SCAPEGOATS FOR STALIN
Gedye, G. E. R.
Scapegoats for Stalin By G. E. R. Gedye FAR ECLIPSING in interest the trial and execution at the end of last year of Rudolf Slansky and his comrades of the Czechoslovak Communist Party is the...
...The degradation of Anna Pauker was judged the right moment to revive the traditional anti-Semitism of the Rumanians...
...In Czechoslovakia, public opinion was deliberately incited at the Slan-sky trial by underlining in the charge the "Jewisn origin" of the accused, and by such passages as the following: Prosecutor (to the Jew Bedvich Geminder): "You never learned to speak decent Czech even when you came here in 1946 to occupy a responsible position...
...Their exhausted brains were replaced by conditioned G.E.R...
...So, from Czechoslovakia, the local party secretaries in Gyor and Esztergom who had thought it permissible to encourage the anti-Semitic wave to cross over from Czechoslovakia to Hungary were dismissed from their posts...
...Prosecutor: "Can you speak proper German...
...For the first time, the instigators of such communist-cannibalistic orgies have found it necessary to apologize for and try to explain to revolted world opinion the sadistic exhibition of the actual trials...
...political police) last year for use as a barracks...
...The disproportionately high number of Jews in cabinet posts, administration, and secret police always kept the fires of native anti-Semitism smoldering...
...Because Gottwald was entirely unconvincing—he is too clumsy an advocate to be entrusted with such a hopeless brief—there will doubtless be other such attempts...
...Formerly on the foreign staff of the New York Times and the London Her' aid, Gedye is now free-lancing from Vienna for the London Observer and The -* Progressive...
...At all costs the world must be convinced that when communists persecute Jews, this has nothing to do with anti-Semitism...
...As long as the embryo state of Israel was involved in fighting with Britain or with the Arabs, she was encouraged as a potential source of unrest...
...It was, of course, a deliberate tactical move, and no error...
...the same board of directors sits, as before, in the Kremlin...
...It was necessary to confute them bit by bit, and step by step, with facts, documents, witnesses' statements, and confrontations...
...The inmates and pensioners of the institute were deported to the remote and desolate village of Balassagyarmat, with a normal population of 7,500...
...Geminder: "No...
...For months the Czechoslovak press had been committing almost daily the same "tactical blunder" of inciting the population against the Jews...
...Rakosi, Gero, and other Jews are still irreplaceable—to the Kremlin—in Hungary...
...Now the ideal moment has come to fan the coals into flame, to hlame the Jews for all of Communism's failures, and to throw them to the wolves, building up a complete illusory "independence" of the hated Kremlin control by replacing its "cosmopolite" agents with non-Jewish nationals...
...Geminder: "Yes...
...Rude Pravo of Nov...
...Does that not recall irresistibly the dialogue between bullying Nazi prosecutors and cowed Jewish prisoners...
...His books on European politics include "The Revolver Republic," "Heirs to the Haps-burgs," and "Betrayal in Central Europe...
...But, as always, the Communists want to have it both ways...
...For the first time an attempt was made to persuade people to believe in the genuineness of the usual "confessions...
...Most important of all, to the original dislike of Communism among the satellites has been added bitter resentment of the depressed standard of life it has brought—a situation which grows yearly worse —and hatred of its political tyranny...
...Prosecutor: "About as well as Czech...
...Zionism is the same...
...The reasons for all this are not hard to find...
...The Jew has played out his role...
...That stamps out the last hope of emigrating to Israel...
...All links have now been cut, not only with Jewry beyond the curtain, but also between the various satellites and Russia...
...President Klem-cnt Gottwald's deliberately publicized wigglings before the Communist Party Congress at the end of the year were something unprecedented...
...First Gottwald endeavored again to prop up the story which aroused such universal derision—that these fourteen dyed-in-the-wool unscrupulous Moscovites were "American agents...
...reflexes, such as Pavlov produced in his dogs...
...It was Lenin who said that anti-Semitism and Zionism were the reverse sides of the same medal...
...One delegate to the Red "peace congress" here in Vienna assured me with naive sincerity that the Communists had convinced him that they had made a "tactical blunder" at the trial by constantly insisting on the "Jewish origin" of the accused...
...Still clearer is the language of the press...
...But Jewish communal property is being gradually liquidated...
...Isolated in solitary confinement, without defending counsel or anyone else to advise, subjected to every wile at the disposal of the secret police, these men were gradually broken "bit by bit, step by step...
...Three weeks later, 41 of the 64 heart patients were dead...
...II In Rumania the signal for the persecution of the 350,000 Jews was given last October, when the police broke into the Bucharest synagogue and arrested everyone inside...
...For in Hungary no Jew may as yet be persecuted on racial grounds, but merely as a "decadent cosmopolite" to be destroyed by depriving him of his livelihood and forbidding him to emigrate...
...The Jewish home for the aged, in the Hungarian Korut, in which millions of Jewish money had been invested, was seized by the A.V.H...
...Today, Israel has established herself, and cadres of native Communists are trained to work in the administration...
...In 1950, for instance, the Jewish hospital in the Szabolcs Utca, equipped with an iron lung and the latest medical and surgical devices from America, was seized by the state...
...Geminder: "I can speak German...
...All references to Zionism or to the Jews as a nation are forbidden, and radio broadcasts abuse the Zionists in the language of the infamous "Protocols of Zion...
...The Jewish population no longer dares contact the local Israeli legation or consulate in any satellite state...
...After 1945, when the Communists in the new satellite states slaughtered, imprisoned, or drove abroad everyone with any administrative or governing experience, the Jews were readily employed to fill the gaps for which their adaptability and quick intelligence fitted them...
...24 quoted Stalin as saying: "All racial chauvinism is a heritage of capitalism...
...Then he turned to his main task—that of reconstructing the accustomed facade of internationalism which the new anti-Semitism had swept away...
...Zionism was backed and the Jewish forces armed in part by the Skoda works...
...Zionism is the truest lackey of American imperialism," wrote Rude Pravo in November, and accused Zionists of having, with Slansky's aid, smuggled to Israel national property to the value of 6,000,000,000 Czech crowns...
...The Jewish patients were evacuated...
...They were an unwilling but unavoidable confession that this time the gullibility of even the communist public was overstrained...
...The situation is much the same for the 50,000 Jews in Poland...
...Prosecutor: "So you can't speak any language properly...
...This was a misunderstanding...
...Here was another sign that the Communists realized that they had presumed too far on the credulity of their dupes...
...In the same way, the persecution of pacifists behind the iron curtain is proclaimed in the Hungarian and Czechoslovak press to be a part of "the battle for peace...
...At first they obstinately denied their guilt...
...Only then could the carefully constructed marionettes be put through their final performance in public...
...That is, they want controlled anti-Semitism behind the curtain (they fear to admit that the last difference between Nazi and Communist methods has thus been wiped out) and, where the Jews still have tasks to fulfill for them, anti-Semitism must temporarily be checked...
...Thus the Zionists have brought about the present food and fuel famine there by impoverishing the state...
...The Zionists made pacts with Hitler and Mussolini and formed a fascist fifth column...
...GEDYE, one of the best-informed European correspondents, has covered major developments in Central Europe for more than three decades...
...A typical cosmopolitan...
...But, of course, only the name plates are being changed...
...They could only be put on, admits the Communist president of Czechoslovakia, after the accused had been subjected behind the scenes—in the Slansky case it took twelve months, 365 interminable days—to unrelenting pressure and trickery...
...People were puzzled," Gottwald admitted, "that the accused should have apparently willingly accused themselves...
...They were made to rehearse their alloted parts with deadly reiteration until they had been made word-perfect automatons in their response to the accustomed suggestions—or, as Gottwald said, "they confessed to what they could no longer deny...
...What most worries the Communists about the dismal blunder of the Slansky trial is the revelation it has brought of Communist anti-Semitism...
...Last July, in the whole hospital, there were only three Jews...
...In Hungary there are still too many Jews in the government awaiting replacement when sufficient intelligent Magyar communists can be found, for it to be politic to touch off against the 150,000 Jews the latent anti-Semitism of the masses...
...Only someone simple enough to believe that this Stalinist congress had anything to do with pacifism could have accepted the "tactical blunder...
...Today 9,000 aged and ailing Jews have been crammed in the town to die...
...There, for example, even the word "Jewish" has been eliminated from the title of the Central Jewish Committee, which now has to call itself the "Social and Cultural Society...
...Scapegoats for Stalin By G. E. R. Gedye FAR ECLIPSING in interest the trial and execution at the end of last year of Rudolf Slansky and his comrades of the Czechoslovak Communist Party is the aftermath...
...So far, Jewish schools and newspapers are still permitted there, but only at the price of becoming vehicles of communist propaganda...
...Geminder: "Yes...
...The fugitive Jews were hunted down and returned to the country where anti-Semitism was encouraged...
...So there we have it—what everyone but the deluded has always known but which has never before been admitted—that these revolt-ingly stylized performances are just what they are called—"show trials...
...Both are revolting barbarism...
Vol. 17 • February 1953 • No. 2
