Titans of History (69 page)

François Duvalier was born on April 14, 1907 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. His mother, who was mentally unstable, worked in a bakery and his father was a teacher, journalist and justice of the peace. The couple nicknamed their son Papa Doc after he qualified to practice medicine at the University of Haiti in 1934. In 1939, as a successful young professional, he married Simone Ovide Faine, a nurse, and went on to have four children, three girls and a boy, Jean-Claude, born in 1951, who would later succeed his father in 1971. Duvalier spent a year at the University of Michigan and, with American assistance, won national recognition for his public-health work against tropical diseases such as yaws and malaria, which had claimed countless lives in Haiti.

In 1938, Duvalier formed Le Groupe des Griots, a group of black intellectuals—influenced by the ethnologist and voodoo scholar Lorimer Denis—which aimed to awaken black nationalism and voodoo mysticism in Haiti. Voodoo, which derives from the word
vodun
, meaning spirit, is an ancient religious practice that originated in west Africa, perhaps as much as 10,000 years ago. It is still practiced by more than thirty million people worldwide, despite once being suppressed and denounced as black magic by Christian colonialists.

In 1946, after the Second World War, Dr. Duvalier joined the government of President Dumarsais Estimé, becoming director general of Haiti's public health service and then, in 1948, minister of public health. In 1950, however, the government was overthrown by a military coup led by Paul Magloire, who identified Duvalier as a key opponent of the new regime, forcing him into hiding from 1954.

Haiti was notoriously unstable, however, and Duvalier re-emerged in December 1956 after Magloire was compelled to resign. Over the next nine months, the country experienced six governments, Duvalier and his followers participating in them all. Finally, in September 1957, he was elected president in his own right, on a populist platform, promising to end the control of the mulatto elite—those of mixed Latin American and European origin—and claiming to be a voodoo priest. (The “Papa” in his name is a reference to the name often given to Voodoo priests and priestesses.)

Despite the fact that the generals had helped to rig his election, Duvalier did not trust the army and, with the help of his chief aide, Clément Barbot, he decreased its size and created the Tonton Macoutes, or Volunteers for National Security, as a counterweight. The Volunteers, soon known as the Bogeymen, were a thuggish militia, loyal to the president and numbering between 9000 and 15,000. Without an official salary, they were instead
given free rein by the government to help themselves through extortion, racketeering and crime—in return, they kidnapped, intimidated and murdered opponents of the regime, as many as 30,000 during Duvalier's reign. They dressed in quasi-military clothing, wore dark glasses and mimicked the demons of the voodoo tradition, preferring to use machetes and knives rather than firearms to dispose of their victims, whom they would leave strung up as a warning to others. No rivals were to be tolerated in Duvalier's regime, as his aide Barbot discovered to his cost after he temporarily assumed the reins of government when the president suffered a heart attack in May 1959. On Duvalier's recovery, he was promptly imprisoned and, after plotting against his former friend on his release, killed in 1963. Others considered a threat were sent to Fort Dimanche, where they were tortured to death.

Having fought off an attempted invasion by Haitian exiles—assisted by Cuban guerrillas—in August 1959, Duvalier soon resumed control. In 1961, a sham election saw his term as president unanimously extended to 1967, Haiti as a result becoming increasingly isolated, as potential allies such as the United States—which had backed him against the 1959 invasion attempt—began to ostracize the regime. This isolation, however, gave Duvalier more room to stamp his cult of personality on the regime, manipulating the voodoo traditions of the island and portraying himself as the embodiment of the nation. He imposed his image on the rural population by mimicking Baron Samedi, a sinister spirit figure in voodoo associated with death, depicted in top hat and tuxedo, with dark glasses and skull-like face. At the same time, despite having been excommunicated by the Vatican in 1964 for harassing the clergy, he associated himself closely with the figure of Christ, one notorious propaganda image depicting Jesus with his hand on Duvalier's shoulder declaring, “I have chosen him.”

In 1964, Duvalier became president for life in a quasi-monarchical regime, amending the constitution to ensure that his son, Jean-Claude, became president following his death. Baby Doc Duvalier duly took over the country in 1971 at just nineteen years of age, his ostentatious displays of wealth incurring the wrath of the impoverished nation, which remained largely illiterate while the corrupt elite siphoned off the country's remaining assets. Baby Doc ruled until 1986, when he was overthrown by the military.

1908–1974

I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me to do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more
.

Oskar Schindler

A womanizing, heavy-drinking war profiteer, Oskar Schindler was responsible for one of history's greatest acts of selfless heroism. His decision to save over 1000 Jewish slave laborers from death at the hands of the Nazis has been immortalized in literature and film—an act of individual nobility that epitomizes the triumph of humanity over evil. Like Dickens's sinner-hero Sydney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities
, Schindler demonstrates that real heroes are often not pious and conventional but worldly rogues, eccentrics and outsiders.

Oskar Schindler was an extravagant and genial businessman from Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He was born into a wealthy family, but his various enterprises were destroyed by the Great Depression that spread through Europe in the 1930s. A wheeler-dealer who excelled at bribery and manipulation, Schindler became one of the first to profit from the Aryanization of German-occupied Poland. In 1939 he took over a Kraków factory from a Jewish industrialist and filled it with Jewish slave labor.

In the late 1930s, sensing which way the political wind was blowing, Schindler had worked for German intelligence—an action that had seen him briefly imprisoned in his native country. When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Schindler, now set free, joined the Nazi Party. His boozy bonhomie earned him a swift rise. But after watching yet another Nazi raid on the Kraków Ghetto, which adjoined his factory, he decided to use his considerable influence to counteract his party's anti-Semitic policy and to save as many Jews as he could.

The very qualities that made Schindler a successful profiteer enabled him to save his workforce of over 1000 Jews. A consummate actor, Schindler used his charm to deflect his fellow Nazis from sending his Jews to the extermination camps. Gestapo officers arriving at his factory, demanding that he hand over workers with forged papers, would reel drunkenly out of his office three hours later without either workers or their papers. He was arrested twice for procuring black-market supplies for his Jews, but his bribes and his easy manner secured his release. “Whatever it took to save a life, he did,” his lawyer later said. “He worked the system extraordinarily well.”

When 300 of his female workers were sent by administrative error to Auschwitz, Schindler secured their release with a hefty bribe. He forbade anyone, including officials, to enter his factory without his express permission. He spent every night in his office,
ready to intervene in case the Gestapo came. As the Nazis retreated and the 25,000-strong population of the nearby labor camp at Plaszów was sent to Auschwitz, Schindler pulled every string to have his factory and all his workers moved to Moravia. Even though he was now himself in danger, he stayed with his Jews until the Russians arrived in May 1945 and he knew that they were safe.

Schindler rarely talked about his motivation. As a child, his best friends had been the sons of a rabbi who lived nearby. “It didn't mean anything to me that they were Jewish,” he said later when asked why he acted against Nazi policy, “to me they were just human beings.” When pressed to explain his apparent volte-face, his reasoning was astounding in its simplicity: “I believed that the Germans were doing wrong … when they started killing innocent people … I decided I am going to work against them and I am going to save as many as I can.” “I knew the people who worked for me,” he told another. “When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings.”

Many are still confounded by why this unlikely hero would sacrifice everything to save these people. But for Schindler, who began saving Jews long before the tide of war had turned, it was simply a matter of conscience. In the words of another man he saved: “I don't know what his motives were, even though I knew him very well. I asked him and I never got a clear answer … but I don't give a damn. What's important is that he saved our lives.”

The opportunistic Schindler ended the war penniless. He spent his vast fortune to protect lives, even selling off his wife's jewels. His marriage to the long-suffering Emilie finally broke down in 1957. “He gave his Jews everything,” she later said. “And me nothing.” He was shunned in Germany after the war, his actions a constant challenge to the collective self-deception that nothing could have been done. His postwar business ventures flopped. The Jews whom Schindler had saved came to the support of their erstwhile benefactor.
A Jewish organization funded his brief, unsuccessful stint as a farmer in Argentina and his short-lived German cement factory. From all over the world the Schindler Jews sent money. He died of liver failure in 1974. He is buried, according to his wishes, in Jerusalem, “because my children are here.”

1908–85

Stalin was not at all what the enemies of communism accused and accuse him of being. On the contrary, he was just and a man of principle … We Albanian communists have successfully applied the teachings of Stalin … His rich and very valuable experience has guided us on our road and in our activity
.

Enver Hoxha,
Memoirs

Enver Hoxha was intellectually sophisticated, handsome and charming, but a paranoid, rigidly dogmatic and murderous Stalinist tyrant of Albania who in a forty-year reign isolated and impoverished his country, tormented and murdered his own people and ran the government apparatus with sinister, sometimes tragicomic, violence, killing many of his own comrades in faked accidents, suicides and executions. By his death, he had turned his country into a failed state on the brink of collapse.

Hoxha was the son of a well-off cloth merchant, and during the 1920s and 1930s he spent several periods abroad, studying and working in France (he attended philosophy lectures at the
Sorbonne) and Belgium, before returning to teach French in a school in the town of Korcë. When Fascist Italy invaded Albania in 1939, Hoxha refused to join the newly established Albanian Fascist Party, and was sacked from his job as a consequence. A year later, he opened a tobacco shop where in 1940 he helped found the Albanian Communist Party, which began an insurgent campaign against Italian occupation, drawing on the assistance of Tito's Partisans in neighboring Yugoslavia. After liberation in 1944, Enver Hoxha became both the new prime minister and minister of foreign affairs but really ruled as first secretary of the Albanian Party of Labor. Soon after the war, Hoxha married Nexhmije, a fellow communist, who would later wield enormous power, not unlike that of Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing and the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaucescu's wife, Elena.

Hoxha was a loyal and devoted Stalinist, savagely purging personal and class enemies. Stalin and Hoxha met frequently, enjoying long discussions on history and linguistics, later retold in Hoxha's surprisingly fascinating memoirs. In 1949, after Marshal Tito's split with the Soviet Union, Hoxha severed relations with Yugoslavia—even though Albania was much indebted to its far larger neighbor. He also executed his defense minister Koci Xoce for Titoism. Fearful lest his people be “contaminated” by exposure to the Titoist “deviance,” Hoxha ordered the construction of guard posts along the entire length of the country's border—which became one of the most intensely monitored frontiers in the world. Later he ordered the building of 750,000 one-man concrete bunkers and 700,000 pillboxes to defend the country against invaders, an absurd and bizarre decision that still disfigures the Albanian littoral.

Behind his Balkan curtain, Hoxha embarked on a Stalinist-style exercise in social engineering. He sought the creation of an urban working class worthy of the name (hitherto, Albania had been a clan-based peasant society) and the socialization of national
life. Forced industrialization followed, while agriculture was reorganized on the Soviet collective-farm model. At the same time, all of Albania gained access to electricity for the first time, life expectancy rose, and illiteracy rates plummeted. Yet the human cost of this social revolution was enormous.

Hoxha's secret police, the Sigurimi, were brutal and ubiquitous: hundreds of thousands were tortured and killed. Hoxha's prime minister Mehmet Shehu spoke openly at a party congress about their methods: “Who disagrees with our leadership in some point, will get a spit into his face, a blow onto his chin, and, if necessary, a bullet into his head.” Out of three million Albanians, one million were at some point either arrested or imprisoned in his perpetual terror.

Hoxha also added his own individual and quixotic touches. Private car ownership was banned, as were beards, which were seen as a rural throwback. Xenophobia was encouraged as the Albanian communists fused their adherence to the strictures of Marxist-Leninism with a glorification of various national myths. The central focus of such propaganda was the man heralded as the greatest Albanian of all time—Hoxha himself. However, Hoxha was careful to share his cult of personality with that of Stalin, who remained an object of forced reverence in Albania for the next four decades.