Word: schmidts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Safely out of Czechoslovakia and the reach of the Communist Secret Police, who were about to arrest him on a trumped-up charge of espionage (TIME, June 19), Correspondent Dana Adams Schmidt sat down to his typewriter in Vienna and began a new series of dispatches to the New York Times. Out of the range of Prague's Communist censors, he wrote at length and in detail. His dispatches, published in the Times last week, gave a sharp picture of the tragedy that enveloped Czechoslovakia 28 months ago when the Communists seized control...
...most characteristic thing about a police state is that people 'disappear,' " wrote Reporter Schmidt. "It is difficult for the casual visitor [to understand that] when he enters the office of a business associate the desk in the corner is empty because the secretary who occupied it was arrested last week, or that the girl at the opposite desk is the police spy who denounced her, and who will shortly make a report to the police on the visitor's conversation with the manager...
...hands of a small, inscrutable inner circle of Communists, who get their orders from the offices of the Cominform in Bucharest or directly from Moscow. Most notable member of this inner circle is Rudolf Slansky, secretary general of the party. Other members, according to the Times's Schmidt, are Bedrich Gemmder, contactman for the Cominform Defense Minister Dr. Alexej Cepicka, and National Security Minister Ladislav Kopriva. But Schmidt suspects it does not include President Klement Gottwald, chairman of the Communist Party, or Prime Minister Antonin Zapotocky. (While both men seem to hold undisputed authority, it has been rumored that...
...walk through Prague's Wenceslas Square," says Schmidt, "and see ... on nine-tenths of the shops ... the sign 'Narodni Podnik' which means National Enterprise." Nearly 100% of industry, wholesale trade and export-import trade, and 80% of shops have been communalized. Although this economic concentration in the hands of the government is capable of generating great power, Communists are finding that compared with the selective precision of private enterprise, nationalized enterprise on such a scale is often a blunt instrument. Thus Rude Pravo, central Communist Party organ, complained recently that so many sieves were being delivered...
...Times had no solution. Nor did newsmen have any solution to the problem of getting the news in the face of such censorship and of even harsher attempts to terrorize them. Fortnight ago, Czechoslovakia indicted able Times Correspondent Dana Adams Schmidt (along with 20 other Westerners) for espionage and subversion. After dutifully filing a straight story to the Times on the charges (which he denied), Schmidt fled to the U.S. zone of Germany. That left only three regular Western correspondents in Prague, all of them exposed to the kind of attack that had forced able Reporter Schmidt to leave...