Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

‘Zionist origin’) served as a presumption of guilt, of anti-Communist, anti-Czech intentions. And the language of the prosecutors, broadcast over Czechoslovak radio, harked back to and even improved upon the crude vituperation of Prosecutor Vyshinsky in the Moscow Trials: ‘repulsive traitors’, ‘dogs’, ‘wolves’, ‘wolfish successors of Hitler’ and more in the same vein. It was also recapitulated in the Czech press. On the fourth day of the trial the Prague Communist daily Rudé Právo editorialized thus: ‘One trembles with disgust and repulsion at the sight of these cold, unfeeling beings. The Judas Slánský’, the paper continued, was betting on ‘these alien elements, this rabble with its shady past.’ No Czech, the writer explained, could have committed such crimes: ‘only cynical Zionists, without a fatherland . . . clever cosmopolitans who have sold out to the dollar. They were guided in this criminal activity by Zionism, bourgeois Jewish nationalism, racial chauvinism.’