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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation
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inventory of its contents. Then he telephoned for an
interpreter, for whom we waited for nearly an hour without saying a word.
The door finally opened and in came a rather thin, sixty-year-old man
wearing a dark gray long leather or imitation leather coat with a
wide belt, just like the Gestapo coats. I got goose flesh. He was a former
Austrian, and the official interpreter. Then began a very thorough
interrogation that lasted several hours, for the official wanted to know
everything. A secretary took it down on the typewriter. Who wrote the pamphlet?
Who translated it? Who printed it? Who gave me money? 'Why were there so many
East German visas on my passport? Who were my friends in the Democratic
Republic? Did they know about this visit to Prague?
Generally speaking,
I only had to tell them the truth, which made my replies easier. I told them
about my talk with Husak in Berlin, but I had to invent some of the details
because I could no longer remember exactly what he had said.
On the
wall was a poster protesting against Angela Davis's imprisonment, and I had
noticed others in the corridor.
Once the first session of my
interrogation came to an end, a police inspector and the interpreter took me to
the hotel to get my luggage. When we went downstairs we crossed a courtyard
lined with barred windows. The effect was so oppressive that I said to the
official while we were waiting for a police car: "You know, I feel completely
relaxed. I'm not the least bit afraid. You're going to let me go tomorrow, just
as they did in Poland, because you can't afford to have a trial on
anti-Semitism."
"No, no," he answered. "That could happen in Poland
and, as a matter of fact, I personally agree with you that there is a
pronounced anti-Semitism in Poland, not official, but endemic with the Poles
themselves. But that's not the situation here. You should have come as a
tourist and asked to be shown our country so you could have seen that there is
no anti-Semitism here. And then you wrote: 'Against repression, and against the
return to Stalinism.' If it had not been for Stalin, the Nazis would have won,
and the Jews would have been completely wiped out."
I told him: "I'm
not saying that anti-Semitism here is the same as anti-Semitism in Poland. I
know that the Czech people themselves are not anti-Semitic, but there is a
group in the government, particularly in the propaganda department, that is
using the Jews as a scapegoat for all your problems."
"Listen," he
replied. "Frankly, the whole thing is unbelievable
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WHEREVER THEY MAY BE © 1972, The
Beate Klarsfeld Foundation |
|
Back |
Page 134 |
Forward |
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