JOINS IN APPEAL FOR POLISH COMMUNIST VICTIMS _
[The April 29 issue of the British Tribune, an independent weekly of the Labour movement, carried. the following editorial on the case.of Iudwik Hass, Karol Modzelewski, Kazimierz Badowski, Romuald. ‘Smiech, Jacek: Kuron and others. imprisoned in Poland because of political views to the left of the regime. The editorial is . entitled, "Stalin! s Victims Suffer Again -- in Poland."]
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The Government of Poland used to claim that since the revolution of 1956. which. ousted the Stalinists and restored Gomulka, there were no political . prisoners in Poland. That is an honourable claim for any government to make. But now it can no longer make it. At secret trials held last July and January, between 12 and 15 members. of the Polish Workers' Party were condemned for circulating "false information detrimental to the State and its supreme authorities." In fact their crime was to have published a twenty-page pamphlet critical of the regime and its policies. For this one person has received three and a half years' imprisonment, and four others sentences of three years.
This return to Stalinism, following as it does hard upon the Soviet writers' trial and a new campaign against intellectual freedom in East Germany, is both depressing and disgraceful. It has rightly provoked protests from Socialists in other countries, most». notably, perhaps, from Mr. Isaac Deutscher, who this week has addressed an open. ietter to Wladyslaw Gomulka.
It is ‘not only Mr. Deutscher's eminence as’a student of Communism that makes his protest important, but the fact that he was.a founder-member of the Polish Communist movement, who now only rarely intervenes in Polish politics. As he points out, these persecuted men are Communist idealists who have already suffered for — their beliefs. (One of them, Iudwik Hass, spent 17 years in Stalin's prisons.) There is a terrible irony in the fact that they have been treated more brutally than Polish anti-Communists ever have been. We join with Mr. Deutscher and others in appealing to the Polish Government to redress this appalling act of harsh injustice.