signal and tune in to Western broadcasts. Inspired by Havel’s warnings about the downsides of globalization and cultural homogenization, I called for “an alliance of democratic values” that would help people confront “the unavoidable questions of the twentyfirst century,” like balancing individual and community rights, raising families amidst the pressures of the mass media and consumer culture, and retaining our ethnic pride and national identity while cooperating regionally and globally.

I said that democracy is a work-in-progress, one that our own nation, after more than two centuries, was still trying to perfect. Building and sustaining a free society is like a three-legged stool: one leg is a democratic government, the second is a free market economy and the third is a civil society―the civic associations, religious institutions, voluntary efforts, NGOs and individual acts of citizenship that together weave the fabric of democratic life. In the newly free countries, civil society is as important as free elections and free markets to internalize democratic values in citizens’ hearts, minds and everyday lives.

I closed with a story Madeleine had told me about a tour she had made through western Czech Republic in 1995 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. In every town she visited, the Czech people waved American flags with forty-eight stars. American troops had passed out the flags a half century earlier, and the Czechs had preserved them through years of Soviet domination, just as they had kept faith that freedom would eventually come.

I was delighted to spend time with Madeleine after our trip in 1995 to the U.N.

women’s conference in China. She and I were determined to build on Beijing and continue to advocate for the importance of women’s issues and social development in U.S.

foreign policy. After she became Secretary of State, we had regular lunches in her private dining room on the seventh floor of the State Department, joined by her Chief of Staff, Elaine Shocas, and Melanne. Over time, we changed some minds and helped shift the foreign policy agenda so that it more aptly reflected our nation’s democratic values of equality and inclusion.

Madeleine and I became allies because of our shared vision and experience, which included Wellesley College. We also became friends, and in the three days we spent in Prague, we talked nonstop during a splendid boat trip on the Vltava River past Prague Castle while July Fourth fireworks were set off in our honor. We walked around Prague, and she pointed out local sights and greeted well-wishers in her native Czech.

One moment from the trip epitomized Madeleine’s resourcefulness and pragmatism.

Before a meeting with Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, she and I had to review some confidential diplomatic information, but there was no private place to meet. Suddenly Madeleine grabbed my arm and tugged me toward a door.

“Follow me,” she said. The next thing I knew, we were huddled in the ladies’ rest room―the perfect, and only, spot available for two women to have a private conversation.

Madeleine and I left Prague for Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia and the seat of a government then headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar, a throwback to the era of authoritarian regimes. He wanted to outlaw nongovernmental organizations, seeing them as threats to his rule. Before our trip, NGO representatives asked if I would attend a gathering of NGOs scheduled during my visit to draw greater attention to Meciar’s repressive treatment of these organizations and to highlight his unwillingness to embrace democracy.

My presence at the meeting, held in the Concert Hall, home of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra, emboldened the participants to speak frankly about issues such as minority rights, environmental damage and flawed election procedures and to criticize the government’s attempts to terminate and criminalize their work.

Of all the world leaders with whom I have met privately, only two have acted in ways that I found personally disturbing: Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who giggled incessantly and inappropriately while his young wife carried on the conversation, and Meciar, whom I met later that afternoon at the Government Offices. A former boxer, he sat on one end of a small couch; I sat on the other. I told Meciar that I had been impressed with the NGOs at the Concert Hall, and the important work the groups were doing. He leaned toward me and, in a menacing tone, constantly clenching and unclenching his fists, ranted on about their duplicity and traitorous challenges to the state. By the end of our meeting, I was wedged tightly into the corner of the couch, appalled at his bullying attitude and barely controlled rage. The Slovak people voted him out of office in September 1998, with considerable help from the NGOs, which mobilized the electorate to vote in favor of change.

All of the countries I visited wanted to discuss their potential membership in NATO, and in Hungary I discussed its prospects in a private meeting with Prime Minister Gyula Horn. I favored NATO expansion so I tried to be encouraging. I also met with Hungary’s President Arpid Goncz, a heroic figure with the distinction of having been on the wrong side of both the Nazis and the Communists. A playwright like Havel, he was the first President elected by Hungarians as they made the transition to democracy. As Goncz welcomed me to the large house that served as a presidential residence, he confessed that he didn’t know what to do with all the rooms. “It is just my wife and me,” he said. “We only use one bedroom. Maybe we should invite lots of people to live here!” Goncz, white haired and humorous, looked like a fit St. Nicholas. His demeanor became serious when we discussed the Balkans, and he voiced the fear that Europe, and indeed the West, was in for a long struggle with ethnic conflict. In what turned out to be a prophetic comment, he warned about Islamic extremists and argued that the same expansionist impulses that had led the Ottoman Empire to the gates of Budapest in the sixteenth century were again thriving among Muslim fundamentalists, who rejected the secular pluralism of modern democracies and the freedom of others for religious belief and women’s choices.

People often wonder how much freedom I had to tour the cities I visited and whether I could go anywhere without my Secret Service escort. For the most part, I traveled in motorcades and was surrounded by agents. But in Budapest I had the rare treat of going to the famous Gundel’s Restaurant where I ate in the garden, lit by hanging lanterns, serenaded by a violinist. And then, on a gorgeous afternoon, I had a couple of hours free to see the old city on foot. Melanne, Lissa, Kelly and Roshann Parris, a top-notch advance woman from Kansas City, did their best to disguise themselves as tourists. My lead agent, Bob McDonough, the only agent to accompany me, did the same. I wore a straw hat, sunglasses and a casual shirt and slacks, and we took off down the city’s narrow streets, past shops, public baths and into the neo-Gothic cathedral. The only giveaway was that the host government insisted on “protecting” me while I was in their country, so two Hungarian security agents―wearing dark suits and thick-soled shoes and carrying weapons―