Jo Langer and her husband Oscar were committed communists; she
Hungarian, he Slovakian. During the Second World War the couple, both
Jewish, escaped to America. Most members of their extended family were
murdered in the Holocaust.
After the war, they returned to
Czechoslovakia to help build communism. She worked for state exports in
Bratislava; he was an economist working for the Central Committee. In
1951 Oscar Langer was arrested and detained as part of the anti-Semitic
purge of the Communist Party that culminated in the infamous Slanksky
trials.
He was subjected to solitary confinement, threats
against his family, unbearable cold and hunger, anti-Semitic abuse and
beatings. In the end, he submitted. In a statement dictated by his
interrogators he said, 'I confess that I am an important link in the
anti-state conspiracy of Zionists and Jewish bourgeois nationalists'.
Jo Langer lost her job, and was exiled to the countryside. In
Convictions, she vividly describes trying to her protect her two
daughters and scrape a living, surviving the loss of her husband, her
place in society and her faith in communism. Oscar Langer died shortly
after his release from prison.
Jo Langer left Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring in 1968, and went into exile in Sweden.
Convictions : My Life with a Good Communist - Jo Langer
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