My Mind on Trial

Eugen Loebl, once a high official in Communist Czechoslovakia, wrenches from memory a crucial period of his life. He was one of fourteen defendants in a spectacular show trial, and one of three who escaped the death sentence. He was punished for having tried, at the orders of the very party that condemned him, to open Czechoslovakia to Western trade. The Soviet Union could not then tolerate Czechoslovakia's moving in that direction. Loebl was made to confess-it took two years-that he was a traitor, a saboteur, a spy. While his mind was thus "conditioned" for the trial, something not planned by the interrogators happened to him. In the isolation and boredom of his cell, he began to reexamine his life, his commitment to Marxism, his political career, his own corruption by power. With agonizing reluctance, he made himself face the truth. The problems he identified in the party and in himself were not, as he had desperately tried to believe, a deviation from true Socialism but, rather, an ingrained consequence of a theory that, in practice devalues man; everything truly humane is made to shrivel and die. Out of two confessions, one external and one internal, grows a deeply absorbing and moving account of an individual's struggle to remain himself.