THE RUDOLF REPORT

11. HUNTING GERMAR RUDOLFminority still living in Czechoslovakia and for the expelled Sudeten-Germans, most of whom had resettled in Bavaria and Austria afterWWII.With the knowledge and support of the Catholic Church, we attemptedto smuggle theological and political books, as well as a photocopier,to a Catholic congregation in Prague. Our political literatureincluded, for example, a Czech edition of George Orwell’s 1984,which was forbidden in the then Czechoslovakian Socialist Soviet Republic.Although the books arrived at their destination, the photocopierwas discovered at the border and my fraternity brother, another persontraveling with us and myself were immediately confined to prison atPilsen in the west of Czechoslovakia. After two weeks of nervous waiting,without any contact to the outside world, during which I was interrogatedtwice, I was told I could leave. My fraternity brother, however,was later sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. He was forced to remainin jail for ten months until Christmas time 1984, when German ForeignMinister Hans-Dietrich Genscher intervened and managed to get himreleased early.Justice, not brute forceFor many others, this experience might possibly have convincedthem to leave controversial topics well enough alone. For me, it wasthe opposite. Because when I find that I have been the victim of injustice,my reaction is to fight until amends are made.It was at this time that I became familiar with the dark side of theCommunist dictatorship. I swore to myself in prison, once I was setfree, I would combat the evil of Communism.During the following year and a half, I became more involvedwith those who had been the victim of expulsions: firstly, because myfather had been expelled from the east German province Silesia, togetherwith millions of German compatriots (after WWII, Silesia wasannexed by Poland and is now its southwestern part); secondly, probablyas a result of memories of the fraternity brother mentioned above;and thirdly, from a conviction that the expulsion and persecution ofEast Germans by the communist dictatorships of Czechoslovakia,Yugoslavia, Poland, and the USSR was one of the greatest crimes inhistory, a crime which ought never be forgotten, trivialized or minimized,approved or justified. Parallels with the arguments invariably299