Synopsis
The film describes the events which triggered off the largest wave
of anti-Semitism ever recorded in the Czech Lands.
On the Easter Saturday of 1899, nineteen-year-old seamstress
Anežka Hrůzová was found dead on the way between the village
of Věžnička and the town of Polná. Her throat had been slashed and
she had obviously bled to death. To the local doctors it seemed that
there's not enough coagulated blood on the scene of the crime, and
the answer to the question where the “missing” blood had gone
suggested itself: the Jews had used it in matzos. The potential killer
happened to be available, too: a cheeky and not-to-clever youngster
Leopold Hilsner, occasional day labourer, tramp and beggar.
The Jew Hilsner was convicted and sentenced to death for the
alleged ritual murder of Anežka Hrůzová. Later on, in a renewed
trial in Písek, the verdict was confirmed, and the charges extended
by sexual deviation: Hilsner was accused of another, still unsolved
crime, a murder committed two years before. Zdeno Auředníček,
Hilsner's young ex officio defence lawyer, was convinced of his
client's innocence – but there were few others sharing his view.
The best-know positive intervention in Hilsner's favour was that
of T. G. Masaryk, who had the courage, his characteristic quality,
to stand up against the medieval superstition about the principle
of Jewish ritual killing. It was thanks to him, too, that Auředníček
managed to get the sentence of death reduced to imprisonment for
life. According to some testimonies, the real killer pleaded guilty on
his death bed, and Hilsner was released after 18 years in jail.
The effort for remedying the injustice perpetrated on Leopold
Hilsner took nearly a hundred years – till the year of 1998.