Transition

In the transition to socialism, the top U.S. Communist leaders (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) told the jury, it is always the middle class that uses force. But the Czech Communists were showing the world how the transition to socialism is really carried out.

In two weeks, more than 10,000 middle-class Czechs had been summarily arrested. Their crime was their failure to "find a positive relationship with our people's democratic order."

Just after sunrise but before the head of the family left for work, the police would come. There would be two plain-clothes men, with a list of names supplied by the Ministry of the Interior, and a uniformed cop. They would ask for the head of the family (or perhaps a grown son). All they would say in answer to questions was that the man was to come with them and that he should bring warm clothes. Before they left they would take the license and papers of his car, and they would type a sample of his typewriter if he had one.

Also among those jailed were 40 more Roman Catholic priests (estimated total of nuns and priests already jailed: 300); they had opposed two bills, steamrollered through Parliament, which made all clergymen employees of the state (at the same time doubling their salaries), and appointed a cabinet minister to "supervise" religion. Archbishop Josef Beran, interned in his palace since June, was quoted by Western diplomats in Prague as saying that the new laws were "treason to the Christian faith." Beran was grieved that some priests had given public support to the bills, had been "bought for Judas coin."

This week, weeping relatives crowded into Prague's police stations, trying to learn where their menfolk had been taken. The police sent many of the questioners out to Pankrac, Prague's biggest prison, which stands ominously on a hill overlooking the city.

There they learned that Pankrac was only a reception center, from which the victims of the transition to socialism were sent in batches to forced labor in industry, agriculture and mining.

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