Foreign Ministry: Polansky’s book full of inaccuracies

Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg has distanced himself from a book by American writer Paul Polansky which alleges that Mr. Schwarzenberg’s aristocratic parents used prisoners from the Lety concentration camp as a cheap labor source on their estate. In his book The Storm, Mr. Polansky claims that in the early years of the war, when the German-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was still under Czech administration, though based on German directives, the Schwarzenberg family contacted the Interior Ministry and requested that one of the labour camps being built should be located near their estate, so that they might have cheap laborers to work in their blizzard-decimated forests. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zuzana Opletalová said that Mr. Schwarzenberg had read Paul Polansky’s book and found it contained basic errors and false information. The statements about Lety are a case in point, she said.