Brave protest
You could not hope to find a more courteous and self-effacing man than Bohuslav Kratovil, who writes this week on the sup- pressed report of the Czech Political Trials (published last week by Macdonalds). He even manages to sound apologetic about being imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo in 1939. At the beginning of the Prague persecutions and trials of the early 'fifties, he was Czech ambassador in London, and then in India. Kratovil would most surely have hanged—along with some of his closest friends—had the British government not granted him asylum in 1951. The letter of resignation he wrote to the Party must rank as one of the bravest protests of the time: 'Several of your recent actions are a Violation of the basic principles of the Czech spiritual tradition, its European character, its love of freedom, its need for truth and peace
• •• the suppression of any of these would bring devastating results in its train and you have no right to prevent the Czechoslovak People from living fully and freely within the European spiritual community . . . You arc Crippling the people's character ...'
Twenty years later he would have to write
exactly the same letter of resignation if he were still in office—and he would do so again.
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