Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic have never acknowledged that Rudolf Slánský, executed in the 1950s, was innocent
Replacing Injustice by Another Injustice Is Not Enforcing the Rule of Law On 26 September 2022, filmmaker Ruth Zylberman presented at the French Institute in Prague her latest documentary film The Trial: Prague 1952. Several reels of the 1952 Slánský show trial, hours of new filming and audio material, were discovered in 2018. On their basis she revisits this trial in a moving and personal take by focusing on three of the accused: Rudolf Slánský, Rudolf Margolius, and Artur London, as well as on their families. As she explained in the discussion after the screening and in the academic debate that followed the next morning at the French Center for Research in Social Sciences (CeFReS), her aim was to present these “radioactive” visual archives to the public and, even more importantly, to turn them, by restituting the humanity of its protagonists, into the sort of material that can be appropriated by a wide audience.