“Don’t bother,” I interrupted. “I know it by heart.”
“But that’s not possible!” Both comrades panicked. “This is a top-secret document! Who betrayed it to you?”
“How dare you ask me that question! Do you think everybody is an informer?”
That was the end of my icy calm and dignity. The two comrades sat behind their table pale, in shock, only occasionally able to get in a word or two as I let them know exactly what I thought of the Party, its policies, and the intelligence and character of its representatives.
“But we had no way of knowing these people were innocent!”
“How could people who had been working with them for years not have known it? How could the Party not have known it when their confessions had been prepared ahead of time? There was a whole team of experts involved wasn’t there? Why didn’t Rudolf’s boss stand up for him? Where was Minister Gregor? He knew for a fact that all the accusations against my husband were untrue!”
“Try to understand,” Jerman stuttered. “He – he, too, was scared.”
“What did a member of the government of a presumably sovereign state have to be afraid of? Of truth? Of responsibility? Why then wasn’t he afraid of his conscience? And what about Bacilek who put on such a big show, promising my husband that he’d take care of me and my son, just to get him to accept the sentence quietly? Then he did everything he could to destroy us! To lie like that to a man who was going to die in a few hours! How could anyone be such a monster!”
I slammed my fist on the table so hard that everything jumped, including the two Party representatives. I raged until I ran out of breath, at which point Comrade Jerman seized the moment to say, “Please calm yourself. I have a document here issued for the exclusive use of the Central Committee. I was instructed to let you read the passage concerning your husband.”
He pulled out of his drawer a fat volume, opened it to a pre-marked place, and let me read a single paragraph.
“The innocence of Rudolf Margolius has been established beyond a shadow of doubt. He did not in any way harm the interests of the State. On the contrary, a thorough review of his case has concluded that he fulfilled his duties in an exemplary manner. Had his proposals and plans been implemented, our national economy would have reaped considerable benefits.”
Comrade Jerman looked beseechingly at me. Surely such a generous retraction would soften my heart. The Party had admitted its error; what more could I ask for?
“There’s no point discussing with you what you’ll never understand,” I said. “Just tell me what guarantee exists that this won’t happen again?”
“How can you even think of such a thing? Nothing like this can ever happen again! The collective leadership of the Party itself guarantees...”
“Oh please! Skip it and listen to me now. I demand a retrial of my husband’s case. I want the accusations investigated, in detail, and I want them publicly refuted one by one. I want a public investigation into the methods by which his confession was obtained. On whose orders was it done, and by whom.”
“Out of the question! The Party has already decided against individual retrials. The verdicts have been nullified for the entire group!” That meant a total cover-up.
“Will what you read to me be made public?”
“Out of the question! The Party has decided to handle the whole affair internally. Nothing will be made public.”
“How can you imagine you can do that? During the trials you made enough noise to bring the world down, and now you want to hush up the rehabilitations? Don’t you think people should know the truth? Is my child supposed to live out his life as the son of a criminal?”
“But of course not! Don’t worry about it,” said the Party representative soothingly. “You know how it is. Sooner or later the word gets around...”
There it was again – the old desperate sense of helplessness.
“Then give me a letter at least,” I said. “On official stationary with the letterhead and the seal of the Central Committee. An official affidavit which my son can use to prove that his father is fully exonerated.”
“We can’t do that.”
I started screaming again but I knew it was in vain. At last, I stood up to leave.
“You can keep your rehabilitation,” I said. “The truth will come out. Just wait, you can’t prevent it. And then you’ll have to account for this too. I’ve waited eleven years. I can wait a few more.”
They stood there, the two of them, dull, immobile, hard, and pale, like a couple of caryatides encrusted with pigeon droppings.
Comrade Jerman said, “I don’t understand you. The other widows all came here and thanked us...”
I spun around and walked out of the room, slamming the door with a bang that resounded down the long corridor. Then I ran all the way to the nearest tavern, where Pavel was waiting and plotting an assault on the Central Committee building in the event that I did not return soon.
The next invitation I received was from a Dr. Bocek, the chairman of the Attorney’s Association, who had been charged with the legal aspects of rehabilitating the victims of the Slansky trials. I went to see him expecting the same kind of farce that the comrades of the Central Committee had played out with me. But this time it was different. It did not take me long to realize that I was talking with an honest lawyer, who was trying, within the narrow limits of our crippled legal system, to enforce the law and to serve justice.
If Dr. Bocek had been given a free hand, the entire truth would have come out then. As it was, he had to wait five years until 1968, when, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he ruled on the genuine rehabilitation of many who had been unjustly sentenced. In 1963, though, his efforts brought him the disapproval of the Party and cost him his job. He was the only honorable man among all the officials with whom I dealt at the time.
When I returned home from his office, I decided to make one more appeal. I wrote a formal complaint to the Prosecutor General.
“I request that legal action be taken against all those implicated in the death of Dr. Rudolf Margolius, executed on December 3, 1952, because I am convinced they knew that they were sending an innocent man to death. This knowledge makes them guilty of murder.”
Among the people included in the designation “all those implicated” were almost all the members of the Central Committee starting with President of the Republic and Secretary General of the Party Comrade Antonin Novotny. Once again, friends warned me to be careful while crossing the street, but these were unnecessary fears. The comrades had no intention of paying attention to such a solitary voice, and the Prosecutor General, though bound by law to investigate all complaints and to file a report on his findings, did not even bother to acknowledge receipt of my letter.
I made my last official visit to the Ministry of Justice at the invitation of Deputy Minister Comrade Cihal. His letter to me had read something like this: Report to the Ministry of Justice for a hearing on the losses you sustained as a result of the arrest and conviction of Rudolf Margolius.
Comrade Cihal’s reputation made the very idea of a serious hearing ludicrous, but I did not want to waste the opportunity.
I sat down at my typewriter and typed up a list.
Summary of losses suffered by myself and my son due to the arrest and conviction of Dr. Rudolf Margolius
- Loss of Father
- Loss of Husband
- Loss of Honor
- Loss of Health
- Loss of Employment and Opportunity to Complete Education
- Loss of Faith in the Party and in Justice
There were some ten items on my list. Only at the end, did I write
- Loss of property
I dressed in my best clothes and borrowed two gold bracelets from a friend. I did not want the comrades to think they were rescuing some destitute wretch who would be grateful for their largesse.
Aside from Comrade Cihal, there were two other men sitting in the office – a representativ
e from the Ministry of Social Welfare and, I think, a representative from the Ministry of Finance. All three were wearing carefully composed expressions of concern and sympathy, which were beginning to fray around the edges. Clearly, their effort to look like responsible officials was tiring them out.
“My dear lady,” Cihal opened the proceeding. “We have invited you here to discuss the losses that...”
“Here you have a summary of my losses. I prepared it in writing.”
Cihal took the list from me and, before he had read it to the end, became as red as a boiled lobster.
“I beg your pardon,” he said with a huff. “You must understand that no one can make up these losses to you.”
“Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly why I wrote them up for you. So that you know that whatever you do, you can never undo what you have done.”
“Look here,” said the representative from the Ministry of Social Welfare, in a conciliatory tone. “We want to help you, award you compensation for lost property. After all, you lived in misery for years...”
“You murdered my husband. You threw me out of every job I had. You had me thrown out of a hospital! You threw us out of our apartment and into a hovel where only by some miracle we did not die. You ruined my son’s childhood! And now you think you can compensate for that with a few crowns? That you can buy me off? Keep me quiet?”
With great satisfaction I watched the same ashen color spread across their official countenances as I had seen spread across the faces of the comrades at the Central Committee. The representative from the Ministry of Social Welfare, however, tried again.
“It’s obvious that you’re tired,” he said. “Upset. That’s understandable. Look, what if you went off somewhere for a vacation? To the seashore maybe? We would pay for it. You understand, it’s not that we want to do you any favors...”
I jumped up from my chair.
“You? Do me favors? How dare you? I’m the one who would be doing you a favor if I decided to accept anything from you at all!”
I swept out of the office, leaving the comrades sitting at their table staring after me. I later learned that Cihal had called Dr. Bocek right after I left and had remonstrated with him for not having warned him about me. Bocek was ordered to make sure that I would never again appear in Cihal’s office. It was fortunate for me that, at the time, no one could afford to arrest the widow of Rudolf Margolius.
As I walked out of the Ministry, I had an idea. I jumped onto the first streetcar, took it to the State Travel Office and signed up for a trip to Bulgaria, to the coast of the Black Sea. I had to borrow the money to pay for the trip, but it was a beautiful vacation. Ivan, who had been depressed and troubled, swam in salt water for the first time, got tanned, and perked up. Every evening we would sit together on a café terrace above the sea watching the albatrosses flying away from the shore and later on, the silvery path that the moon traced on the water. We fell asleep to the quiet sound of the water sprinklers that showered the lawns and flowers in the garden below our windows.
Some time in June, the Party finally decided to publish a small notice in the newspapers to the effect that the men who received the death sentence in the Slansky trials had all been rehabilitated. Not one word more.
The comrades at the Ministry of Justice were instructed to limit the financial compensation to the next of kin strictly to the value of the confiscated property at the lowest possible estimate of its worth. From this estimate, a substantial sum was deducted to reflect the depreciation which this property would have suffered had it been in use over the years since it had been impounded.
Comrade Cihal won a special citation from the Party because he managed to pay out the absolute minimum to the widows of the convicted, many of whom were old and ill, and was thus able to return to the State Treasury a considerable part of the funds that had been allotted for restitution.
Three ministers were demoted as a result of the reassessment of the trials. Two of the most notorious torturers from the Ruzyn prison were given short prison sentences. One year later, they were granted amnesty and placed in good, well-paying jobs.
For me, the Prague Spring of 1968 began late in 1967 when I saw posters on the street announcing a public lecture on crime in Czechoslovakia. It was to be held at the Slavic House, a large hall, where a panel of legal experts would answer questions from the floor. I had the evening free and decided to go.
The panel proved to be a mixed bag. Sitting up on the stage were Dr. Bocek, Comrade Cihal, an officer from the legal department of the army, and a few lawyers whom I did not know. The hall was filled with ordinary people, mostly middle-aged, the kind of people I saw every day in the street. I found a seat near the exit beside Rosemary Kavan, thinking that I would slip out at the first opportunity.
There was a brief general introduction about the rise in the crime rate among young people, and then the audience was invited to pose questions from the floor.
An older man who looked like a factory worker stood up.
“All this is very interesting,” he said. “But I want to hear what really happened to all those people who were hanged in the fifties. For eleven years all the papers called them names and said they were the worst kind of criminals. Now we’re told, just by the way, that they were all innocent. And that’s that.
“You should explain to us here what kind of laws and courts we have when innocent people get hanged. And why aren’t we told what really happened so that we don’t have to feel like idiots or scoundrels for having agreed with it? When they send a convicted spy to prison somewhere in the West, we organize protest rallies. Here at home we let our own people get hanged and even pass resolutions to approve it! How do you think we feel now?”
That was only the beginning. Questions and shouts rained down on the panel from all corners of the hall. Some of the gentlemen seated onstage began to wipe their foreheads. At first, I could hardly believe it. I thought that everyone had forgotten the trials long before. It had been sixteen years! And these were ordinary people, the sort of people I had thought never showed an interest in anything except their own well-being.
It was at this meeting that I first became aware of the spontaneous solidarity of the decent which had started to grow and which reached its climax when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. As soon as the questions started, my friend Rosemary who was working as a reporter for an English-language magazine published in Prague, began taking notes. I tried to help her. About half an hour into the questions, a young man in the balcony who had a good view of the hall raised his hand.
“Watch what you say folks!” he called out. “There’re two informers sitting among us. I can see them very well from up here and they’re writing down everything anyone says!”
Rosemary and I looked up and, from the stage, Bocek started laughing. Only then did we realize that the young man was talking about us.
“Don’t worry friends,” Bocek said. “You have nothing to be afraid of from those two!”
The young man understood, gave us a conspiratorial nod, and the whole hall burst out laughing.
Bocek then gave a factual, cogent summary of the trials and their aftermath. Cihal slouched deeper into his chair, and later slunk away like a whipped dog. It was typical of the prevailing mood that no one attacked or even threatened him. People seemed to understand that violence and revenge, no matter how justifiable, could not be part of the rebirth we were just beginning to experience, of the short but unforgettable rebirth that became known as the Prague Spring.
That same spirit of tolerance prevailed at all subsequent rallies, meetings, and discussions. Whenever someone dared to stand up in defense of the old order, people heard him out, with contempt perhaps, but also with patience, and then repudiated his arguments and paid him no more attention. On one of these occasions I remember a distraught bureaucrat who lost all control and screamed at the top of his lungs, “What do you want? I’ve been a Party hack all my life so what do you want me to do now? Lo
ok for a job? Work?”
I shall never forget the first large youth rally that March. Some twenty thousand students and young workers jammed into the main exhibition hall, thousands more were packed into adjoining halls, and more gathered outside, where confused and surly policemen tried in vain to provoke some incident that would give them a pretext to break up the meeting.
All these young people had been born and reared in a society walled in by censorship, where the expression of any independent opinion was routinely treated as a crime. What could they know about democracy? How could they even know what they wanted? But as the evening progressed, those of us who were much older grew ever more amazed and impressed. We were taken not only by the precision and clarity of the ideas that were voiced but by the high level of the discussion and the discipline of that mass of young people. They knew exactly what they wanted and what they did not want, what was open for compromise and what they refused to give up.
Under a Cruel Star Page 19