Something worth reading:
A Trial in Prague': When Guilt Divorced
The Facts
By J. HOBERMAN
N late November 1952, one of the most
bizarre media spectacles of the 20th
century began its eight-day run. The show,
broadcast live from a Czech tribunal to an
international audience, took the form of a
legal proceeding in which a number of
prominent government officials confessed to
crimes of treason and espionage as heinous
as they were nonexistent. They had been
required to memorize their lines, as had 35
witnesses. At the conclusion of the
proceedings some 80,000 copies of the
transcript (or, rather, the script) — helpfully
translated into four languages — were
instantly available for distribution. Then, 11
of the 14 defendants were hanged and their ashes scattered to the winds.
This staged trial, known by the name of its most prominent defendant, Rudolf
Slansky, erstwhile General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party,
is the subject of Zuzana Justman's soberly compelling documentary "A Trial
in Prague," opening Sept. 14 at the Quad Theater. The story of the Slansky
Trial combines elements of Arthur Koestler's novel about the 1930's
Moscow show trials, "Darkness at Noon," with, as the studiedly neutral title
of Ms. Justman's documentary suggests, the bureaucratic nightmare of
Kafka.
The trial was also predicated on a totalitarian regime's remarkable capacity
to readjust reality. The Czech Communist government had been preparing
the show for two years when its script required an extensive rewrite. The
initial premise concerned a plot to assassinate Slansky. But a few months
before opening, the script was revised so that the original victim became the
star villain — a Zionist traitor who had conspired to return Czechoslovakia
to the imperialist camp.
It was scarcely coincidental that Slansky and all but three of his fellow
defendants — many of whom he had imprisoned earlier — were Jews. This
had less to do with the prominence of Jews in Czechoslovakia's Communist
Party — which, after World War II, had been the most popular Communist
Party in Eastern Europe, with more than 1 million members, as well as the
winner of a national election — than with events inside the Soviet Union and
elsewhere in the world.
Masterminded from Moscow, the Slansky Trial was of a piece with the
virulent anti-Semitic campaign that characterized the last five years of Stalin's
reign. In part, the aging dictator's paranoia was fed by disappointment with
the pro-Western stance taken by the new state of Israel, which had been
supported by the Soviets and heavily armed by Czechoslovakia during the
war of 1948. Hence the convenience of targeting prominent Jewish
Communists.
But the so-called Zionists on trial were all dedicated, lifelong Communists —
if not loyal Stalinists — who in embracing that secular religion had largely
abandoned their Jewish roots. Representatives of a now antediluvian sort of
modernism, they had spent their youth obtaining a particular form of
mid-20th-century European education: some survived Nazi concentration
camps, most fought in the international brigades on the side of the Spanish
Republic, a few had been involved in the French Resistance — all of which
would be used to establish their guilt during the trial.
A native of Prague, Ms. Justman survived her own 20th-century education;
under the German occupation, she was deported to Terezin when she was
11. (The concentration camp has been the subject of two of her three
previous documentaries, including the Emmy- winning "Voices of the
Children.") After Czechoslovakia's Communist coup in 1948, Ms. Justman
relocated to New York by way of Buenos Aires and was studying Slavic
languages at Vassar at the time of the Slansky Trial. She was not, however,
wholly detached from the event. She knew the daughter of one of the 11
executed men, and learned more the first time she was permitted to go back
to visit her family in Prague in 1958.
When Ms. Justman began shooting "A Trial in Prague" in 1999, she
discovered that although the entire trial had been filmed, only 12 minutes of
footage remained in the Czech National Archives. Her documentary
supplements this material with vivid newsreel footage of newly Communist
Czechoslovakia — young militants parading through a festive Prague, the
all-powerful Slansky celebrating his 50th birthday three months before his
arrest. The historical commentary is supplied by witnesses to the
proceedings.
Ms. Justman's interviewees, several of whom have since died, include the
elderly widows of three defendants: Slovak Party Secretary Otto Sling and
Minister of Foreign Trade Rudolf Margolius (both hanged), and Deputy
Foreign Minister Artur London (sentenced to life imprisonment).
London, freed in 1956, provided the firsthand account of the Slansky Trial
that was the basis for the 1970 Costa-Gavras film, "The Confession." Where
"The Confession" emphasizes the physical coercion and mental torture that
induced men like London to admit to crimes they had not committed, "A
Trial in Prague" is more concerned with the Communist mind-set that
rationalized the fantastic as true. Two of the widows, who had also been
dedicated Communists, initially believed their spouses to be guilty. The
voluble Ms. London even wrote a letter to the Czech premier, Klement
Gottwald, denouncing her husband.
Letting the story tell itself, Ms. Justman maintains an approach both
understated and sympathetic — too much so for some. At a private
screening at the Czech Center in New York, some émigrés accused Ms.
Justman of being an apologist for the Communist regime. Among other
things, she allows Eduard Goldstucker, the first Czech ambassador to Israel
and a false witness against Slansky before having his own trial six months
later, to explain the powerful appeal that Communism held for youth, Jews
and anti-fascists — particularly in a democracy like Czechoslovakia, which
had been abandoned by the West to the Nazis.
Ms. Justman says that "A Trial in Prague" was "turned down instantly" by
Czech television. The indifference to the fate of a few Communist
functionaries is understandable. The historian Karel Kaplan, an adviser on
the film, estimates that 250,000 citizens of Czechoslovakia were tried for
political reasons from 1948 to 1954 and that another 100,000 were
subjected to political harassment. At the same time, the Slansky Trial raises
troubling questions about self-delusion and scapegoating, as well as about
the nation's sense of itself. It is impossible to dismiss the bloodthirsty, ritual
nature of the event or the ease with which an all-pervasive anti- Semitism
was manipulated by its cynical managers scarcely a half-dozen years after
World War II.
In some respects the Slansky Trial was a family affair. Late in the movie, Jan
Kavan, current Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Czech Republic and son of
Pavel Kavan — a Communist official compelled to testify against Slansky
and subsequently jailed — is asked to describe his feelings about his father
and appears stricken. (Rudolf Slansky Jr., now the Czech Republic's
ambassador to Slovakia, declined Ms. Justman's request for an interview.)
Ms. Justman says that a screening at the 2000 Karlovy Vary International
Film Festival in the Czech Republic inspired not only curiosity but also some
audience hostility. For the filmmaker, the most difficult moment came when
she was asked why she chose to focus her film on Jews — as though that
weren't the point of the trial.
J. Hoberman is the senior film critic for The Village Voice and author of
``The Red Atlantis: Communist Culture in the Absence of Communism.' |
