ABSTRACT
In the 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia was known for its repressive political atmosphere that did not allow for the expression of Holocaust memory. There had been an explicit break with the political and cultural liberalization of the 1960s, which had produced a variety of representations of the Holocaust in the media, in cinema, in literature, and in historiography. 1 After the suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968, the more liberal policies of the 1960s were de-famed; publications on the history of the Holocaust had to be stopped. The historian Václav Král argued that this policy of reversal was a legitimate reaction to the fact that the “Israeli propaganda misuses the persecution of the Jews during World War II to morally justify Israeli aggression against the neighboring Arab peoples.” 2
