A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [79]
Of the fourteen accused, eleven were Jews, and their “Jewish origin” was clearly stated in their indictments. During the trial the Czech prosecution made regular references to the Jewish-ness of the defendants. Like many Jewish Communists, most of these defendants were not very Jewish. Bedrich Geminder, who had directed the party's foreign affairs department, never mentioned bis Jewish background and for a long time even tried to conceal it.
But the accused fourteen, forced to play their parts, burlesqued confession and grotesquely contradicted the record of their entire careers. On the first day, Slansky somberly confessed—as though it made sense—that he had plotted with, among others, the Rothschilds, David Ben-Gurion, Bernard Baruch, and the American Joint Distribution Committee to destroy Czechoslovakia and turn Israel into an American military base. Two weeks after the trial began, three of the defendants, including one Jew, Deputy Foreign Minister Arthur London, began to serve their life sentences, while the other eleven, including Slansky, were hanged and cremated, their ashes tossed out the window of a speeding car in the suburbs. Then a second trial started of another three prominent Jews, including Slansky‘s brother. At the same time thousands of lesser-known Jews were arrested and charged with playing minor roles in the conspiracy.
At first, Czech Jews who were not serious political observers paid little attention. To Karol Wassermann, it was just another internecine conflict between Communists. He was not even aware that the defendants were Jews. But as the trial progressed, he started noticing troubling things in the newspapers. Words like Zionists and cosmopolitan were being used in that same vague way that a paranoiac uses the word they—the unnamed enemy. The official press adopted language reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. The defendants had “Judas faces” and “beady eyes.” Graffiti that denounced capitalist Jews or that said “Jews out!” appeared on Prague walls. Anti-Semitism had become official policy.
Its repercussions were felt even after Stalin died. Frantisek Kraus was removed from the radio station and from the Czech news agency, and the Krauses were forced to give up their apartment. They had to squeeze into a small one and live on a meager pension that Frantisek was receiving for his ruined health at the hands of the Nazis. He died from those health problems in 1967 without ever again getting a job.
In Bratislava, at a time when unemployment did not exist, Jews who worked in large factories and offices of big companies were being told that their services were no longer needed. Juraj Stern's father lost his job as accountant. A thoroughly apolitical man, he was the only one dismissed in his factory. He too never again worked.
Even people who didn't know they were Jewish were losing their jobs for their supposed Zionist ties. The first time Bedrich Nosek had ever thought about his link to Jewishness had been when the Nazis examined his family tree and told him he had to leave the civil service and work in a factory. The second time was when the Slansky trial cost him his job. In fact, he wasn't Jewish. He had come of age in the 1920s and 1930s, and typical for that generation, he thought of himself simply as an enlightened modern man, an engineer with a role to play in the modern age. He was a secularist who liked science and progress and was not interested in religion. His parents were Catholic, but Bedrich was not interested in Catholicism. His mother's mother was very Jewish-looking