"I Never Thought"

After a week in Prague, TIME Correspondent Will Lang cabled from Berlin:

"During the past year I never once thought I would ever look forward to returning to the dreary ruins of Germany. Yet I had such a feeling this week on crossing the border and leaving Czechoslovakia. It is not that I have learned to enjoy living among Germans and their dreams of the past, but on this trip I found it heartbreaking to continue talking with Czech democrats who see nothing but fear in the future."

In their second week under Communist control, most Czechs were still numb with shock. Some nurtured a newborn hope for a new war soon. In Pilsen a Czech said to a departing American friend: "The next time you come, I hope you come in a tank." Others, by the hundreds, fled into the U.S. zone of Germany. Said one: "I never thought that Czechs would turn to Germany for refuge."

Many Czechs found themselves in German-administered D.P. camps filled with Sudeten Germans recently expelled from Czechoslovakia. In a camp near Hof, in Bavaria, Czech refugees complained: "We are living on the German economy, sleeping in German shelters, eating German food. This cannot continue. It is impossible for us. They are laughing at us. How can the democratic nations of the world permit this to happen to us?"

Meanwhile, Prague's Communists busily consolidated their coup. New Communist Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Klementis received resignations from Czechoslovak diplomats in Washington, Ottawa, The Hague. Over transatlantic telephone, he called Prague's resigned U.S. Ambassador Juraj Slavik* "a characterless betrayer of your country," and promptly hustled through a new set of appointments.

Prague was a city of fear, despair, and the dreaded swish of the iron brooms that Communist Premier Klement Gottwald had put in the hands of his action committees.

The press was now rigidly controlled, but a profusion of brief, tragic items charted the brooms' progress. Samples:

P: M. Martinek, general director of the nationalized chemical industry, has been sent on leave.

P: The deputy director of the Czechoslovak airlines has been dismissed.

P: Sixteen judges in Prague have been dismissed from their courts, 17 in Brno, twelve in Olomouc.

P: A purge has been carried out in the Farmers' Union.

P: The action committee of the Czech film industry went Hollywood 211 better: it has dismissed 216 employees because of their "negative attitude."

The full, brutal meaning of the brooms became clear only when the new government's Ministry of Social Welfare announced that Czechoslovaks fired by the action committees would be sent to labor in mines, quarries, lumber camps. In two weeks Soviet-style forced labor had come to the "new people's democracy" of Czechoslovakia.

*Last week Bulgaria's Minister to London Nocloas Dolapchiev also resigned to work "for the restoration of democracy in my country."

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