While the trial of Rudolf Slánský involved, with a few exceptions, the top leaders of the Communist regime, who had long since rejected their own Jewish roots and resisted being labeled as Jews, far less well-known cases of abuse of justice have affected the community of survivors.
The mass arrests of Jews, for example, were the result of the long-running Dana campaign waged by the communist State Security between 1953 and 1957 against the social support of returnees from concentration camps by Jewish communities.
Listen to the testimony of Edgar Semmel, whose father was arrested as part of the Dana action.
Edgar Semmel was born in 1924 in Teplice-Sanov, after the occupation of the borderlands the family fled to Prague, but they tried to be as little visible to the regime of the Second Republic as possible. And so they moved to Chust in the then Subcarpathian Rus. In 1939, shortly after the occupation, the whole family managed to move to Palestine, where Edgar joined the exiled Czechoslovak army at the age of 18.
He fought at Dunkirk and returned to his homeland after the liberation. He studied electrical engineering and wanted to build socialism and communism. The 1950s brought him out of his naive fantasies, and after the occupation of the country in 1968 he was branded a right-wing opportunist, hence a Zionist. It was only after his retirement that he first met his sister, who had married in Israel in 1947.
The interview was filmed on 29 July 1996 in Prague.
Why were not only the distributors, but also the recipients of social aid identified as part of an anti-state espionage network?