11 JANUARY 1957, Page 8

A FRIEND just back from Eastern Europe tells me—a curious

sidelight on recent events behind the Iron Curtain—that feeling is very bitter, par- ticularly in Poland and Hungary, about the Czechs. Czechoslovakia has played a conspicu- ously inconspicuous part in the movement of revolt against Russian domination : when even the students of Kiev were marching, Prague was silent. Two. sayings are current in the other satellite—or ex-satellite—States. One is that the Czechs are angry with the Western Powers for not doing more to help the Hungarians and Poles to win Czechoslovakia her freedom. The other is even more savagely to the point. 'The Hungarians,' it runs, 'have behaved like Poles; the Poles have behaved like Czechs; the Czechs have behaved like swine.'

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