"We Are Tough"

CZECHOSLOVAKIA

In all the suffering that 1938 brought the world, no man suffered more than Jan Masaryk, Czechoslovakia's last Minister to Great Britain. It was not important to him that he lost his job. The important things he lost were a country and an ideal, founded by his late great father, which he himself had worked 20 years to preserve. Last week Jan Masaryk was in the U. S., putting what was left to him--as proud a name as there is in Europe--to work not for the Czechs but for democracy in general and persecuted Jews in particular.

This is the first time in eight years that Jan Masaryk has been in the U. S., where he once worked and where he married an American heiress.* He found the U. S. changed--for the better--but the U. S. found no change in him. Still the urbane, witty image of Cinemactor Dudley Digges in appearance, expression and tone of voice, still a great teller of racy stories and amiable spiller of confidences, he wasted no bitterness last week on the men that so hastily and so clumsily deserted his country. His chief criticism of the Munich deal, said he in private, was that "It lacked skill, elegance. It was so, what shall I say, middle class--and I am the son of a peasant." As for his own people: "We are tough."

Before the National Conference for Palestine, one of eleven audiences he will address before returning to England, he shed no tears for his lost land. "There are nearly 10,000,000 of my people facing suffering and depredation, but they, being united together, can endure and survive it and come out victorious in the end," he said. "But the Jews, scattered all over the world--what chance have they to fight off hatred and oppression which has driven them from their homes and dumped them on the highways of the world? The Jews are a minority everywhere. And without tolerance and decent treatment of minorities, democracy cannot survive. There is no exception."

For himself, Jan Masaryk has no personal plans. He was offered a sheaf of British directorates, turned them down. Maybe next year he will write a book--"just a little one." It should be a bestseller on the century's best sellout. Meanwhile he says he has "taken the veil for democracy."

*Mrs. Frances Crane Leatherbee, of the Chicago plumbing Cranes. Her father, onetime Minister to China, was a potent backer of Father MasaRyk; her brother, Richard Teller Crane 2nd. was first U. S. Minister to Czechoslovakia. The Jan Masaryks are now divorced.

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