The Deepest Disillusionment

The Spanish peasants on the Jarama front in 1937 were brave, but many had never even seen an automobile, and they panicked at the sight of a tank. El Campesino, their Red commander, broke them of that. Once when a tank approached he told them to lie still. He filled his belt with tin cans packed with fused dynamite. Then he slid through the weeds toward the tank. When it seemed to the peasants that El Campesino was done for, he threw twice: one bomb hit the tank's treads, the other its turret. That finished the tank.

The peasants became "El Campesino's dinamiteros," famed antitank battalion of the Spanish Loyalist 46th Division. El Campesino (which means the peasant) became a top Spanish Communist general. In Russia, his picture was printed on match covers.

Last month, onetime Red Hero El Campesino (real name: Valentin Gonzalez) told a Paris court: "I am ready to go to Russia with an international commission and show them the graves of millions who died in concentration camps. I am ready to show them the camps where I was. I am ready to show them other camps. Then the commission will conclude that the thing called Communism is, in truth, vulgar fascism only under a red banner."

Then There Were 1,200. After Franco's victory, Gonzalez had fled to Russia. First he was made a Soviet army general, but soon he was under arrest. He was put to digging the Moscow subway, later was shuttled from slave camp to slave camp. He told the Paris court: "Six thousand Spanish comrades came with me to Russia. When I escaped in 1948, only 1,200 were left. The others perished."

With El Campesino in the Paris courtroom was one of the largest collections of Soviet slave-camp alumni ever assembled Russians, Germans, Poles, Jews, Spaniards, and Balts. They included Jerzy Gliksman, brother of the Polish Socialist Victor Alter, who was executed by the NKVD in 1941; Margarete Buber-Neumann, author of Under Two Dictators (TIME, Jan. 15), whom the Bolsheviks jailed in Russia in 1938, then turned over to the Nazis in 1940; Julius Margolin, Tel Aviv philosophy student who traveled to France to tell the court about his six years in Soviet durance.

All were witnesses in a libel suit brought by French Author David Rousset against the French Communist weekly Les Lettres Franc,aises. Heavy, one-eyed David Rousset, 38, an ex-inmate of Hitler's Buchenwald, had proposed a year ago that an international commission investigate all the concentration camps in the world. Les Lettres retorted that Russia had only "correctional stockades," that Rousset faked his evidence. Rousset sued for damages. El Campesino and the others came to testify to the reality of Soviet slave labor.

El Campesino boomed his accusations: "I am fulfilling the sacred pledge I made to the millions of Soviet camp inmates, also the pledge I made to those Old Bolsheviks who helped me to escape . . . It is the labor of millions of slaves that provides the Soviet Union with the means to rearmand to pay its foreign agents and the lawyers in trials like this."

The Communist lawyers were livid. One shouted: "It's unbelievable. Here is the Soviet Union tried by a Spaniard. An unheard-of shame" The court ordered him ousted. Another Red lawyer resorted to smearing:

"Witness Sharikov, you are a Soviet citizen. Why didn't you return home after the war?" Tikhon Sharikov, eight years in Soviet slave camps, replied: "Does the cow go to the slaughterhouse unless she is driven?"

The Second Time. The court was convinced. Last week it found that the Communist weekly had libeled Rousset. Les Lettres was required to announce the bitter-pill news in its own columns and in ten other papers of Rousset's choosing, and to pay nominal damages to Rousset.

It was the second time in two years that Les Lettres had had to pay damages to a former Communist whom it had lied about; first was Victor Kravchenko, author of I Chose Freedom.

The trials had focused French attentionmuch as the trial of Alger Hiss had focused U.S. attentionon the true inner infection of the Soviet crusade. To millions of French people, fearful of war, still fearful of a fascist Germany, but indulgent toward Frenchmen who want to establish a Communist regime in France, the testimony of El Campesino was impressive: "I do not regret having fought fascism. But I firmly regret that once I wished to establish a Communist regime in Spain. The Soviet Union was the deepest disillusionment in my life."

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