EDUARD BENES, PRESIDENT OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA   (from Shmuel Katz’s memoirs)   There was by contrast nothing about our problems that we could tell Eduard Benes, whom we visited, Abrahams and I, that autumn.   The Western Allies who had shamefully failed him and through their betrayal opened the way to war and to Hitler’s conquest of Europe had now, less than two years after Munich, recognized him once again as President of Czechoslovakia.   In tragic irony, all but one of the Allied countries were themselves under Hitler’s heel and their legal Governments living in exile, like Benes and his colleagues, in the single remaining free capital.   *As Foreign Minister, and then as President, Benes had in the years between the wars represented to the world far more than Czechoslovakia.   *He had been the personification of all that was connoted by Europe in political liberalism and sheer human decency.   *Erudite, and deeply aware of the problems and weaknesses of Europe, he had been the most “European” of all the States on the Continent.   *Until the advent of Hitler’s arch-gangsterdom as the prevailing system in European relations, Benes had been the international community’s unfailing peacemaker.   *They had called him “the cleverest man in Europe.”   It was surely symbolical that his country should have been the crucial bastion by whose betrayal all Europe was doomed.   Ever since the establishment in 1919 of the Czechoslovak State, Benes, like Masaryk, had given what assistance he could to the Jewish cause.   With Jabotinsky, as with Weizmann, he had for years been on friendly terms.   Now Abrahams and I went to talk with him on our central theme – the need to prepare hearts and minds for the belated post-war evacuation of the Jews of Europe.   We spent a morning hour with him.  The Battle of Britain was at its height.  Invasion might come at any moment.  On our way to his office there was a brief air-raid.  As we sat in his room we could all see through the window the incongruously cheerful looking barrage balloons – permanent reminders of the dire threat to the city from Hitler’s hitherto devastatingly strong Air Force.    The three of us in perfect gravity discussed the situation that would arise for the Jews in Europe and specifically in Czechoslovakia, when the Nazis were defeated and driven from the Continent.   Benes was a short slender man, quiet-spoken and laconic, with a slightly didactic manner.   The passion burning steadily inside him was betrayed only by his incisive language and by the arresting emphasis he gave his words.   He did not maintain formality with us, walked about the room when he talked of Czechoslovakia’s agony under the Nazis, jabbed at a large map of Europe on the wall to underline what he was saying.   He did not question our faith in the rise of a Jewish State after the war.   Had he not twenty-five years earlier, in the darkest days of the First World War, had similar conversations with statesmen about a future, still phantom Czechoslovak State?   Was he not now himself the spokesman of what had again become a phantom independence?    He was however emphatic about the status of the Jews in a restored Czechoslovakia.   “We shall of course encourage Jews to go to Palestine,” he said.  “It is natural that they should go there.  But those that remain in Czechoslovakia will be citizens like everybody else.  We shall never again recognize minorities, nor have special laws to protect them.  The minorities treaties after the last war were a serious blunder.  Special status for minorities breeds the problems it is supposed to solve.  It breeds hypocrisy.  It is humiliating for the protector as much as for the protected.”   Fate did not give him much opportunity of putting his principles into practice.   When Czechoslovakia was restored, the Jews of Europe had all but ceased to exist.   For Benes his erstwhile friends prepared a bitter cup.   Within three years after the restoration, the Soviet Union crumbled the liberal democracy he had reestablished and drew Czechoslovakia into the orbit of Communist Russia.   This time his spirit was crushed.   Benes died of a broken heart in the very days of 1948 when the Jewish State was emerging from its natal ordeal of blood and tears.