At home, he was equally betrayed. His likely suicide was the
ultimate protest against Gottwald and a regime so inhumane and
contrary to everything that he, his father, and Beneš had stood for
and worked for through all these years. He died spiritually, in the
words Alice used with us so many times, when he saw his efforts so
clearly failing. His chief raison d'être--to lead his people and to serve
humanity--had been taken from him. He could no longer be loyal to
his father's ideal of service. And he knew that a suicide in this
context would not betray his father and the family name. So he chose
to depart the scene at age 62 of his own volition, in his despairing but
historically significant gesture of protest.
NOTES
1.Letter from Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk to Thomas Masaryk, dated September 1, 1913, 18 pages, handwritten (copy), Crane family archive.
2. Tomáš Masaryk, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 7. Original publication in German, Vienna, 1881.
3. Marcia Davenport, Too Strong for Fantasy ( New York: Scribner's, 1967).
4.To the best of our knowledge, Marcia Davenport first learned of Jan's death
from Ambassador Steinhardt, who had been very friendly with Jan. He had talked
with Davenport when she called him from London and he informed her of Jan's
death, nothing more. Robert Bruce Lockhart, Masaryk's closest English friend, later
wrote a memoir of Jan in which he spoke of Davenport and himself as having had no
evidence of murder and said that he attempted to dissuade Davenport from charging
that Jan had been murdered, as she lacked solid facts.
5.Ana and Herberta told the authors that they genuinely regretted having given
one interview on this question to Claire Sterling, as they volunteered that they had no
facts to go on. See Claire Sterling, The Masaryk Case ( New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
6. Robert Bruce Lockhart, Jan Masaryk: A Personal Memoir ( New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), p. 67.
10. Hana Beneš to authors. Sterling, The Masaryk Case.
11.Related to authors by Loumir Soukup in 1977 in London.
-332-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Czechoslovakia:Anvil of the Cold War.
Contributors: John O. Crane - Author, Sylvia E. Crane - Author.
Publisher: Praeger.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 1991.
Page number: 332.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may
not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
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