High Czech Officials Defy Nazis on Relations with Jews

Highest functionaries of the Czech National Solidarity Party and well-known personalities in Czech political, economic and cultural life are among the many inhabitants of the Protectorate recently denounced to the German authorities for continuing to maintain relations with Jews, Czechoslovak circles here reported today.

An ostentatiously friendly attitude towards the Jews is one of the characteristic expressions of national resistance to the Nazis. Since last autumn, when the National Solidarity Party was compelled to forbid its members to maintain social contacts with Jews, the German press, as well as the Vlajkist (Fascist), has been unceasingly denouncing Czechs for defying the order.

A particular target of attacks recently has been the town of Prebram, where, according to the Nazi-controlled press, “the local secretary of the National Solidarity organization aroused public indignation by contacts with local Jews.” In the town of Novacerekve-Moravia, “even the head of the gendarmerie conducts himself in this inadmissible fashion.” Something even more terrible happened in Turnov, where “at a dance arranged by a secondary school a Jewish girl was a member of the dance committee.”

Czech circles here said such denunciations were not merely an expression of German anger, but the persons thus pilloried were usually imprisoned or interned in concentration camps for several months. Nevertheless, it was added, they risk everything to show that the Czechoslovak nation “cannot be forced, even by the worst terror, to degrade itself by accepting Nazi racialism.”