Questioned about his appointment as Envoy to Israel in August 1949, Eda replied that it was his reward for arranging espionage contacts with Zilliacus. Slánský asked him to establish similar contacts in Israel which, Eda admitted, was pursuing a policy ‘in the interest of Western imperialism’.
This was confusing: a year ago the Soviet Union had been the first country to recognize the newly founded State of Israel; Czechoslovakia had supplied arms to Palestine from 1945 to 1948.
I was at a loss. Something was wrong. Eda had spoken calmly and slowly, as was his habit, and yet there was a difference. I couldn’t nail it; but it was there.
‘Dr Pavel Kavan.’
At the sound of his name all my senses were alert. The prosecutor addressed him as ‘Zionist bourgeois nationalist and Titoist.’ I gripped my chair. The appellations were in themselves an indictment. But they were completely untrue. Zionism had been of mere academic interest to Pavel; he had never advocated it as a solution for Czechoslovak Jews. In fact Pavel never referred to himself as a Jew. His parents had been assimilated by the non-Jewish community when he was still a boy and he regarded himself first and foremost as a Czech. Had it not been for Hitler, the racial criterion would not have been applied to his family. Since 1948 Pavel had been an anti-Titoist in accordance with the Party line. In 1951 he had accepted the diplomatic defector’s account of Yugoslavia as a police state where capitalism was being restored against the wishes of the people. The term nationalist puzzled me. It could perhaps be applied to Pavel in the sense that he was proud of his country’s traditions and achievements. But that could hardly be defined as a political crime. Later I learned that nationalists were people who put their country’s interests before those of the Soviet Union.
The prosecutor asked Pavel whether he was a member of the anti-state conspiracy. Holding my breath, I waited for his denial. My heart was thumping so loudly I could hardly hear his voice.
‘Yes,’ Pavel replied. ‘During my stay in London I acted as an intermediary between Konni Zilliacus, agent of the British Intelligence Service, and Rudolf Slánský, head of the anti-state conspiracy, and his accomplice Bedřich Geminder.’
Pavel was referring to a meeting he had arranged between Zilliacus and Slánský in Prague in August 1946. He could not give the substance of the conversation because it had been conducted in Russian. Asked for details about further espionage contacts, Pavel said:
‘At the beginning of 1948, when I was working at the Czechoslovak Embassy in London, Zilliacus asked me to visit him in the House of Commons. He gave me a copy of a speech he had made in Parliament, and a letter, and asked me to convey them to Slánský. I sent them to Prague by courier with a brief covering letter. In July Zilliacus handed me a sealed envelope in his house and asked me to send it to Slánský.’
‘But, you didn’t know what was in it. Why don’t you say so, you fool?’ screamed a woman’s voice. With a shock I realized it was my own. Involuntarily I had rushed across the room and shouted at the set. Unnerved by Pavel’s inexplicable behaviour, I returned to my seat, scarcely able to concentrate on the rest of his testimony. Then — surely my dazed senses had played me false? — Pavel began his next reply before the prosecutor had properly formulated the question, like an actor skipping his cue. His cue! The thought hit me like a physical blow in the chest, causing me to gasp for breath. Pavel had known what question to expect. Did this mean that he had known all the questions beforehand and was drawing attention to this salient fact?
Stunned by the implications, I missed part of Pavel’s testimony. When I had gathered my wits, he was saying: ‘I sent several letters from British agent Konni Zilliacus to Geminder, the content of which I do not remember … I passed on two espionage reports from Margolius to Zilliacus, one in the spring of 1949, the second later in the year; in this Margolius informed Zilliacus of difficulties encountered during negotiations on the British–Czechoslovak trade agreement.’
In actual fact, I remembered, Rudolf had merely requested Zilly’s assistance in ironing out differences.
Pavel was asked what he knew of Artur London. He replied:
‘He was one of the leading members of the Trotskyist–Zionist faction at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He maintained espionage contacts with British agent Zilliacus for Slánský and Geminder …’
I reflected: Pavel had a great admiration for Artur; if he had been answering freely, he would have told the court that Artur had fought in Spain and had been awarded the Croix d’Honneur for his services to the Maquis.
The witness was told to stand down. One question blotted out all others in my mind. On principle Pavel never admitted blame; how then had he been forced to confess to something of which he was innocent? I turned over Pavel’s testimony. His voice had sounded normal, but something was unnatural. Then it came to me. His speech was in the style of written, not spoken, Czech — the written Czech of newspaper editorials. Pavel and Eda, whose natural modes of expression differed vastly, had employed exactly the same phraseology. This, too, suggested that they were reciting a script that had been written before the trial opened.
Rudolf Margolius’s testimony, which followed soon after, confirmed my hypothesis. He spoke in a high-pitched monotone, as though in a trance. He confessed to ‘widespread espionage and sabotage in foreign trade, aimed at disrupting the Czechoslovak economy’, motivated by hatred toward the working class and the Communist Party, which attitude he owed to his upbringing in a Jewish capitalist family. Most of his relatives were active Zionists, he said, who had emigrated to capitalist countries, mainly Israel, after the war.
Lies, lies, I cried inwardly. Both his parents and nearly all his relatives were gassed by the Nazis. He joined the Communist Party partly out of admiration for the courage shown by communists in the concentration camps.
Sadly I pictured Heda listening in. I had visited her in hospital on the first day of the trial. She was very ill: hollow cheeks, eyes glazed with morphia and sunken in huge black rings, lips yellowish-grey. She had been relieved to see me: a friend who believed as firmly as she did in Rudolf’s innocence. The women in the ward were talking about ‘those traitors’ and their ‘chances of the rope’.
After denouncing himself as an enemy of the people, who had tried to undermine socialism and Comecon, Rudolf admitted: ‘… I sent espionage reports to Zilliacus through Pavel Kavan in London.’
There was a macabre irony in the situation: two friends were sending each other to the gallows while their wives were trying to comfort each other.
Rudolf was charged with ‘agreeing to export television tubes under the trade pact with Britain,’ knowing that they could be used for military purposes. He admitted that he had thereby ‘strengthened Britain’s war potential and weakened Czechoslovakia’s defence capability’.
My mind flashed back to 1949. The Czechs at the Embassy had teased Rudolf for his extreme caution. He had conferred with Prague at every stage before proceeding with the negotiations. In no way could he be held solely responsible: the treaty could not have been signed without the approval of the Czechoslovak Economic Council; the government had ratified the signed agreement.
The voice that was Rudolf’s and yet was not Rudolf’s went on in the same vein: exports of this, imports of that; every item that had crossed the border had injured Czechoslovakia’s interests, proving that Rudolf’s aim was to orient Czechoslovak trade away from the Soviet Union and toward the West.
I was too exhausted to demolish all the arguments. The whole trial was a nightmare. The next day I went to see Heda. Ill as she was, she had been discharged from hospital on the ground that the current shortage of beds left no room for the wife of a traitor.
‘You heard Rudolf’s testimony?’ she asked.
I nodded, declaring that I didn’t believe a word of it. A man whose life was at stake did not incriminate himself without a stumble.
‘He had to memorize it, I know he did,’ she cried in anguish. ‘He had a bad memory for f
acts, he always had to look them up.’
Assuming that the defendants were unwilling actors in a prepared scenario, the question still remained: how had they been induced to perform? Particularly someone like Rudolf who had no faculty for learning by rote?
Heda was convinced drugs had been administered.
Drugs that would destroy the will and leave the memory intact? No, no, I protested, not in civilized Czechoslovakia.
Heda gripped my hand. ‘They won’t hang Rudolf, will they? Tell me they won’t let him die.’
Ah dear Heda, I would have given ten years of my life for that assurance. I stroked her hand wordlessly.
She vowed: ‘I’ll scrub floors for the rest of my life, if only they don’t hang him. If they give him a life sentence, I’ll be happy. Just to visit him once a month, to know that he is alive and thinking of us is all I ask. How can I live without him? There will never be anyone like Rudolf.’
‘At least you have known real love,’ was all the comfort I could give. It was trite but so true. Few find true and lasting love, perfect companionship and understanding that deepens and ripens with the years, as they had done, so that to know them was to enrich one’s own life.
Heda smiled wistfully: ‘Yes, no one can take that away from me.’
I had found blatant loopholes in the testimonies given by Pavel, Eda and Rudolf. I was still unable to explain why the leading spy role had been assigned to Konni Zilliacus. Then Karel turned up with a book concealed among the office files and tins of fish in his brief-case. Karel had a remarkable talent for procuring proscribed literature. I read it long into the night, and Zilly’s transgression became clear. He had written in praise of Tito after Tito had been outlawed by the Soviet Union. He had cast doubts on the authenticity of the political trials in Bulgaria and Hungary. He had described reforms carried out by Tito’s government that might well have awakened a desire for emulation in the other socialist countries. Zilliacus had had to be discredited.
The trial wore on. Not one of the accused or a single prosecution witness attempted to defend himself. All pleaded guilty to every item in their indictment. Not a voice in the mass media questioned the speciousness of the prosecution’s arguments or the lack of real evidence. On the contrary, public hysteria was whipped up. Hundreds of resolutions demanding the death sentence, purporting to come from factories, offices, trade unions and so on, were quoted daily in the press.
Everything hinged on the defence counsel. I waited tensely for the defence lawyers to speak. A little research would have armed them with arguments to demolish the prosecution’s case. Alas, the defence was a mere formality. No witnesses were called. The defence put no case. Its role too had been precisely defined.
The prosecution demanded the death sentence for all fourteen defendants. The monstrous charade was almost played out. The presiding judge pronounced the verdict: Guilty! It was a foregone conclusion. That was the real conspiracy: a conspiracy by the security police, the judiciary — and who else? — to condemn fourteen men for crimes they had not committed.
Eleven defendants were sentenced to death; three — Artur London, Evžen Löbl2 and Vavro Hajdú — to life imprisonment.
I spent a sleepless night. Every time I closed my eyes figures dangling on the end of a rope dragged me back to consciousness.
On the afternoon of 3 December the executions were carried out, just six days after sentence had been passed. The curtain had dropped on one of the most shameful episodes in Czechoslovak history.
After an interminable day, staring at drawings that conveyed nothing to me, I took the tram to Letná. With infinitely sad eyes, Heda was alone in her still flat. Even the clock was silent. Rudolf’s photograph was in its usual place on a small table, but the gentle smile which only yesterday had been full of peace and hope now seemed far away, dwelling on thoughts we would never read.
‘Did you see him?’ I asked. Or don’t you want to talk about it?’
‘Yes, I saw him,’ she said quietly. ‘But the guards would not let me take his hand and give him a last kiss. We were separated by two wire partitions.’
Facing each other like animals in a zoo. They weren’t even allowed to spend their last moments together like human beings.
‘I promised him that I would bring Ivan up to be proud of his father’s memory, that I would fight to clear his name. Then they led him away. We had had only a few minutes together, but I think he went to his death knowing that he was not alone.’
She looked so frail, as though a puff of wind would blow her apart. She struggled for composure. ‘Yesterday I thought I would die if they murdered Rudolf. But I must live, because of Ivan.’
Knowing Heda’s extraordinary vitality, I was convinced she would rally. She would never recover from the inward wound but outwardly she would regain her zest for living. She was like the rose that thrived on a dunghill, and bloomed far into the bleak winter.
*
The trial left me plagued with questions. What purpose had it served? At a guess I would say it served as a cover-up for economic deficiencies. I knew from my factory experience that blame could not be attached to a handful of top-notchers; inefficiency and muddle existed at all levels. Nevertheless, the Jews had been offered as the time-honoured scapegoat. (The prosecution had stressed the Jewish origin of the majority of the defendants and witnesses.) The defendants had been accused of serving Western interests. This would justify discrimination against all those who had lived or fought in the West. The trial would also act as a warning to potential Czech Titoists, and to the Slovaks: the main crime of which the Slovaks, Clementis, Novomeský3 and Gustáv Husák4 (who ousted Dubček in 1969), were accused was ‘bourgeois Slovak nationalism’.
Who, then, were the fabricators? I did not believe a trial of that dimension could have been staged without full discussion by Gottwald, the Party presidium and the Politburo. Heda and Karel, and surely other wives and relatives, had addressed letters to the Party leadership and the Ministries concerned, setting out the true facts and suggesting that the confessions had been obtained under duress. In any case, the leading politicians and economists must have recognised from their own knowledge and experience that the indictment was an invention. They could have saved the defendants, had they wished. If they had not chosen to do so, it was from fear of being incriminated or because they themselves were among the fabricators.
Why had there been no public outcry? I could not understand this. Then I remembered the Trial of the Vatican Agents. I had taken it at its face value, having no counter-evidence. I found my copy of the transcript and re-read it. With growing consternation I recognized the same technique, the same mechanical responses to a prepared script, the same confessions of sabotage and foreign contacts. I was appalled. I, too, had condemned innocent men. These monstrous proceedings made monsters of us all. (In self-defence I could only say that reading a transcript in Slovak, with which I was less familiar than Czech, made a far weaker impact then hearing the drama enacted.)
In the light of my self-discovery, I tried to re-assess the effect of the Slánský trial on the public. Spies and saboteurs — real or invented — had been served up since 1948. The atmosphere existed for the unmasking of a gigantic conspiracy to end all conspiracies. People who had believed the previous trials must believe the latest one too. Many would not find the manner in which the trials were conducted strange: ‘self-criticism’ was a Party ritual; turgid anti-imperialist hysteria had long been the language of the media. On the other hand, the Slánský trial had exceeded all bounds; this must surely give rise to misgivings. Communists, of course, would be bound to smother any suspicions, pledged as they were to trust the Party implicitly. Non-communists, if my colleagues at work were any guide, regarded it as one of a series of rigged trials.
‘This one’s a case of dog eats dog, that’s the difference,’ said one of them, ‘Švermová5 was jailed for preparing a coup against Slánský. Then she’s accused of backing Slánský, Clementis and Šling ag
ainst Gottwald. Taussigová6 caused Šling’s downfall and ends up testifying as Sling’s accomplice! Not that I’d waste a night’s sleep over a bunch of commies. No offence, Rozmarýnka, your husband may be a cut above the rest.’
Mirek burst out: ‘Slánský, Reicin7 and Šváb are the very ones who built up the state security into a man-eating machine. Šváb was responsible for sending Milada Horáková8 to the gallows — a mother and a woman of guts who’d spent five years in Gestapo prisons. She was executed on trumped-up charges of treason because she was a leader of the Socialist Party and a Catholic.’
‘But surely this sort of madness is alien to communism,’ I protested.
‘You’re nuts!’ said Mirek. ‘You’re the only one of us here who’s suffered politically, yet you still believe in Marx as the new Messiah. Poor Rozmarýnka,’ he reached out and ruffled my hair. ‘Your Mum must have dropped you on your head when you were in nappies.’
The trial of Dr Horáková, accused of organizing a conspiracy of former capitalists and members of the pre-February parties, had been held in the summer of 1950, while we were still in London. Officially, the Embassy had condemned her. I had known too little of the political background to form an opinion. Inwardly I deplored the sentence: to hang a woman for a political crime was diabolic. Yet I had kept silent. My happy life with my children in safe, sane England had pushed Dr Horáková out of my mind. Now I remembered her with horror and remorse.
I felt completely disorientated. But of one thing I was certain. Pavel was innocent. He was incapable of betraying his political ideals or of committing a dishonourable act in their defence. I was glad I had been rejected by the Party. I was not bound by Party discipline. I was free to believe implicitly in Pavel’s innocence. Pavel was still alive. Pavel might yet be saved. There was no vehicle for public protest. The censored press would publish nothing. But what about a petition to the government with signatures? I was sure that if I spoke to people individually, I would convince them of Pavel’s innocence. Hundreds would sign.
Love and Freedom Page 14
