LUDWIG HASS
REPORTED FREED
--. The Gomulka regime has freed Ludwig Hass, an old Polish Trotskyist, according to Huw Price, writing in the September 10 issue of Ereedon, the British anarchist weekly.
"Tudwig Hass, one of the five ex-communist Poles imprisoned after two separate trials during the last year for opposition: by organisation and document to the Polish State and Communist Party, “has been freed during the last week," Price reports. "This is partly due to the fear of embarrassment to the Government if’ he. died in jail, since it is thought that he is in poor healtn. It is also partly due to the demonstrations in England and in America which singled out Hass as the main figure." Huw Price does not andicate his source of information. oo,
Hass, together with Romuald Smiech and Kasimierz Badowski, were sentenced last January to three years in prison for political opposition to the regime. They were advocates of proletarian democracy.
The case was linked to the condemnation in May 1965 of -two youths on similar charges. Karol Modzelewski was given three. and a half years and Jacek Kuron three years in a trial that attracted international attention due to the fact that Karol Modzelewsk1 was the son of a top government official.
Anong those who protested the political trials and prison sentences was the well-known historian Isaac Deutscher. In an open letter to Gomulka and the Central Committee of the Polish Workers party, he said that he had known Hass since before World War II. He was "a member of the Communist, so-called Trotskyist, organiza-— tion, of which I was one of the founders and mouthpiece. He then ' spent 17 years in Stalin's prisons, concentration camps, and places of deportation. Released in 1957, he returned to Poland so free from all bitterness and so strongly animated by his faith in a better Socialist future that he at once decided to join your Party; and he was accepted as member."
Deutscher said that no one asked Hass to renounce his past, "and he did not deny his old 'Trotskyist' views even for a moment “--'on the contrary, he upheld them frankly and untiringly. This ' circumstarice alone testifies to his courage and integrity."