Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Here Where We Live Is Our Country

Chapter I.7

(1926 to 1933)

Coup

On May 12, 1926, the Bund's leaders woke up to the news that Józef Pilsudski was overthrowing the Polish government. Sick of the economic collapse and the right-wing parties whom he blamed for his friend Narutowicz's murder, Pilsudski massed two thousand troops in Praga, marched over the Kierbedz Bridge into Warsaw proper, and seized the most important points of the city. From his apartment on Nowolipie Street, Bernard Goldstein heard the bullets. He was overcome with relief, mixed with self-criticism. "There is shooting in the fortress of reaction and oppression," he later wrote, "and I'm not there, taking part?" That evening, he grabbed two friends and headed to the front lines around Theater Square. The once-quick walk took hours. Bodies covered the streets. Bernard saw a soldier lying next to the Kierbedz Bridge's aqueduct, brains sprayed across the cobblestones. He went for the dead man's rifle. "Are you crazy?" his friend screamed. "You don't have a permit!" Bernard sheepishly returned the rifle to its place.

At the Folkstsatung office, editors rushed out an emergency issue. "Jewish workers have too much at stake to stand aside during this uprising.... You must demand the overthrow of the anti-people's-government," one editorial read. Henryk Erlich grabbed his fellow city councilman, Viktor Alter, and hurried to the Warsaw Town Hall for a press conference to announce their support of the coup. Guns were everywhere. Everyone was a target. They walked carefully, weaving, dodging, running through the intersections with their heads down. A machine gun sprayed. Stone splintered. from buildings. Tenements had bolted their courtyard gates, so there was nowhere to run. Alter grabbed Erlich and pressed him against a wall, shielding him with his body.

To support the coup, the Polish Socialist Party and the Bund declared a general strike. Bundists lined up at Pilsudski's field headquarters in Belvedere Palace and offered to enlist, while the Polish Socialist-led railway workers' union tore up the tracks to keep government reinforcements from reaching Warsaw. After two days, the government submitted its resignation. Pilsudski was in charge.

Despite their uneasiness about coups, the Bund gave Pilsudski their support. How could they not? The old government had gunned down workers and deliberately impoverished their community. Meanwhile, Pilsudski was a lifelong radical with a celebrated socialist past. He promised to quash corruption, to stop extremism both left and right, and to unite the country like a tough but benevolent grandfather.

Warsaw

Bundists soon realized that no politician can ever offer salvation. Though Pilsudski declined to serve as president, he stayed on as minister of war and was in every way the actual head of state. Monomaniacal and hot-tempered, Pilsudski loathed the garrulous ineffectuality of electoral politics. Over the next six years, he would jail opponents, confiscate newspapers, and undermine parliament whenever his rivals threatened to get too much power.

Still, it was a good time, at least by the standards of the former Pale of Settlement. The government cracked down on nationalists, and America extended Poland generous credit. The economy improved, even in the slums of Jewish Warsaw. Poland was now a country where the Bund could build a future.

Build they did. The Bund in Pictures has dozens of photographs of the innumerable committees by which the Bund organized working-class Jewish life. These diligent men and women set up economic cooperatives to help artisans weather discriminatory tax laws. They created stores, eateries, and workshops. Under Viktor Alter's leadership, the National Council of Jewish Trade Unions became a branch of the powerful International Federation of Trade Unions. Its membership tripled. The Bund set up day care centers, libraries, and drama clubs. Both independently and through the Bundist-dominated tishoh school system, the party ran nearly two hundred schools, from kindergartens to a teachers' college to night schools for Jewish workers barely into their teens. In the words of Victor Gilinsky, son of Bundist leader Shloyme Gilinsky, "The Bund was your union, your education, your church."

The Bund had high hopes for the next generation. They would raise their kids to be free and unafraid. These kids would take care of one another, like socialists did. They would fight back, because they came from a lineage of fighters. They would never doubt that this country was their home.

In 1926, the same year as Pilsudski's coup, the Bund created skif, the Socialist Children's Union. "We are young, and the world is open," their anthem went. I look through photos of skif's mandolin orchestras and summer camps, and I see the wholesome, conventional childhoods that these kids would otherwise have been denied. Marek Edelman, son of the former self-defense fighter Tsipie Edelman, had a typical skif childhood. His widowed mother served as secretary for Y.A.F, the Bundist women's movement, so the party helped raise her boy. Marek grew up at protests, where he rode on the shoulders of comrades, red flag in his tiny fist. At ten, he helped run a skif group in a Praga homeless shelter. The next year, Medem Sanitarium admitted him on suspicion of tuberculosis. There were Polish and German children among the patients. He learned that the fight wasn't Christian versus Jew but democracy versus fascism. All kids were family in Medem's paradise.

The same year, the Bund founded their sports club, Morgenstern. They had hikes and bike races, gymnastics and boxing matches. In summer, they rented pools to teach kids to swim. In winter, hundreds of workers twirled on their ice-skating rinks. In Warsaw, thousands watched soccer tournaments that Naye Folkstsatung ^{[*]} sponsored. The Bund's sports magazine, Worker Athlete, breathlessly covered each play.

I leaf through the Morgenstern section of The Bund in Pictures. Girls in booty shorts stretch their legs in Lublin. Each has a black heart pinned to her middy blouse. Laughing teens lounge on a riverbank. Two guys mime a boxing match. Big smiles. A perfect punch. On a cobblestone street, boys prep for a footrace. A man braces himself on parallel bars. He throws himself in the air, reaches, flies.

In April 1927, Morgenstern took over a Warsaw circus for a mass acrobatic display. Hundreds of gymnasts performed. In the photos, young men raise their hands. Their chests are broad. Their white shorts show muscular thighs. Young women lean their heads back. Their bodies move together like a symphony. At the end of the show, Morgenstern paraded, each age group in its own distinct uniform. To Bernard in the audience, they looked like a field of flowers. He remembered the prison damp, the cellar safe houses. His generation had suffered. These kids were their reward.

On their first May Day in Pilsudski's Poland, the Bund displayed the richness of their world. Beneath a satin banner lined with braid, Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter led tens of thousands of marchers. They had their unions, their brass band, their athletes, their motorcade of militiamen, their Tsukunft groups with fighting pennants—red linen bands attached to poles they could use as clubs. Then the skif kids, each waving a little triangle flag. The Bund marched down the ritziest Polish boulevards. They sang Yiddish songs, to the fury of the onlookers. Let them seethe. These were the Bund's streets. This was their city. To Bernard Goldstein, the procession seemed to stretch for miles.

Banners flew, each embroidered with demands they had debated over endless mass meetings, but the sole real demand was the unwritten statement: Here where we live is our country.

In October, the Bund celebrated their thirtieth anniversary in the largest hall in Jewish Warsaw. Sophia Dubnova and her thirteen-year-old son Victor watched from a balcony bedecked with flowers. Henryk Erlich's speech was the center of the event. Victor's Yiddish was not good enough to understand his father's words, but he saw how dashing he looked on the podium, how he captivated the audience. That's my dad, he thought proudly.

I notice something else in the photos of the Bund's anniversary: the girls. They don't resemble Itka the Bundist. They don't wear corsets, these girls. They wear drop-waist dresses and arrange their bobbed hair beneath cloche hats. They are sleek babes of the jazz age, red-lipped flappers whom I might pass in a New York nightclub. They make out with guys. They drink vodka and talk back in three languages. They seize the stage at meetings. They hold their own in a street fight. They belong to themselves.

Unlike the Bund's founders, their political compass didn't point to Russia. They came of age in independent Poland, and they lived in a Warsaw that was worthy of them. If she had the cash, our girl could have snuck into the famous basement cabaret, Qui Pro Quo, where Artur Gold conducted the band and the blond goddess Hanka Ordonówna starred. The ballerina turned showgirl might sing "Mein Yiddishe Momme," then segue to a breathy tango. Our girl might watch some of the poet Julian Tuwim's scandalous political skits, if the joint wasn't raided by the police.

Down the street, our girl could have caught a performance by the Nigerian jazz percussionist August Agbola O'Browne. The city was a diverse place. In the artistic world, Poles and Jews and everyone else mingled easily, like discs in the multilingual catalog from Syrena Record.

Right next to the Great Synagogue, at the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists at 13 Tlomackie Street, our heroine could avert the advances of the prematurely balding young satyr Isaac Bashevis Singer, listen to editors at impecunious literary magazines heap scorn on the established poets they corrected, then beat every last one of them at chess. She could watch the diva Ida Kaminska play a doomed revolutionary at the Warsaw Yiddish Art Theatre. She could get a ham sandwich by Tabachinsky's coffeehouse, downstairs from the Bund club, where workers stuffed their faces in front of the plate-glass windows on Yom Kippur just to annoy the pious. And she could stop by Fat Yosl's tavern, where Bernard Goldstein organized his teamsters for attack. She was a socialist. She was young. The twenties were roaring.

Volkovysk

Volkovsk The optimism of the twenties spread to backwaters like Volkovysk. By 1926, Sam's hometown was being modernized, the wood shacks replaced with multistory buildings. Two train stations connected it to the rest of the country, attracting Poles who wanted government jobs, and free farmland was parวeled out to the Polish military veterans. Neither of these enticements was available to local Jews. Still, Volkovysk was a Jewish town. Jews thrived in large part because of the mutual aid institutions—orphanages, old-age homes, co-ops, free clinics, and credit unions—that they used to keep each other afloat in a hostile world. The volunteer fire brigade was still Jewish, despite the efforts of the Polish government to disband it, and their orchestra was so popular that girls swarmed their concerts. You could still gather mushrooms in the forest, still hang a hammock beside the river and watch the boats float slowly by. There were no streetlights, so you could still see the stars. There was trouble too, just like there had always been. The Volkovysk Memorial Book uses the word squatters to describe the new arrivals from western Poland, who came to take advantage of the government's offers of land. Longtime Jewish and Christian residents didn't view their new neighbors kindly. Perhaps they had their own claims on the land that the state so freely handed out. And despite the relative calm, pogroms still broke out on market days, incited by the newcomers, according to the Volkovysk Memorial Book. As the factories grew in Volkovysk, the Bund grew with them. They set up a secular Yiddish school and a Yiddish library. Their top local activist, leatherworker Avram Markus, ran their newspaper, filling its pages with impudent journalistic campaigns against the town's Zionist elite; the Jewish factory bosses and landlords; and the Orthodox, whom he mocked as "black crows." The Bund launched a theater troupe and held election meetings at Polonia Cinema. They paraded down Broad Street on May Days.

As this free generation marched, they would have passed by Kanoval home, where Sam's relatives still lived. Their chants might have echoed in their neighbor Moshe Rutchik's house, where Rutchik's friend, the sarcastic Bundist shoemaker Meir Zeleviansky, a man of Sam's generation, liked to sit in the corner parsing obscure points of dialectical materialism until Rutchik snapped, “enough!” Then the two old men might have reminisced about the days of the tsar, when they were just dumb kids who had formed little gangs to fight the soldiers—may their names be erased from the book of life—and about all their friends who had sailed to strange America. Perhaps they remembered the artist Shmuel Chudozhnik, Zeleviansky's comrade. What was Shmuel doing across the sea?

Sam Rothbort

The past decade had had its ups and downs for my great-grandfather. In 1919, Sam Rothbort finally found a patron: Hamilton Easter Field. Born into an aristocratic Quaker family and educated in Parisian ateliers, Field was a prominent art critic and collector who championed modernists in his home gallery. Sam Rothbort caught his eye. My great-grandfather needed it. Though Sam exhibited in the Brooklyn gallery world, he never got the hang of social climbing. He was congenitally unable to kiss ass, and so curators relegated his work to the margins of shows. He quit or was shoved out of this artistic society or that, until Field swept in like Prince Charming.

In Sam's work Field found the most fragile of qualities—authenticity. Sam worked directly from life, finishing what he started the same day. This was the real, Sam thought, uncorrupted by memory. Field agreed. “My feeling is that the antipathy against Rothbort's art is the antipathy which most men and women feel against a plain unvarnished tale of truth.... They dream of lords and ladies, and do not wish to have their dreams disturbed,” Field wrote, comparing Sam's work to the poetry of Walt Whitman. Field hung Sam's paintings at his home exhibitions, and before long, his new discovery was showing in the Brooklyn Museum. Sam had breezed past the gatekeepers and seemed headed to a secure place in the world of High Art.

Or that's how it should have gone, but on April 10, 1922, Field died of pneumonia. He was only forty-nine. Sam stood with Field's other artists in the Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park and watched gravediggers shovel dirt on his patron's coffin. On the subway ride back, another artist turned to him. "Rothbort, you don't know what you lost, but you'll soon find out."

The artist's words were prophetic. Things went south for Sam after Field's death. He bounced around New York artist groups but found a chilly reception wherever he went. “The laymen dream of lords and ladies” and could not stand the unvarnished truth of Rothbort's work. Maybe Field was right.

Embittered, Sam turned his back on the city. “Don't let inept authorities buldoze you with spineless culture,” he wrote on an undated notecard. In 1924, he moved the family to two acres of land in Uniondale on Long Island, where he set up a no-kill egg farm. (A few years earlier, he had become a vegetarian, for moral reasons.) This left the problem of what to do with male chicks. While he worked on his art, Rose cared for three thousand chickens and an unknown number of murderous roosters.

Sam loved the land. It was his provider of sustenance, his guarantee of freedom. In 1925, he took up the hammer and chisel. He preferred fieldstone and scavenged fenceposts, battered materials that hid stories. On a stained lunch counter, he carved a relief of a bull staring down at the victims of pogroms. Above them the moon laughed at mankind's violence. He sculpted the prophets: “Moses, standing and holding his hand with sympathy on the shoulder of the fallen Christ, as if he would say, 'My son, men will have to accept 'thou shalt not kill' before they can accept 'love,'” Sam later wrote. A wry philosophy emerged from these sculptures, one that was witty, earthy, that mocked and yet accepted human frailty. It had been a bad career move to leave New York, but in Uniondale, on a failing farm amidst stunted birch trees, he found his artistic voice.

Social Fascism

Were he alive, Medem would have congratulated himself for his foresight. In 1918, at the height of Trotsky's power, he had written, "The day is not far off when we will see revolutionary tribunals in which the more kosher Bolsheviks will execute the more suspect.... If today Lenin desires to shoot Abramovich, who can tell that tomorrow he will not shoot Trotsky?" Lenin was nearly four years dead in November 1927 when his party, now helmed by the former bank robber Joseph Stalin, expelled Trotsky and banished him to a remote backwater in Kazakhstan.

At the Comintern's sixth world congress, which closed in September 1928, Stalin announced a new theory called social fascism. In his telling, democratic socialist parties were as bad as, if not worse than, the real fascists who currently ran Italy. These socialists worked as fascism's handmaidens, leading workers away from communism while hiding their villainy behind red banners and Marxist catchphrases. They were the main obstacles to worldwide revolution and needed to be destroyed.

High on the doctrine of social fascism, Poland's Jewish communists escalated their attacks against the Bund. To prosecute their jeremiad, they enlisted the underworld: men like Hershel the Fighter, kneecap-smashing debt collector Dovid Milner, cross-eyed pimp Simkhe Macz, and the dapper Maier Chmopel, who could knife a man as easily as he combed his hair. Communists gave gangsters cover for their rackets, and gangsters gave communists an army.

Communists broke into the Bund's night schools, grabbed students, and pelted teachers with rocks. They interrupted Bundist meetings with jeers. Once, a gang stormed into the Bund club, grabbed the shoemaker Black-Haired Khatskl, and used a cigarette to burn a hole clean through his lip. Communists in Bundist-led unions declared wildcat strikes, not to win higher wages but to force the unions to split. When workers refused to strike against their unions' orders, communists attacked them with clubs and knives.

Bernard tried to speak to the communist workers directly. Flanked by militiamen, he descended into the smoke-filled cellar where communists held meetings to plan their assaults. His appearance stunned the attendees into silence. When he walked to the podium, the chairman gave permission for him to speak.

He said that the war between communists and Bundists had gone on long enough. Communists would no longer beat up workers who stayed loyal to his party's unions. It was time to strike a deal. As labor organizers, they could arrange matters amongst themselves, but if communists kept up their assaults, his men would defend their shops.

The audience said nothing.

Bernard's proposal failed. Embarrassed that a rival had crashed their meeting without consequences, the communists redoubled their attacks. They passed a death sentence on Bernard Goldstein, the worst social fascist of them all, and sent fanatical teenagers to fire revolvers at the cottage where he stayed for summer vacations. Another communist tried to assassinate Bernard outside his apartment. Bernard shot back, wounding the communist, who left a trail of blood across the pavement. When the cops showed up, Bernard refused to reveal the identity of his attacker. For each attack, the Bund's militia meted out revenge in the form of split skulls and shattered rib cages, which only escalated the conflict. Violence took on its own logic. In the years that followed, communists would murder several Bundist workers. They even shot up Medem Sanatorium, terrifying the kids but fortunately killing no one.

Victory against fascism achieved.

Betar

On New Year's Day 1929, Warsaw watched with astonishment as hundreds of young Jews clad in brown military shirts marched to the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street for the first international conference of Vladimir Jabotinsky's Betar youth movement.

Naye Folkstsæytung described the display as “a parade of little Jewish fascists.”

Preaching strength, cruelty, and conquest of both banks of the river Jordan, Betar drew inspiration from the same brutism Polish nationalists that the Bund fought in Saxon Gardens. In Poland, its forty thousand members learned to shoot guns and use hand grenades. They promised to die for a Jewish state. If Betar were just “little fascists” in Poland, in Palestine, where a hundred thousand Jews had immigrated since the Mandate began, they were growing into something more akin to Mussolini's squadristi. To enforce Hebrew language use, Betar members raided Yiddish cultural events, and they destroyed the property of Jews who hired Palestinian, rather than Jewish, workers. But Palestinians were their primary target. These attacks served the dual purpose of enforcing supremacy upon the other and of re-creating the Jewish self. If Jews were to transform themselves from the emasculated “Yids” of the diaspora, whom Jabotinsky criticized, into his macho “Hebrews,” they needed to show the uppity natives that they were boss.

Palestine

Jabotinsky fixated on East Jerusalem's Wailing Wall as a casus belli. Believed to be a remnant of the destroyed second temple, the wall was the holiest site in Judaism, positioned directly below the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam, and flanked by a bustling eight-hundred-year-old Moroccan Quarter. When Jabotinsky returned to Palestine in 1928 to set up a newspaper, he took up Zionist calls to buy and buldoze adjoining Muslim homes. During that year's Yom Kippur service, Orthodox worshippers tried to put up the screen that traditionally divides men and women during services, only to have it removed by British policemen. This seemingly minor incident became the pretext for Jabotinsky to agitate for full Jewish control of the site. After a year of stupid squabbles, tit-for-tat dick waving, and identitarian provocation, things finally exploded in 1929, when, on the Jewish mourning day of Tisha b'Av, thousands of Jabotinsky's followers raised the Zionist movement's flag and chanted that the wall was theirs. For the next ten days, Jews and Palestinians murdered each other in a carnival of brutality whose cruelty was worse because, in many cases, it took place between neighbors. Most of the perpetrators were Palestinians, and most of the victims were Jews, particularly Arabic-speaking Sephardic Jews who rejected offers of protection from the Haganah. But Jews also lynched Palestinians, and one Jewish policeman gunned down an entire Palestinian family. The most notorious massacre took place in Hebron, where a Palestinian mob murdered sixty-seven Jews, among them young Lithuanian yeshiva students and a dozen members of the longstanding Sephardic community. (Hundreds of Jews survived by hiding in the homes of their Palestinian neighbors.)

Photos of the victims' mutilated bodies appeared in the international press.

These murders set off a worldwide explosion of Jewish anguish that quickly morphed into calls for bloody vengeance. With this came a suffocating demand for conformity. Any Jew who sought to understand the causes of the violence was a traitor, an apologist for their people's murders.

Days after the riots, Jabotinsky stood in front of six thousand Jews in Tel Aviv and called for war in the name of Zionism, shouting, “Arabia for the Arabs and the land of Israel for the Jews.” Dissatisfied with the Haganah's alleged restraint, Jabotinsky's followers founded the ultraviolet Irgun, which would murder hundreds of Palestinians in car bombings and mass shootings in the years that followed.

Protests against the Palestine riots broke out immediately in Poland. At Warsaw's British embassy, police dispersed furious crowds at sword point. Jewish shops shuttered, and worshippers flocked to the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, where the rabbi declared an official fast for the victims. Thousands marched under banners that read, the Wailing Wall Will Be Ours. Betar's Polish membership soared, even in tiny Volkovysk, where street mobs chanted, "Jabotinsky was right."

The Bund refused to join this public mourning. They saw too clearly where it would lead. Eternal skeptics of nationalism, the Bund's journalists had covered Palestinian politics with such care that Zionist newspapers called the party “an enemy of the Jews” and claimed it was not a Jewish party but an Arab one. The Bund knew that the British occupation ignored the efforts of Palestinian notables like Musa Kazim Pasha to achieve basic self-determination, as well as the needs and desires of the entire Palestinian population. In 1928, Naye Folkstsaytung covered the seventh Palestine Arab Congress in Jerusalem, which demanded a democratic parliament, an end to the British occupation, and a halt on Zionist immigration. It got nothing.

The Bund had no problem with emigration, to Palestine or elsewhere. Believers in more-or-less open borders, they understood that poor people would always seek better lives where they could. They even ran a bureau to help prospective emigrants deal with the bureaucracies of western Europe and the Americas. The Bund believed that people should live where they wanted, Palestine included. The problem was the Zionist demand for Jewish supremacy.

Days after the riots, the Bundist leader J. Khmurner responded to the anti-Palestinian protests in Naye Folkstsaytung:

Following the latest bloody events in Palestine, the Zionists organized demonstrations of mourning; they used the immediate feelings of hurt and rage that had enveloped the Jewish masses...to deflect the thoughts of the masses from the roots of the tragedy. For this reason, the Bund chose not to participate.... We consider it our duty to the victims in the Land of Israel and to the Jewish masses here to say the whole truth about the events and their causes.... The horrific events show that Jewish labor is absolutely correct to fight against Zionism.... We oppose any nationalism, any chauvinism, be it Arab or Jewish.

The Bund said the same to the three thousand workers who packed into Warsaw's Egyptian-styled Splendid Theatre to hear them talk about “the liquidation of Zionism.” That night, they passed a resolution:

The most important condition for a peaceful life together, for the entire population of Palestine, is the renunciation of the Zionist plan to rule the land against the will of the majority.

Zionists have built all their hopes on stripping away the political rights of Palestine's existing Arab population, who constitute the oppressed majority...and on forcing them from all positions of power.... [Zionists] have stood with every occupying power in Palestine—first Turkey, now England—and have used every means to make sure that Arabs are not granted their most minimal demands for political freedom and self-government. The Arab hatred of the Jewish population is a direct result of Zionist politics. Zionism has poisoned the atmosphere and put the Jewish population of Palestine in danger....

The nationalist demonstrations that Zionists have organized exploit the victims of these tragic events and the understandable upset of the Jewish community.... This meeting calls on Jewish workers to fight the storm of nationalism and chauvinism that Zionists are unleashing on the Jewish Street. The answer to tragically but pointlessly spilled blood cannot lie in more national hatred, which will inevitably lead to more communal clashes, but in international solidarity and the growth of the socialist movement.

To educate its readers, Naye Folkstsaytung published Palestinian perspectives. In one piece reprinted from a Berlin newspaper, an unnamed Arab journalist described how the British high commissioner rejected Palestinian demands for a parliament, and how the occupation shut down every avenue for Palestinian self-expression. He exposed British double standards. When Palestinians tried to hold a peaceful protest in Jaffa, Zionists denounced them to the police as Bolsheviks, but when Jabotinsky toured yeshivas giving far more incendiary speeches, the police looked the other way. "Nothing is more hideous than a bloody civil war, but when an entire population is forced to take up arms, one can't just dismiss it with a quick condemnation. It's rather the duty of every cultured person to examine the causes of this desperate struggle," the journalist wrote.

In “Who Are the Arabs and What Do They Stand For?” Naye Folkstsaytung printed a blistering satire of anti-Palestinian racism:

Arabs are a savage people...proven by the fact that they go around with savage ideas, like needing a parliament.... Arabs discovered the numeral zero, but they don't use it. They can't even understand the simple fact that 100,000 Jews is a bigger number than 700,000 Arabs...

In 1929, Bundist speakers toured Poland, giving hundreds of lectures on Palestinians, Zionism, and the British Mandate. When the Bundist leader G. Zeibert traveled to New York for the Jewish Socialist Federation's national convention later that year, he took the opportunity to denounce the "sentimental mass hysteria" over the Palestine riots, and to place their ultimate blame on political Zionism. The Bund even published a short book by their journalist Yoysef Khmurner titled What Can the Events in Palestine Teach Us? The answer to the title's question was this: By collaborating with the British Empire to suppress Palestinian rights to their own country, Zionists had brought the violence on the entire Jewish community.

The Zionists hit back. In a statement sent from Tel Aviv, Histadrut leader David Ben-Gurion wrote that the Bund gave “ideological justification for robbery and murder” and decried their “filthy partnership” with Palestinian leaders whom he held responsible for the riots. In Vilna, Zionists vowed to fight for “the final elimination of the shameful anti-Jewish microbe” of Bundism, and hooligans attacked a Bundist kehillah member with bats.

In Warsaw, the Zionist daily Haynt decried “Bundism's disgrace.” After having “lost its revolutionary fire,” they wrote, the party tried to justify its existence by “spitting on, undermining, and smearing our heroic builders in the land of Israel” and by siding with Palestinian “pogromists.” They called for Bundists to be expelled from “the table of the Jewish community,” with their funding cut off and their reputation destroyed amongst their American donors. Haynt began a jeremiad against the secular Yiddish tishoh schools where many Bundists taught. The schools raised “enemies of Zion,” Haynt alleged. In other words, self-hating Jews.

Dictatorship

After the American stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, the reverberations devastated the Polish economy. Bristling under Pilsudski's authoritarianism, in June 1930, center and left parties met in Krakow to form a new electoral bloc to oppose the country's descent into dictatorship. Furious at the challenge, Pilsudski dissolved parliament and had fifteen opposition deputies thrown into a concentration camp. Pilsudski's supporters won the next elections, thanks to arrests, censorship, and mild voter fraud.

Pilsudski then “instituted a de facto dictatorship papered over with the appearance of democracy,” wrote Bernard Goldstein. His government viciously repressed the Left. Police confiscated the Bund's newspapers and banned their meetings on phony pretexts. Cops and Endeks battered their marchers each May Day. Bernard planned his marches like military campaigns. Blond Tsukunft girls hung out in Polish neighborhoods before protests, trying to see what the Endeks were up to. Once the march began, Bernard's militiamen were everywhere. They led the protest, trailed behind, filled the neighboring streets. Militiamen on bicycles formed a wall on either side of the marchers. Slavic-looking Bundist men went undercover, mingling with suspicious groups of hooligans. One May Day, Tsukunft member Josef Gutgold saw nationalist students gather in front of Warsaw University to prepare an attack on comrades. Gutgold tricked them into running down a side street.

Government repression drew the Polish Socialist Party and the Bund together. In 1931, the two parties marched together for the first time in a joint May Day parade. The Polish socialists even volunteered to exchange their militias, so that Poles would protect Jewish marchers and Jews would protect Poles. Bernard touchily declined. To earn respect, he said, Jews needed to protect themselves.

Krochmalna Street

In poor Jewish neighborhoods, the Bund were public servants, with an emphasis on servant. They got sick relatives into hospitals and helped small shopkeepers negotiate their back taxes—even if it meant that Henryk Erlich had to leave his desk at Naye Folkstsaytung right before a deadline. The Bund mediated private disputes as well. Did a landlord steal the money his tenants gave him for repairs? The Bund's city councilwoman Esther Iwinska filed a lawsuit. If the butcher stole meat from the slaughterhouse where he worked and ended up in jail, the Bund showed up with bail money and a lawyer. Did some rich kid marry a sex worker, then ditch her with nothing? Comrade Bernard made sure she got a big enough payout to open her own shop. Were the pimps and porters fighting? Comrade Bernard stepped in to make peace. In the Kercelak Market, the Bund defended Jewish vendors from gangers' predations. When a landlord tried to evict a tenant, Bernard's militia was there as well. The guys waited till after the bailiff left, then busted open the doors of the evicted family's old apartment and put their furniture back in place. They told the landlord not to bother filing more eviction suits. They'd just keep coming back.

The Bund launched a campaign to infiltrate Krochmalna Street, a communist stronghold nicknamed the Kremlin. Eternal mud ate Krochmalna's pavement, lapping up against the scabrous flophouse walls and encircling the wretched little plazas where sharpsters like Puny Hannah and Chaim-Yosl Jackass ran their scams. On Krochmalna, a Bundist couldn't even hang their party posters without risking a beatdown. The Bund vowed it would be theirs.

Comrade Bernard recruited local delinquents as his foot soldiers. He saw the potential in them, hidden by mute rage and too much liquor, so he shaped them up and taught them how to read and write. “Without Bernard I would probably have sunk into the underworld,” one of these men later recalled. The Bund opened a Yiddish school in the neighborhood, which ran activities for the children. On summer days, a crooked-shouldered militiaman dubbed Khaskele Hunchback would summon swarms of kids with a single whistle. He marched them to the forest outside Warsaw, where they'd hike all day, then return tanned and sleepy to mothers so grateful that they wished Khaskele eternal life. At the Bund's new Krochmalna Street clubhouse, their activists exposed porters, butchers, and street peddlers to new worlds of literature and art. The men began to read Yiddish newspapers, even books. They became bona fide intellectuals—in their own eyes, at least.

A new problem emerged in the form of Krochmalna wives. Each day, furious women stormed into the Bund's office and demanded to speak to Bernard Goldstein. What the hell had he done to their men? Ever since their husbands joined the Bund, they barely came home, and when they did, they talked to their wives like they were idiots. When Bernard Goldstein suggested they read a bit to keep up with their husbands' interests, the women burst out laughing. Who would have taught them to read?

The Bund began to enlist these women in the party. They taught them to read and encouraged them to escape their domestic prisons by inviting them to meetings and concerts. Their husbands could pick up the slack. “Let him sometimes sit home at night with the children!” said one newly literate housewife. When the men complained, Bernard chided them. Socialists support women's equality, he said. That meant your equality with your wife.

These activities won the Bund so much love that when a group of communists tried to jump Bernard on Smocza Street, nearby housewives threw themselves on top of the attackers, using their brooms as bludgeons, and would have murdered them if the communists hadn't managed to escape.

Red Vienna

In July 1931, three hundred athletes from the Bundist sports club Morgenstern prepared to leave for the third Workers' Olympiad in Vienna. They had spent the last two years saving up money to participate, and it promised to be the trip of a lifetime.

With a hundred thousand athletes and over two hundred thousand spectators, the Vienna Workers' Olympiad dwarfed the official Olympics held the next summer in Los Angeles. Organized by the Socialist Workers' Sport International, these olympiads meant to provide a socialist counterpoint to the “capitalist” Olympic Games. The athletes were all workers, and the focus was world peace, not nationalist competition. Red Vienna was the perfect city to host the games.

In the thirteen years that the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria had run Vienna, they achieved many extraordinary things. They built airy, avant-garde apartment blocks that housed over a hundred thousand workers. They started free cafeterias, public baths, and after-school programs. They cut infant mortality in half. Committed to roses as well as bread, they lavished money on theaters, libraries, workers' education. The charismatic sports instructor Julius Deutsch led their militia, the Schutzbund, which would inspire the Bund's own youth militia.

Not everyone liked Red Vienna. In Austria's conservative countryside, Catholic politicians grumbled that the city's policies were a decadent Jewish plot. Things had gotten worse since the political rise of the failed Austrian painter across the border; the Nazis were now the second-largest party in the German Reichstag. All of this weighed on Bernard as he boarded a railway car that the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party had rented for their athletes. During the overnight journey, young people danced and passed the vodka. Bernard tried to lose himself in their enjoyment.

As the train approached Vienna, Bernard saw red flags hanging from houses along the tracks. A socialist delegation met them at a station done up entirely in red.

The sense of brotherhood shocked him. A hundred thousand workers, from twenty-six nations itching to start stupid border wars, had biked, walked, rowed boats, motorcycled, and crammed into overstuffed train cars to travel to Vienna, and the city welcomed them so warmly that hotelkeepers didn't try to rip them off. Locals opened their homes to foreign athletes. Bernard crashed with a railway worker whose spacious apartment reminded him of the homes of wealthy professionals in Warsaw. His hosts' hospitality disconcerted him. In the morning, the railway worker's wife served him hot cocoa in bed. When he got back from the games, he found his dirty boxers had been washed and pressed.

At the opening ceremony, the Italian flags flew at half mast, to acknowledge Mussolini's attacks on the labor movement. The flag bearers of each nation saluted each other, until the French and German athletes came face-to-face. They paused—tensions were high between their countries—then stepped forward and gripped each other's hands in friendship. Visitors filled their days with bike races, powerlifting competitions, and chess at the famous Viennese cafés. On the last night, three hundred Morgenstern athletes took their place beside the white-clad Czechs and the azure-uniformed Finns in the final torchlight parade. Yiddish banner high, they strode down the grand Ringstrasse, past the baroque edifice of parliament, and chanted the parade's slogans: "For world disarmament! For general peace!" They belonged there, equal in the family of nations.

World disarmament and general peace were the themes of the Congress of the Labor and Socialist International, a grouping of democratic socialist parties that the Bund had joined two years before, and which opened in Vienna right after the 1931 olympiad. Photos show Henryk Erlich next to future French president lee-ohn Blum. He is a bit hunched, as if the present weighs on him. As editor of Naye Folkstsæytung, he kept a close eye on the rise of fascism in Europe, and he was horrified at the seeming obliviousness of Western socialist parties. In his speech at the congress, he saved special ire for the German Social Democratic Party. Where was their sense of fight? he asked. Their independence? Their militancy? Why did they rely on alliances with industrial barons and discredited, centrist politicians whose cruel austerity policies immiserated the workers they were supposed to represent? This sort of spinelessness had already led a chunk of Polish workers to turn to fascism. The same would happen in Germany unless the Social Democrats changed course. They were still the largest party in the Reichstag. They ought to seize power and create a socialist government, before disillusioned workers went over to Hitler for good.

German Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels could barely contain his laughter. The nerve of this Erlich, leader of a powerless little party, thinking he could offer his advice. “It has been barely five months since the 'Bund' found its way into the International, but that is enough for it to act as the schoolmaster of German social democracy,” Wels sneered. The German social democrats had everything under control. They would proceed as they always had throughout their long and glorious history. If it the came time for a fight, Wels condescendingly welcomed the Bund's “assault battalions” to join them.

The University

After the congress, Bernard Goldstein stuck around Vienna to get some tactical training from Red Vienna's militia, the Schutzbund. When he got home, he would need it. The Nazis' victory in the Reichstag elections had stoked the ambitions of Poland's hardcore nationalists. Brutal Polish youth movements sprung up like mushrooms after the rain. Inspired by Hitler's Brownshirts, these young nationalists aimed to strip Jews of their civil rights and evict them from the country. Polish universities became their battlegrounds.

It started that fall semester at the Krakow University, where young nationalist rioters expelled their Jewish classmates. At the University of Warsaw, bat-wielding nationalists drove out Jewish law students in imitation. The Jewish students fought back, helped by Polish socialist friends. The next day, Endeks guarded the gates, promising not to let in a single Jew until the government put harsh limits on their admission to university.

Within a week, riots forced the government to shutter every college in Warsaw. The riots spread to Lomza, Sosnowiec, Poznan, Lviv, and Vilna. In Lowicz, a small town outside Warsaw, high school teachers led their students in the destruction of the Jewish commercial district. With classes canceled, nationalist students lurked around train stations, looking to beat Jewish passengers. They demolished Jewish graves in Sochaczew and ransacked the Jewish library in Pruszkow. In Vilna, Jewish students held back their pogromist classmates by throwing rocks. After a rock killed one nationalist student, his buddies turned his death into a day of mourning. The government arrested hundreds of rioters, but when it came time to press charges, they confined themselves to expelling one Jewish and four Polish students. They were afraid to come out too strongly in defense of Jews, Bernard Goldstein thought. It would make them look bad to their base.

The Bund preferred more direct means of dissuasion. To combat the riots, Bernard inducted hundreds of union guys into his militia. They patrolled parks and swimming spots beside the Vistula River. When nationalist students tried to attack the covered market in Mirowska Square, Comrade Bernard organized hulking porters to greet them.

When the University of Warsaw reopened, nationalist students staked out the right side of their classrooms, forcing Jews to sit on the left, in what they called the “ghetto benches.” At student restaurants, new noticeboards forbade Jews to enter, and after school, nationalist youth donned uniforms to enforce a commercial boycott. They surrounded Jewish shops on Nalewki Street, dragged out the customers, and covered the walls with their posters. don't Buy From Jews. don't Sell To Jews. Poland for Poles. Jews To Palestine.

Nationalist newspapers thanked these students for their service. Endek politicians promised to continue their fight in parliament.

Sophia Dubnova

In the summer of 1932, Sophia Dubnova took her son Victor to visit her parents in Berlin. She had been in the city six years before, when the Bund hired her to make sense of their voluminous archives. Those were the days of fragile Weimar democracy—the fertile moment of monetary inflation, polymorphous sexuality, and political factionalism that most Americans only know from the movie Cabaret—and she had relished them. So had her sons. When it was time for university, Alexander Erlich chose to study in Berlin.

Now, in 1932, she arrived in a different city. The newly legalized Brownshirts filled the streets. Drunk proto-frat boys bonded over the thrill of mob murder, the Brownshirts beat Jews at the subway stations and fought the communist Red Front Fighters with bullets and paving stones. By mid-July, these political clashes had left over a hundred people dead. The cops always took the Brownshirts' side. As for the social democrats, Erlich's comments at the International had been prescient. When President Hindenburg kicked out the Social Democratic leadership of Prussia, Germany's largest state, and installed a conservative aristocrat named Franz von Papen as chancellor, Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels declined to call a general strike. His party's paramilitary, the Iron Front, sometimes fought the Nazis, but communists and social democrats regarded each other as the real enemies. After the July elections, the Nazis were the largest party in the Reichstag.

In the Bund's Berlin offices in a dark little wing of the Social Democratic Party's headquarters at 68 Lindenstrasse, old revolutionaries began to consider skipping town. They'd already fled Soviet Russia. What's a city when you've lost a homeland? Paris looked lovely in the fall. In the Menshevik club down the hall, where Raphael Abramovich now led a powerless, righteous, and argumentative little court, the losers of Smolny were equally pessimistic. In their smuggled proclamations, they still held out the hope they would return to a Russia that needed them. Germany, however, was on its own. In Grunewald, a leafy Berlin suburb, Sophia's father, Simon Dubnov, reluctantly packed his library. After so many moves, he dreaded another displacement.

Sophia and Victor returned to Poland, where Victor prepared to start his first term at the Free Polish University. As usual, the semester began bloodily. A thousand nationalist students crowded into a church to mourn their confrere killed in Vilna the prior autumn. Afterward, they marched on Jewish Warsaw, bludgeoning and stabbing whomever they caught. At Warsaw University, nationalist students screamed, “Revenge yourselves on the Jews!” before they threw their female Jewish classmates out of windows. The government closed the university. When young Bundists and Polish Socialists set up a meeting to plan resistance, the police it shut down.

Worse violence broke out in Lviv, when, during a student-led pogrom, drunk nationalist students decided to pick a fight with Jewish gangsters. One of the gangsters stabbed the student Jan Gratowski in the neck. Sixty thousand Christians marched in Gratowski's funeral procession. During the march, a bomb went off, tearing a nationalist student into pieces. The cause turned out to be a hand grenade the student had illicitly stowed in his pocket, but the mobs blamed the Jews anyway. After that, the city exploded. Batwielding mobs ransacked Jewish stores, placed bombs in the synagogue, and wounded hundreds of people, including a Jewish parliamentarian. Nationalist student riots spread throughout Poland. They persisted into winter, despite the government's efforts at repression. By then, the Bund had another problem to deal with.

Berlin

In November, Germany held elections. The Left was split between social democrats and communists, but together, they had enough seats to form a powerful anti-Nazi block. When the social democrats proposed joining forces, the communists refused. Why should they work with social fascists? They weren't worried about Hitler. A brief stint of Nazi rule would teach the masses their mistake. “After Hitler, our turn!” the communist slogan went. Things were all going according to plan. Champagne corks popped on the first midnight of 1933. At the end of January, Hindenburg appointed Hitler the chancellor of Germany. Hitler may not have been respectable, but he fought communists, and in the eyes of the aristocratic junkers around Hindenburg, that was enough. These serious men were sure they could keep this Nazi clown in check. The social democrats decided that since Hitler had been appointed fair and square, they'd suck it up and wait till the next election, in the name of democracy. When the communists proposed a general strike, the social democrats refused. Why should they work with the party that called them social fascists? One month after Hitler's appointment, on February 27, the crew at the Bund Archives in Berlin would have found their evening interrupted by the smell of smoke. From their windows, they could have looked west, toward the Brandenburg Gate, to see the sky stained a baneful red. If they followed the crowds down to the police cordons, they would have grasped the cause. The Reichstag was on fire.

Chapter I.8 Dangerous Solidarities

(1933 to 1938)

Berlin

N the Night of February 28, when Naye Folkstsaytung's anonymous Berlin correspondent telegraphed his copy to Warsaw, he must have known that a fundamental rupture had taken place between the future and the past. He had seen the Reichstag's glass dome shatter. He watched the flames reach high enough to lick the sky. He had heard the police reports about the communist arsonist they found in the wreckage. Even so, he still would have struggled to convey the speed of everything that followed. In a single day, Hitler convinced Hindenburg to sign a decree suspending civil liberties. The government banned the leftist press. Police arrested hundreds of communists, including every delegate to the Reichstag. Their social democratic foes were next in line, since Hermann Göring archly suggested the fire was a joint plot between the parties. The Social Democratic Party protested the "flood of monstrous accusations," but it did them no good. Police invaded the homes of social democratic politicians, tore the doors off their hinges, and dragged them off along with their families.

Storm troopers ransacked the Social Democratic Party's offices at 68 Lindenstrasse, where the Bund had its archives, while more storm troopers were posted out front.

The Bund's archives, lovingly accumulated since the early days of Exileland, told the story of European socialism in all its eloquence, madness, stupidity, and hope. Everything was there. The Menshevik-Bolshevik split. The collapse of the Second International. The rise of Lenin and Trotsky. This vagrant history lay under the guard of Hitler's Brownshirts. Bundists appealed to the Polish embassy for help, but the ambassador refused to get involved. At last, Erlich's friend, the French socialist lee-ohn Blum, arranged for Paris's Bibliothèque Nationale to purchase the collection. For months, the Bund's archivist, Franz Kursky, snuck into 68 Lindenstrasse through a secret side door and packed the documents into crates.

In his youth, Kursky had liked this sort of cloak-and-dagger mischief. He titled a chapter of his memoir “P & S,” for his two revolutionary must-haves, the fake (P) assort and the false-bottomed (S) uitcase. But in 1933, he was a paranoid fifty-nine, and these were times of terror. Storm troopers made the laws. They could beat a socialist parliamentarian unconscious and burn his feet with a blowtorch to wake him up. Otto Wels, leader of the Social Democratic Party, who had once condescendingly chided Henryk Erlich for his alarmism, went into exile. The Spandau Citadel filled with political dissidents; the cocky communist leader Ernst Thalmann disappeared into the Reich's dungeons. Kursky could easily have been next.

Thanks to a last-minute intervention by the French ambassador, Kursky and his two rail carriages' worth of archives made their way to Paris. Eighty years later, I would run my fingers across the papers he had saved. Archives are a way for the past to speak directly to the present. The fact that I can write this book owes everything to Kursky's courage.

The Naras

As the Brownshirts ravaged Germany, Jews escaped over whatever border they could reach. In Paris, The New York Times interviewed traumatized new arrivals. One man watched storm troopers pull a diner from an Alexanderplatz restaurant and beat his face until it resembled beefsteak. A factory owner's wife presented "bloodstained pajamas and a blood-clotted club" as proof of what she endured. Polish Jews beseeched their consulate for help. Within a few weeks of the Reichstag fire, thousands had returned home, with or without the correct paperwork. Their country didn't welcome them. Peasants rioted, afraid of a Jewish invasion, and Endek parliamentarians agitated against the influx of "German fugitive Jews."

The Endeks were no longer the biggest racists in Poland. They had been supplanted by two breakaway youth groups: the National Radical Camp, nicknamed the Naras, and the even more deranged Falanga. Both groups were comprised of rich kids who dressed in gray military blouses and razor-studded shin guards, the better to slice up their victims. In a single night in 1934, Naras wounded thirty people in a raid on a Jewish library on one side of Warsaw, while on the other side of town, they kidnapped a burly porter—leader of a Bundist battle squad—and beat him to death with iron rods. In Warsaw, the Naras began a new, Nazi-style boycott. Their boys stood in front of the Jewish-owned bookshops on Swietokrzyska Street and passed out pamphlets describing their determination "to clear the country of Jewish parasites," while their girls sang the cheerful ditty "Jews to the Gallows." During Christmas shopping season, Naras lobbed stink bombs into Jewish stores, smashed their windows, pulled their fire alarms, and dragged out their customers. In the old covered markets, they wrecked Jewish stalls, bludgeoned vendors, and declared the place the exclusive property of Poles. At universities around Poland, every semester began with a bloodbath, as nationalist students attacked Jews with rubber cudgels, revolvers, and firecrackers. At Warsaw University, nationalists even beat the dean of history for failing to sympathize with their crusade. After a few weeks of riots, police shuttered the schools. Jewish students were not alone. Polish socialist students rescued their classmates from attacks and passed out antiracist leaflets alongside their Bundist comrades. At the main university in Vilna, in the same room where mobs had beaten Jews the previous semester, the Polish Socialist Party organized an evening of poetry to celebrate Jewish-Polish coexistence. In Warsaw, they deployed their men to fight alongside Bernard Goldstein's militia. When Nara thugs beat up Jews in Saxon Gardens, a hundred Polish and Jewish slaughterhouse workers sent them scurrying back to their own neighborhood, where Polish socialists lay in wait to reinforce the lesson. When the Bund needed unregistered handguns, Bernard turned to the Polish Socialist Party, which had members employed in gun shops around Warsaw. One of these workers would order an extra crate of guns. Just before the shipment arrived at the train station in Danzig, another Polish socialist, employed by an exporter, would snatch the guns off the train and conceal them in a crate of deli meat. The guns proceeded safely to Warsaw.

Bernard Goldstein would have liked a different sort of life. Despite his decades-long career in political violence, he was more sensitive than people thought. He loved kids. He cried at sappy songs. As he got older, he realized that the constant bloodshed had taken its toll on him. He walked around with his hand on his revolver, as if every footstep behind him belonged to a nationalist ready to slip a knife between his ribs. He forced himself not to look back. Toughen up. Get ahold of yourself. You have a job to do. He choked down his fear.

He was broke. The party had never paid him much. Sometimes he had to ask his brother in America for money, just to make ends meet. The only fringe benefit he got was when a rich comrade gave him his old shirts. Warsaw gangsters wooed him with offers whose implications were unstated but obvious. “Can I get you a drink, Bernard?” the gangsters asked. “A suit? You look like a bum, Bernard.” He was human. He wanted drinks and suits. His union buddies thought he should take the gangsters' offers, but he'd been around long enough to know where such compromises led. Yet he couldn't deny the compulsion he felt to accept them. One night, Bernard begged central committee member Noyakh Portnoy to find him another job in the party. The old man patted Bernard on the shoulder and told him he was the only one they could trust to run their army.

Bernard adored art. At the Yiddish literary club, he let the poetry recitations take him away from the brutal present. He liked to lose himself in the theaters around Leszno Street, where the hit play was a true-crime saga by a master thief turned writer named Urke Nachalnik. He preferred the actors at the corner table at Gertner's restaurant to the beery nights at Fat Yosl's tavern where all gangsters liked to hang. It was at Gertner's that he met his closest friend, the Bundist teacher Shloyme Mendelson. Witty and intellectual, married to a glamorous stage actress, Mendelson was the sort of man Bernard wished he'd had the chance to become. But just like every thug wants to be an artist, every artist wants to be a thug. Mendelson had the same fascination with brawlers that Bernard had with playwrights and poets.

After fights, Bernard often retreated to Mendelson's apartment. "Why do I have to be the enforcer?" he asked one night. Why did he have to break bones, stick guns in people's faces. Each time he bemoaned his life, Mendelson reassured him. He was important. He was a fighter for their people. The intellectuals envied him. "If I was tough like you," Mendelson swore, "I'd gladly take your place."

Goebbels

In the summer of 1934, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels visited Warsaw, where Pilsudski received him like the representative of any legitimate government. Months earlier, in January, Poland had signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. Now, when Naye Folkstsaytung criticized Hitler, cops confiscated the issues and threatened to send the editors to a concentration camp. The government also suppressed a movement by the Bund and other Jewish groups to boycott German goods. It would not do to insult a friendly power.

Red Vienna

In February, Austria's dictator, Engelbert Dollfuss, came for Red Vienna. The Social Democratic Party of Austria was the most powerful, militant socialist party in Europe, with tens of thousands of armed workers in their Schutzbund militia. After Hitler rose to power across the border, they swore they would not repeat the German Social Democratic Party's mistakes. If fascists tried to destroy democracy, they would call a general strike and, if necessary, take up arms. Yet when Dollfuss seized power in 1933, the Austrian social democrats sat on their hands, letting him chip away at basic freedoms. They hemorrhaged credibility, and their members drifted away. When fascist paramilitaries tried to break into the Social Democratic Party office in February, the party had finally had enough, and the Schutzbund opened fire. The party called a general strike, but their months of inaction had disillusioned their base, and most workers ignored their order. Pursued by the fascists, Schutzbund fighters barricaded themselves inside Karl-Marx-Hof, one of the avant-garde housing estates that were Red Vienna's most famous achievement. They held off government forces for three days, until Dollfuss brought in the artillery and slaughtered the Schutzbund fighters, along with thousands of workers.

For years afterward, the Bund would elegize the valiant fighters of Red Vienna, but poetry can't change the past. When it was time to use force, the Austrian social democrats hesitated, just like their German counterparts, and so they too lost their country.

The Jewish Labor Committee

On February 25, 1934, days after the fall of Red Vienna, a trio of former Bundists in New York founded the Jewish Labor Committee to help fascism's victims, whether they were Jewish or not.

Despite the Depression, this trio had done well for themselves. David Dubinsky led the powerful International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Baruch Charney Vladeck sat on the board of Mayor La Guardia's housing administration, and Joseph Baskin ran the wildly popular mutual aid society, Workmen's Circle. They represented at least four hundred thousand workers between them. Though they remained socialists, these men were a long way from their insurrectionary pasts. There were no Cossacks in America, no need for jailbreaks or barricades. Through patient organizing, they had built a vibrant union culture, with housing cooperatives in the Bronx and workers' summer resorts. Now they were prominent men in fine suits, New Deal Democrats with a direct line to Roosevelt. The years had faded their scarlet radicalism to a whisper-pink.

The Jewish Labor Committee found their first beneficiary thanks to Abraham Plotkin, an American union organizer unlucky enough to be in Berlin during Hitler's seizure of power. In the chaotic weeks after the Reichstag fire, Plotkin witnessed the brutal Gestapo arrest of his friend, a German union organizer named Martin Plettl. Plotkin had expected such attacks on Jews and communists, but Plettl was a basic-issue Aryan social democrat. Plotkin cabled his friends in the Jewish Labor Committee. After Plettl escaped Berlin to Amsterdam, the Jewish Labor Committee put him on a boat to New York City.

At first, the Jewish Labor Committee stuck to activities like this. They collected money from garment workers, which they used to snatch Europe's trade union aristocracy out of fascist concentration camps. Once they arrived in America, these rescued labor leaders went on lecture tours. Their ticket sales funded the antifascist underground in Europe. But though the Jewish Labor Committee helped many individuals, the American border regime stymied them at every turn. In 1930, Herbert Hoover had radically slashed immigration quotas, then instructed American consulates to issue no more than 10 percent of the meager number of visas allotted to each country. In 1933, the United States accepted less than two thousand immigrants from Germany. Hoover's cruel policy had the support of America's largest union, the American Federation of Labor, which believed that immigrants would steal American jobs. Appeals by Jewish Labor Committee leaders went nowhere. When, at the 1935 American Federation of Labor convention, delegates from Dubinsky's union proposed a resolution to increase quotas for refugees from fascist countries, the federation's leadership shot them down.

The House on Avenue S

As a Workmen's Circle member, Sam Rothbort fell under the aegis of the Jewish Labor Committee, but I don't know what this meant in practice. In the early thirties, he had his own problems. The farm failed, the art market cratered, and he fell behind on his taxes. Luckily, Rose always had more practical sense than her husband. Over the years, she had squirreled away as much as she could from Sam's sporadic paychecks. When the government finally seized their farm in 1934, she used these savings to buy a house in Brooklyn, at 823 Avenue S.

When I was a child, my great-aunt Ida still lived in the Rothbort home. Every detail of the place evoked a shabby old-world artistry, from the blintzes that Ida baked to Rose's ceramic pitchers to the whimsical stained glass Sam made from broken beer bottles. I loved it in my blood and bones. My great-grandparents' home became my aesthetic lodestar, whose resonances I pursued through underground bookstores and artists' lofts around the world.

In those years, I would sit at the picture window and stare out at the garden, a riot of magnolias, snapdragons, and bowing golden sunflowers that Rose used to arrange into still lifes for Sam to paint. I would descend into the basement that smelled like turpentine, where Ida stored Sam's sculptures. Stored is the wrong word, though, for they didn't sit passively but lurked and haunted, like a family of minotaurs carved from wood and stone. Sam's brush still lay in a congealed pool of safflower oil, surrounded by tubes of hand-ground pigment. Perhaps a thousand paintings lined the walls. Two hundred self-portraits, many of them costumed, displayed a talent for disguise he first learned in the underground then honed at the masked balls for the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union, but which would never suffice for the art world to accept him. Sam still sold paintings in the 1930s, though each year his work fell further out of fashion as tastes turned toward abstraction and modernism. He hung at the Brooklyn Museum sometimes, or in the Caz-Delbo Gallery, run by another eastern European Jew who had transited through Geneva's Exileland. He painted murals. His younger son, Lawrence, also wanted to be an artist.

When I was a little girl, I played in the garden with my cousins Barry and Meesha. Barry and I drifted apart over the years, but we reconnected decades later. We sat on the couch in my apartment, not far from the South Williamsburg neighborhood where Sam and Rose made their first home. Barry laid out a stack of black-and-white photographs he had found when clearing out his father's apartment after his death. He wanted me to help identify the people in them.

I looked at a photo of Rose Rothbort and my great-aunt Ida, standing on a boardwalk. Rose seemed to be in her thirties, a bit heavy in the jowls but still attractive in her dark-eyed, pouty way. Ida was a gold-haired sprite of seven or eight. On the back of the photo someone had written: “Coney Island.”

Sam Rothbort loved Coney Island. He visited it from his first days in New York. Come June, he could ride the train to Mermaid Avenue, where the tenement dwellers stripped off their clothes and plunged into the gray Atlantic. As a young man, he would mingle beneath the thousand domes, spires, and minarets of the brand-new Luna Park. He would turn the gambling wheel, each spoke a sea lion's head, to try, but fail, to win a prize, then stuff some cotton candy in his mouth as consolation. It was the old market of Volkovysk, with its fire-breathers and acrobats, its violent peasants now transformed by the American gospel of More. He returned each summer with the family and immortalized its pleasure palaces in his paintings.

Every year, he walked by the shore. The ocean stretched before him. If he followed the water to its endpoint, he would have reached Europe, the bloody continent whose union bosses the Jewish Labor Committee now fought to save. How many Europeans would soon throw themselves into the waves? Around him jostled the denizens of New York's megalopolis. They were the lower class of everywhere, born in a thousand warring places, but here, they fought over nothing more consequential than a spot of sand. In this democratic gathering spot, this place of bare bodies and easy solidarity, the storm gathering in Germany must have seemed terribly far away. How could he have imagined that the ravings of a clown with a bristle mustache would ever touch his birthplace?

Driftwood lay on the shore. Sam picked up a piece. The driftwood had come from a tree, he thought, chopped down in some country on the other side of the ocean. It could have been his Zamkov forest. Like him, it had traveled across the world only to wash up, discarded, on this dirty beach. No matter. He was an artist. Even in trash he saw the glowing filaments of divinity, to be revealed by his chisel. He stroked the driftwood, looking for stories hidden in the grain.

Sophia Dubnova

In 1934, Sophia Dubnova had just turned fifty, and the family was together again. German universities had expelled their Jewish students, so her eldest son, Alexander, returned from Berlin to join his brother, Victor, at the progressive Free Polish University in Warsaw.

With her boys grown, she was also a writer in search of a muse. She found it in the blossoming feminist movement of thirties Poland. Intellectuals like Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski challenged the taboos of conservative Catholic society to demand secular divorce and gender equality. The Society for Conscious Motherhood advocated for a woman's right to use birth control and abortion as she saw fit. Sophia Dubnova decided to bring these ideas into the Bundist press.

Her articles on the ethics of love and sex caused an immediate sensation amongst party youth, especially young women. These girls had come of age with a level of freedom unimaginable to their mothers. They had ostensible, if imperfect, legal equality. Many studied at coed schools. Orthodox Judaism remained patriarchal, but steely young women could still get jobs, escape home, ditch arranged marriages, and raise their kids themselves. Girls comprised half of Tsukunft's membership. These boys and girls hiked together and argued at meetings together, and both got black eyes in university brawls. Together, they filled the cramped rooms of the Bund's club, tramped up steps polished by footfalls, and flirted across tables filched from the party's wartime soup kitchen. In the back rows of the Fame movie theater across the courtyard, teenagers could paw each other like they just invented sex. Darkness kept their secrets.

The Bund was never a feminist paradise. What was, in 1934? Most Bundist bigwigs were men. In interwar Poland, women made up a smaller share of leadership than they had in the days of the tsar. Tsukunft girls often complained that their male comrades talked over them at meetings, that they stuck them with grunt work, or that made dumb comments about their bodies. The important thing was this: girls and boys were in the same room, no partition between them. This closeness forced them to see each other as humans. They flirted awkwardly, broke things off clumsily, and used ideology to paper over heartbreak, but all the while, they were discovering something unprecedented: the prospect of love between equals.

Sophia Dubnova began to receive invitations to speak at Tsukunft meetings. After her talks, the girls jostled to tell her their problems, grateful that they could speak frankly, without shame. They were tough. Many of them had worked in factories since their early teens, and they had no patience for the failings of their male comrades. The boys talked a big game, they said, but they behaved like pigs. They skulked away after sex or, worse, acted like they owned them. Years later, Sophia recalled a spirited teenager named Gutka. After accidentally becoming pregnant, Gutka procured an illegal abortion with Sophia's help. The operation was painful, and Gutka had no desire to sleep with her boyfriend afterward. He reacted poorly, whining, wheedling, and screaming blue balls, until he made himself so thoroughly unattractive that Gutka broke off their relationship. That might have been the end of things, except that Gutka's boyfriend was also a member of Tsukunft. His friends, her male comrades, barraged her with lectures on her bourgeois callousness. How could she cut off a poor boy's "social energy?" They were Marxists. From each according to her ability to each according to his need.

Sophia covered these sorts of dramas for the Bund's youth newspaper. Soon her desk was filled with invitation letters from Tsukunft groups in shtetls across Poland. On Fridays, just before sunset, her rickety bus would pull up to a market square that smelled of horseshit and tar. Shabbos candles glimmered in the windows. It could have been Volkovysk of forty years prior, and Itka the Bundist might have listened to her speak. Sophia lectured in Polish (her Yiddish was never strong) about modernist literature, revolution, and a woman's right to orgasm, to halls packed with kids so eager for life that they could have cracked open the world. Afterward, they would crowd around Sophia with more questions, grab her arm, and conduct her over to a party in someone's attic. She would always remember how "excited young voices crisscrossed.... Little tongues of flame leapt up from person to person, and the whole attic was humming and sizzling like dry birch bark set aflame, throwing into the dark, dense night of the shettl the voices' challenge and yearning."

Afterward, she sometimes received messages from the provincial administration forbidding her to speak on topics that threatened the borders—political or sexual—of the Polish state.

It was not an easy time. Letters from her brother in Moscow stopped, and issues of Soviet literary journals grew thinner as the names of her favorite writers disappeared. Money was tight. Henryk worked as a defense attorney to make ends meet, but he spent much of his time helping imprisoned communists (he loathed their ideas but would defend their right to express them) who obviously had little money to pay him. Otherwise, they had only his small salary from Naye Folkstsaytung. They plugged on. The couple wrote side by side. He sweated words and syntax like she did. He also chased the perfect sentence. Together, they were happy. They understood each other and loved each other, in the mature, steady way of people who have spent many years together but have been deprived of each other's company often enough to still feel lucky to have each other for however long they do.

The Death of Pilsudski

In April 1935, Poland passed a new constitution that did away with the last vestiges of parliamentary democracy. A new election law made it nearly impossible for opposition parties to nominate legislative candidates. The president would appoint the prime minister and dissolve the parliament whenever he saw fit.

All of this would have been bad enough under Pilsudski, but the old marshal was wasting away with stomach cancer. He died on May 12, 1935. Crowds lined up to watch his funeral cortege pass by on the way to the Archcathedral of Saint John, where his coffin lay in state for two days, as befitted the father of modern Poland. Afterward, Bundist newspapers printed blunt assessments of Pilsudski's legacy. Police confiscated the issues. But however critical our Bundists were, they must have guessed this was the end of a tarnished golden age. Everything was about to get much worse.

Like many men who believe themselves indispensable, Pilsudski died without nominating an heir. He left that to a quartet of colonels, led by Edward Rydz-Smigly, a dimwitted military man whose main qualifications were his square jaw and his chest full of medals. Confronted with a brutal economic crisis but lacking even a smidgen of Pilsudski's charisma, Poland's leaders turned to racist demagoguery to shore up their power. From now on, antisemitism would be an official policy of the state.

The Countryside

The countryside was ready to boil. Since the first days of Poland's independence, every successive government had promised the peasants land. Yet, after fifteen years, most farmland remained concentrated in aristocratic estates, and the poor farmers who made up most of the population found their holdings ever more inadequate.

In traditional rural society, peasants and Jews lived together in a symbiotic coexistence that seldom translated to warmth. Peasants brought their crops to shetel markets, where petty traders like my great-great-grandmother Chaya Ruchl bought their wheat and fixed their shoes and sold them vodka. The traders always seemed slightly better off than the peasants, in the same way an immigrant bodega owner always seems slightly better off than his customers. The differences in class might have been minute, but they caused resentments far more violent than those felt toward aristocrats or millionaires in distant Warsaw. The most passionate hatreds are always intimate ones. All of this gave the nationalists an opportunity.

Forget the landlords, the nationalists said. Forget the aristocrats and the millionaires in Warsaw. Your real oppressor is the hunched little man in his market stall who sews the lining into your coat each winter. Jews charge too much. They rig their scales. They cheat you with bad merchandise. They own wooden stalls and battered workbenches that should rightfully be yours. Also, they killed Jesus.

To combat nationalist incitement, the Bund enlisted the local branches they had in hundreds of shtetls around Poland. Despite police repression, they passed out over a million Polish-language pamphlets explaining how antisemitism was a tool of the rich to divide and conquer. Their youth groups hiked out to villages each Sunday, where they picked crops, cooked in soup kitchens, and made friends with local peasants. But these efforts were no match for a well-funded hate campaign that was supported by the government, ignored by the police, and backed by the Catholic Church.

On March 9, 1936, a pogrom broke out in Przytyk, a town too poor to even afford vowels. As was often the case, it happened on a market day. The peasants, drunk and exhausted, had sold their crops for prices that felt too low. The Jews, impoverished and tax-burdened, had tried to strike sharp deals. Everyone was irritable, suspicious, and acting their worst. In Przytyk, it started with a shoving match—and probably would have ended there as well, if a group of nationalists hadn't spent the past week distributing pamphlets with the charming counsel, "Hit! Hit steadily! Do not be afraid of blood!" That day, a thousand peasants descended on Przytyk's Jewish stalls, where they hacked the shoemaker Josek apart with axes and bludgeoned his wife, Chaya, to death. Police arrested Jews who tried to resist; courts would sentence one defender to eight years' imprisonment.

The pogrom horrified Polish Jews because of everything that it seemed to foreshadow. A song by the Bundist poet Mordechai Gebirtig captured their mood.

And you stand there looking on

With few-tul, folded arms

And you stand there looking on—

While our village burns!

The Bund called a half-day general strike, with the support of the Polish Socialist Party. It would not be merely against the murders but against fascism, and not just for Jewish rights but for the rights of everyone to work, bread, and freedom. On March 17, just after sunrise, Bernard Goldstein's militia spread through Warsaw's commercial districts. "Shut it down," they hollered, and the traders complied. Shutters clanked. Bolts locked. Teamsters bellowed, “We're going home.” Bundist union reps fanned out across the factories and workshops to spread the order. Jewish students stayed home, despite their administrators' threats. The Praga slaughterhouses ground to a halt as Christian workers heeded the Polish Socialist Party's call for a walkout. By eleven, Warsaw's Jewish quarter had transformed into a mass protest, centered on the Bund club's courtyard. The same scene repeated in every Jewish neighborhood in towns across Poland. The strike succeeded beyond the Bund's wildest hopes, associating their name forever with the willingness to fight back.

More pogroms followed, in more immiserated shetels across Poland. Mobs emptied towns of their Jewish populations. A report by the Joint Distribution Committee (a New York-based relief organization that aided impoverished Jewish communities around the world) summed it up like so:

These bands of cutthroats are sent around from town to town to break the windows of Jewish stores and ransack the goods, break up their stands and pushcarts in the market places, break human heads, arms and legs, and when their job is done in one town, they take a train to the next.... The police disappear and the Jews are left to the mercy of the armed mob. When the goods and wares are destroyed, some heads broken, some arms and legs maimed, the police appear and say, “Time is up, boys.”

The party sent Bernard around the country to organize self-defense. In dingy Minsk Mazowiecki, he won a minor victory. After Endeks lit a Jewish house on fire, the flames spread to nearby Polish homes. Without thinking, Bernard ran into a burning building to rescue an elderly Polish woman abandoned in the flames. Once he had brought the woman to safety, he mounted a roof and began barking orders to form a bucket brigade. His actions shocked the Polish onlookers out of their trance. Why was this Jew helping Poles? They began to listen to the whispers of their socialist neighbors, who pointed out that the Endeks, not Jews, had started the fire that now consumed their homes. What those neighbors said might as well have been a metaphor. Jews and Poles lived side by side. Their fates were intertwined. If one burned, the other would burn with them.

Mendele the King

Bernard ran from town to town putting out both literal and metaphorical fires. In September he was in Lodz, where Endek leaflets appeared warning Jews not to vote in the next municipal election. It was no empty threat; nationalists had murdered five Jews since the year began, and when Bernard arrived, the air felt edgy and sour. In the shabby wood streets of the Baluty neighborhood, he saw shattered market stalls and merchants with black eyes.

Bernard had brought with him sixty militiamen from Warsaw. This was nowhere near enough to secure an election, even with backup from his comrades in Lodz. Reluctantly, he called an old acquaintance from the Jewish mafia, nicknamed Mendele the King. The wizened little mob boss was not a politically conscious man, to say the least, but he agreed with Bernard's argument that the Jews of Lodz should not be fucked with—at least, not by people other than him. When Election Day came, hundreds of Mendele's men spread throughout the city, eager to assure that every citizen could cast a ballot, regardless of their ethnicity. They carried steel bats and revolvers in case anyone was inclined to disagree. The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party won the municipal elections. They ruled Lodz together for five months, until the government dissolved the city council.

Moscow

Outside Poland, the world moved on. History progressed. Each second fell, one after the other, like water droplets, until they accumulated into a sea.

In 1936, a grandiose series of show trials rocked the convictions of the worldwide Left. The defendants were Grigori Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and other members of the original Bolshevik elite that had helped Lenin orchestrate the October Revolution, then construct the Soviet state.

The trials sprang from the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, an affable communist bureaucrat who was the closest that Stalin had to a friend. Police caught Kirov's murderer immediately, but Stalin refused to believe that the mentally ill nonentity had acted alone. Instead, he blamed his most hated enemy, Leon Trotsky, who was still scribbling away in exile. Worse, Stalin thought, Trotsky couldn't have acted alone. Stalin imagined a conspiracy that reached the highest echelons of the Soviet state. The purges that followed consumed thousands of people, including Moishe Rafes, David Petrovsky, Esther Frumkin, and almost every other Bundist who had joined the communists during the killing years of the Russian Civil War. Security services arrested Lenin's closest intimates. Zinoviev and Kamenev disappeared into secret prisons. When they reappeared two years later, on the docket of the gracelessly named Trial of Trotskyite-Zinovievite Terrorist Center, Zinoviev and Kamenev were broken men. Tortured and terrified for their families' lives, they confessed to every charge put in front of them. Yes, they were diseased, decayed, and perverted terrorists, sex pests, and gluttons, Nazi spies and agents of Trotsky. Yes, they caused famines. Yes, they sabotaged industries. Yes, they killed Kirov. Yes, they conspired to murder Comrade Stalin. Yes, they deserved to be shot (which they were, immediately after their trial). At the show trials that followed, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, and other old Bolsheviks denounced themselves in similarly sensational terms. The Bund's leaders might have hated the defendants, but they never doubted their innocence. They had known each other for too long. Bundists and Bolsheviks had grown up together in Exileland. They had scrapped and mocked and loathed each other, but they came from the same vanished world. In his coverage of the trial for Naye Folkstsaytung, Viktor Alter took note of one old Bolshevik missing from the docket—Trotsky himself. The arrogant young fugitive in yellow shoes who had once interrupted Medem's lecture in Karlsruhe, the orator king of the Saint Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the roving war journalist who became the most popular man in newborn Soviet Russia, Lenin's heir apparent.

If, today, they want to shoot Raphael Abramovich, tomorrow they'll want to shoot Trotsky, Medem had predicted in 1918, when Trotsky was at the height of his power. Where was Trotsky in 1936? Expelled from the party, exiled from the country he helped found. He lived under house arrest in frozen Norway, hunted by Stalin's spies. In Viktor Alter's words, "a helpless refugee."

Alter had a brother, a bon vivant named Jean Arens who had risen far in the Soviet state. When the purges began, Arens lived in New York, ostensibly as a journalist. Moscow summoned him back. On the way home, he passed through Warsaw to see his family. Alter begged him to stay in Poland, but Arens refused, and the conversation devolved into a political argument so bitter that their mother had to separate the men. As Jean Arens's train pulled out of the Warsaw station, Alter screamed after it: "Confess nothing!"

The Soviet secret police arrested Arens shortly after his arrival. He disappeared.

The droplets accumulate.

Drip, drip, drip.

Camp of National Unity

In February 1937, top Polish politician Colonel Adam Koc announced a new pro-government organization: the Camp of National Unity, or ozon. An Endek rehash in a flashy new fascist skin, ozon based its ideology on Catholicism, Anti-Communism, Army Worship, and Massive Torchlight Parades. Poland was for Poles, ozon said, not its three-and-a-half-million Jewish citizens, whose culture ozon's leader, Boguslaw Miedziński, described as “disgusting and ridiculous, [based on] sorcery and superstitions, recalling the practices of Asiatic shamans or black chieftains from the African jungle.” Jews should be stripped of citizenship, denuded of their assets, and expelled. The government even tried to set up deals with France to ship Polish Jews to Madagascar. (The Malagasy were not consulted.)

The government levied new taxes on Jewish artisans; by 1939, Jews, who made up 13 percent of Poland, would pay 40 percent of the country's taxes.

When the government banned kosher slaughter, the Bund organized general strikes, despite their own atheism.

The government stepped up efforts to ruin Jewish businesses. “We must spare no effort to Polonize the main branches of the national economy,” said Colonel Jan Kowalewski of ozon. They stripped Jews of trading licenses. Professional associations introduced bylaws restricting membership to “Aryans.” Signs went up around the country urging Poles not to buy from Jewish stores.

The Catholic Church supported the boycott. The Polish Cardinal August Hlond told his flock that Jews constituted “the advance guard of a godless life, of the Bolshevik movement, and of subversive action.... Jews are embezzlers and usurers, and they engage in the white slave traffic.”

None of this was enough to satisfy the far-right Falanga, who demanded laws modeled on those that the Nazis passed at Nuremberg. Jews should be denied the vote, kicked out of the army, banned from Polish companies, forbidden employ or work for Poles, and finally, entirely eliminated from the country. A few months later, ozon made Falanga an official youth-movement affiliate.

Encouraged by official indulgence, nationalist youth gangs proclaimed “Jew-free days” at universities, when they attacked any Jewish student who dared approach their campus. In a single day at a single school in Warsaw, they put twelve Jewish students in the hospital. Their leaflets read, “When you see a Jew, knock his teeth out. Don't waver even if it's a woman.... The only thing to be regretted is that you didn't hit hard enough.”

Once authorities closed the schools, nationalist students left the cities to spread the riots to their hometowns. Nationalist bombs demolished homes and shops and shook the Katowice synagogue. “Here and there, a Jew is beaten to death,” reported The New York Times.

One morning, huge white letters went up on the wall around Volkovysk's Catholic Church: the Jew Is the Enemy! Do Not Buy From Jews!

Everyone knew who was responsible. The author of those words was a well-heeled pharmacist named Hugon Tyminski, who held nationalist meetings at his swish shop at 13 Pierackiego Street. Tyminski and his friends often picketed the Jewish shops on Broad Street, shouting slurs, smashing windows, and beating whoever looked like an easy target. Tyminski was only the most enthusiastic representative of the zeitgeist. Over the last few years, ozon's campaign against the Jews had transformed Volkovysk. Jewish shops went bankrupt and were replaced by Christian businesses. Market stalls shuttered. Young people lucky enough to get papers departed for Palestine or America. Others chose to stay. And to fight. In *The Bund in Pictures*, I found a photo titled, "The Tsukunft Youth Militia in Volkovysk." Fourteen young men and three young women pose in quasi-military garb, with expressions of barely suppressed ferocity. They bear little resemblance to Sam's comrades of 1906. There are no peasant blouses. No dreamy looks. The young people in the photo are serious, and distinctly modern. To learn more about them, I turned to *The Volkovysk Memorial Book*, which identifies the leader of the group as Yankel Rubinstein, son of a locksmith. He looks proper in his suit and glasses, but his thin, righteous face makes him resemble an aspiring Trotsky. His dark girlfriend, Chana Irmess, glares at the camera like she could kill. In another photo, taken at the local Bundist school, sullen boys and girls pose beneath a marvelous painted banner of a falcon transforming into a woman's face. On it was written: We Belong To the Future. Avram Markus, editor of the Bund's defunct local newspaper, was still an active party worker in 1937, despite a stint in a Polish prison. His family lived austerely and hosted itinerant leftists in their humble home. Avram refused to hire employees for his small tannery, since he didn't want to exploit the labor of others, and so he exploited the labor of his son Shlomo to keep things going. He must have worried about Shlomo, whose ambition and talent bridled against the boundaries the state created to stifle Jewish youth. Racist quotas kept Shlomo out of Polish universities, so he studied medicine in Italy. When he returned to Volkovysk, the government refused to recognize his degree, or to allow him to take an examination to prove his knowledge. Unable to practice medicine, Shlomo helped his father at the tannery and volunteered at the Jewish hospital when he could. Around this time, he began dating Nechama Schein, who was from a wealthy Zionist family. The couple became self-righteous, dogmatic communists.

Palestine

In the Zionist movement, the Polish government found a loyal ally in their plans for ethnic cleansing.

During the same years that the Polish government supported fascist youth gangs terrorizing Jewish neighborhoods, they provided machine guns, Mauser rifles, and military training to three Zionist militias in Palestine—the Haganah, which secretly answered to David Ben-Gurion; Jabotinsky's Irgun; and the fascist Lehi militia—even though all three groups had already murdered countless Palestinians. Prospective fighters signed pledges to leave Poland immediately after training. They could not use their skills to defend their own communities.

During the same years that the Polish government demanded the expulsion of three million Jewish citizens, Jabotinsky toured the country calling for their “evacuation,” a fine distinction that the Bund didn't appreciate. When Jabotinsky spoke in Vilna, the Bund was there to picket the man they called “the spiritual father of Jewish fascism.” “We are citizens with equal rights in this country!” their pamphlets read. “We shall fight for work and for bread, for life and for rights here in Poland! We do not wish to escape from Poland! We shall not permit charlatans to speak in our name!”

In 1937, the Bund had another reason to shun Zionism: Palestine was on fire. The efforts of well-heeled notables like Musa Kazim Pasha had done nothing to gain Palestinians' political rights, nor to stop Zionist land purchases and the subsequent expulsions of Palestinian farmers. As if to underscore their indifference to Palestinian opinion, British police beat Musa Kazim Pasha to death in 1933 at a protest in Jerusalem. The situation grew more volatile after Hitler's ascension to power, when 164,000 new Jewish immigrants flocked to the only place on earth that would accept them. Just as the Bund warned, Zionist politics had poisoned the air, and Palestinians didn't welcome their arrival. These Jews may have been refugees fleeing imminent murder, but for Palestinians, they transformed into colonizers the moment they disembarked at Haifa Port. In 1936, Palestinians declared a general strike to protest the Mandate, Jewish immigration, and the unequal wages paid to Palestinian workers. Within six months, it grew into the Great Palestinian Revolt. This armed uprising targeted the British, Zionist institutions and wealthy Palestinians branded as collaborators.

This time around, Naye Folkstsæytung was cooler toward the rebels, whom they often referred to as terrorists. I chalk this up to the fact that the new immigrants were not the ideological settlers of prior years but brutally persecuted people with nowhere else to go. The Bund also had little time for pan-Arab nationalism, which they held in the same low esteem as they did the Jewish sort. They knew that the beliefs of the oppressed can be just as dangerous as those of their oppressors if power should happen to shift. As Henryk Erlich wrote in 1933:

If Jewish nationalism, as a general rule, is not bloodthirsty, this is only out of necessity, not virtue; if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations.

To be sure, Jabotinsky is nothing more than a small-scale Hitler, a fascist clown.... Of course, Jabotinsky's brown-shirt soldiers are nothing more than a tragicomic caricature of Hitler's S.A people. But the only thing missing in order for them to become the same beasts is some muscle strength, some territory, and a political opportunity....

No, we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all the other nations.

The Bund placed the ultimate blame for the revolt on the Zionist movement, which, as Naye Folkstsaytung wrote in 1937, “has taken it upon itself to settle people in a home that is for the most part occupied by others, in order to take control of all of it with the assistance of the house superintendent." To illustrate the reality for its readers, Naye Folkstsaytung laid out Zionism's more quotidian cruelties. In one piece, a writer described how Zionists beat a Palestinian girl who dared to sell milk in Tel Aviv, and how a driver threw an upper-class Egyptian Jew off an autobus after confusing him with a Palestinian.

For the Bund, Zionists were ideological twins of the same people trying to force Jews out of Europe. Preserved in yivo's collection of youth autobiographies, I found the testimony of a girl who had briefly joined a Betar youth group. “[The speaker] keeps saying we have to kick out the Arabs, [but] they are also human beings.... People also want to kick Jews out from every country in the exact same way and deny them the capability of living,” she wrote. She soon left to join Tsukunft.

Warsaw

One May Day, Bernard Goldstein stood on Gliniana Street, watching the Bund's parade pass by. Suddenly, a crash. Black smoke filled the air, followed by pistol shots, screams, and groans. When the smoke cleared, Bernard saw a woman bent over her toddler. "Avremele!" she howled. The boy had a bullet hole through his chest.

Police didn't find any suspects. The government forbade the little boy's family to give him a funeral.

To avenge Avram Shenker's murder, Goldstein's group linked up with the Polish Socialist Party to raid a posh restaurant frequented by Nara journalists. When Bernard walked in, the journalists' heads swiveled. Their silken companions gasped.

That year's hit song was "Suicide Tango." Mieczysław Fogg might have crooned from the gramophone: Give me this one Sunday, the last Sunday, and...then let the world fall apart.

The journalists lunged for Bernard. His friends rushed in, swinging their steel clubs. When they left a half hour later, the restaurant lay in ruins.

Bernard's suit was stained with blood and good champagne.

Spain

Ever since July 1936, when General Francisco Franco launched a military uprising against the elected government of Spain, the worldwide Left had been riveted by the peninsula. Naye Folkstsæytung reported every development of the first European war between socialism and fascism. The Spanish government appealed to Western democracies for military aid, but the self-described free world was not interested in another war and declared an arms embargo against both sides. Hitler and Mussolini had no such scruples. The pair lavishly supported Franco. Desperate, the Spanish government turned to the Soviet Union. Stalin was only too happy to oblige. Comintern agents from as far afield as Puerto Rico and China recruited fighters to defend the Spanish Republic. Most volunteers for the International Brigades were communists, but others joined as well: anarchists, socialists, and unaffiliated idealists of the sort immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Several Bundists enlisted, including Beniak Livshitz, a Tsukunft militia member from Warsaw. The brigades were a place of dazzling diversity, where Ali Abdel Khalaq, a Palestinian communist from Jerusalem, could join the Yiddish-speaking Naftali Botwin Company; where Chicago's Oliver Law could become the first Black man to lead white Americans as the commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; where Baghdadi Jew Setty Abraham Horresh could lay his arm over the shoulder of Mack Coad, the grandson of slaves from Alabama. Spain seemed like the furnace in which a new antifascist brotherhood could be forged. It thrilled Viktor Alter, whose migratory, multilingual background had made him an internationalist to the core. As he wrote in his book The Jewish Question in Poland, Jews' “liberation can only be a side product of the universal freeing of all oppressed peoples.” In Spain he hoped to see this liberation in action. In April 1937, Alter was in Paris for a labor conference with his friend the Polish socialist Antoni Zdanowski. The pair decided to take a detour to the Spanish front.

The war seemed far away as Alter and Zdanowski crossed the snow-capped Pyrenees. At the border city of Puigcerdà, armed workers greeted them with shouts of “Camarada!” In anarchist Barcelona, Alter saw a city in the midst of collective self-reinvention. The C.N.T, an anarcho-syndicalist trade union, ran the taxis, and workers committees took over the hotels. The famous Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset showed Alter around a palace that activists had converted into a shelter for homeless kids. Workers learned to shoot—not just men, but milicianas—housewives, sex workers, and factory girls who battled Catholic conservatism to insist that this was their revolution, that they would never be subservient again. Viktor Alter fell in love with wartime Barcelona. Its magic let him ignore the darker currents that pulsed beneath that city's surface—the fratricidal contradictions between an anarchist population and their Soviet backers. Along with the weapons and military advisors that the Soviets gifted the beleaguered republic, they also sent spies, informants, and torturers from the N.K.V.D—the Soviet secret police. Alter's nephew, a leftist radio engineer working for the Spanish Republic, had already survived several N.K.V.D interrogations. Just weeks before Alter's arrival, Raphael Abramovich's son, the journalist Mark Rein, had vanished in Barcelona. Years later, the Bund learned that the N.K.V.D kidnapped and murdered Rein on Stalin's orders.

In Valencia, Zdanowski and Alter drank sherry with Prime Minister Francisco Largo Caballero, who begged them to convince Western democracies to lift their arms embargos. In besieged Madrid, the pair learned to tolerate bombardment. One afternoon, a shell exploded in Plaza del Sol. Shrapnel hit the man beside them. He bled out before their eyes.

One photo remains of Alter and Zdanowksi's trip, taken in the small town of Cabanillas del Campo, an hour outside Madrid. It shows the two men surrounded by filthy fighters from the Dabrowski Battalion, sprawled on the Spanish earth. Alter squints as if unaccustomed to such sunlight.

One night, Alter sat in a posh hotel with the Italian socialist Pietro Nenni. "Every revolution is a series of moments, both sublime and base," Nenni told him. "When we look at a revolution up close, it may sometimes seem to us that the repulsive moments come to the fore. But when we look at it from another perspective, of time, space and thought, we see its beauty."

Alter had the opportunity to reflect on Nenni's words as he traversed the country interviewing anarchists, socialists, and communists for a book he published under the title Spain in Flames. When he got back to Warsaw, he organized a week of solidarity with Spain, notwithstanding the smears of pro-government newspapers rabid over the photo he took with fighters at Cabanillas del Campo. Bundist sources claim he organized secret weapons shipments for the Republic.

Warsaw

Back in Poland, the government increased its attacks on the Bund. They confiscated more issues of the group's newspapers. In the Naye Folkstsæytung archive, white bars appear on the pages—the work of an energetic censor. That summer, when three hundred Morgenstern athletes applied for passports to attend the Workers' Olympiad in Antwerp, the government refused without explanation. At Warsaw City Hall, nationalist students shouted slurs at the Bundist councilmen from the public galleries; Alter and Erlich left work surrounded by bodyguards.

That summer, nationalists carried out hundreds of assaults against Jews. Nationalists descended on Saxon Gardens, where they threw Jews in the lake, clubbed Jewish mothers, and kicked over baby carriages. In September, hundreds of Falanga members blockaded Warsaw's Jewish neighborhood during the Sukkos holiday, until Jewish and Polish workers drove them off. Naras rigged an I.E.D in the office of a Jewish newspaper and threw a bomb on one of the city's busiest streets. The government banned newspapers from reporting on the attacks.

The Bund plastered Warsaw with handbills: Do Not Let Them Drive You From the Streets!

On the evening of September 26, two bullets blasted through the walls of the Bund's headquarters on Dluga Street, narrowly missing the head of their secretary Shoshke Erlich. A few seconds later, Bernard Goldstein heard a boom. The windows shattered and the rooms filled with suffocating smoke. Shoshke and Bernard ran into the hallway, where they saw the building's foyer in flames. As the attackers fled, they had fired their pistols, injuring three Bundists and the wife of the building's handyman.

Everyone knew it was the Naras.

Vengeance

A few nights later, Bundist tailor Hyman Freeman joined dozens of Jewish and Polish workers outside Luksenburg Gallery, a modernist shopping arcade in central Warsaw. The men packed into automobiles. They passed around brass knuckles and pipes. Through the car window, Freeman would have seen a city that he was too poor to enter, full of bright lights, London suits, and shiny cabarets. The cars stopped near an elegant apartment building at 17 Bracka Street, where the Naras had their headquarters. The workers disembarked and creeped to the entrance. Freeman could hear laughter from inside.

Two Polish socialists found the building's circuit box, flipped it open, and cut the wires. The building plunged into darkness.

Freeman and his comrades stormed up the stairs and kicked open the office door. In the gloom they could make out the silhouettes of a few dozen nationalists, who seemed frozen by shock. The workers didn't wait for them to realize what had happened. Freeman brought down his club on his enemy's skull.

For the next fifteen minutes, the workers smashed everything in their sight. Furniture, windows, bones. They were not tailors and porters anymore but conduits of vengeance, and the ruined faces of their adversaries did nothing to assuage their rage. They bashed the mahogany desks into splinters. They shattered the chandeliers. They stood over the bloody blond men and kicked them in their stomachs, and when the nationalists curled up in agony, they brought their boots down on their heads. Knowing the cops might arrive at any moment, Bernard Goldstein ordered his men to finish, but they didn't want to. They were enjoying it too much. They beat the nationalists mercilessly, until at last Bernard prevailed upon them to run.

That night, Bernard learned that a nationalist had died from his wounds.

Ghetto Benches

In October 1937, the nationalists achieved a cherished goal when the government segregated university classrooms across Poland. From then on, Jewish students would be forced to sit on the left side of the class, on so-called ghetto benches. The government justified segregation as the only way to stop the annual student riots, but for the nationalists, the benches were just a start. After a decade of concerted harassment, they had managed to halve the number of Jewish university students. If they kept it up, they hoped to eliminate Jewish students entirely.

“This first attempt to institute the medieval ghetto in independent Poland must be repudiated with the most energetic protest,” wrote the Bund. Erlich and Alter met with the education minister to protest, but he told them that Jewish students needed to obey the order.

They would not. Across the country, Jews refused to sit in the benches. They stood for hours-long lectures as a rebuke. Universities forbade them to stand, and even expelled them. Nationalist students attacked them, trying to force them into the seats. The Jewish students refused to submit. Polish socialist students sat in the Jewish benches in solidarity.

With Polish socialist support, the Bund called a two-day general strike against the ghetto benches. In the Jewish neighborhoods, Polish socialists gave fiery speeches on behalf of the students. In front of Warsaw University, Bundist and Polish socialist students passed out literature, while mass promenades of armed Jewish workers guarded the youth. As The Nation's correspondent William Zuckerman wrote: "Never before has the Polish Socialist Party worked so harmoniously with [the Bund] against antisemitism."

Thanks to its proximity to Warsaw Polytechnic, the Erlich apartment became a field hospital. Sophia would return from the library to find battered young people getting their wounds stitched up on her couch. Her son Victor's girlfriend, Iza, showed up one day hunched and weeping. On her way to her law exams, nationalist students had thrown her down the staircase. Another day, a pair of muscular students carried in their unconscious, blood-soaked comrade. Son of a famous Endek politician, the victim had turned his back on his father's beliefs to fight alongside his Jewish classmates. Nationalists broke his skull for treachery.

Bernard Goldstein

Bernard Goldstein smuggled himself into Brest-Litovsk in May 1937, days after police had led a pogrom in the city. He found a community paralyzed by the knowledge that, at any moment, the pogrom would explode again. In the deserted Jewish quarter, Goldstein met a Polish socialist comrade, the journalist Jan Dabrowski. As the two worked out a battle plan to deal with future attacks, they saw the glow of Sabbath candles in a window. "I explained to Dabrowski the meaning of the Sabbath candles.... Deep in somber thought, we both walked silently through the pogromized, empty streets...a Jewish and a Polish Socialist. Perhaps, I thought, hope resides in this, that we two, Dabrowski and I, walk here together with a single purpose."

I agree with Comrade Bernard, despite everything that happened next.

Henryk Erlich

On November 17, 1937, Henryk Erlich took the stage in Warsaw's Nowosci Theatre for the fortieth-anniversary celebration of the Bund. Three thousand faces stared up at him from the audience, including, notably, delegates from the Polish Socialist Party.

Erlich was an honest man. He didn't sugarcoat the situation. He spoke about the brutal poverty, the unemployment and hopelessness, the pogroms, and the parties inspired by Hitler who, together, desired "to degrade the human being in you, to trample upon your feeling of self-worth, to turn you into pariahs devoid of legal rights and dignity.... They wish to deprive us not only of the right to live but also of the possibility of self-defense and struggle."

He denounced the bourgeois Jewish parties who cut deals with nationalists to protect their bank balances, and the Orthodox who told poor Jews that antisemitism was God's punishment for insufficient piety. He scourged the Zionists, “bankrupt not only here but also there—in Palestine,” who stubbornly insisted, “There is a law of some kind: 'gentiles must hate Jews. There is no alternative. It is necessary to flee,'” and so played along with the country's leaders to advocate a mass expulsion of Polish Jews.

Then he told them an extraordinary thing.

You must briefly step out of the confines of your Jewish misery.... Look about you and you will see—the Jews are not the only ones who are suffering. The overwhelming majority in the country, whether Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, or others, is suffering from the economic crisis...scarcely able to eke out a daily existence.

Shift your gaze beyond the borders of Poland toward the wide world and you will see: Seventy million people are languishing under the heavy boot of Hitlerism. Not only the 500,000 Jews—the whole German people has been transformed into a nation of slaves.... Forty million Italians have been turned into a footstool for the “great” Mussolini.... And just as in Germany and Italy, millions of working people in other, smaller countries which have become areas of reaction are sunk in privation and bondage.

I read Erlich's call for empathy with the same people who had carried out pogroms across his country, who had dropped mustard gas on Ethiopia and forced refined German Jews to clean the streets with toothbrushes, and I remember words from thirty years before, in the American Star Hall in Brownsville, when the Bundist fundraiser Meyer London called out to the crowd: "Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives...for liberty? They...pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt."

This was it. There was only Egypt, the Bund knew, and they were stuck with the Egyptians. They were people first, not Jews or goys. There was no God to save them, to offer exodus across a bloody sea. All that existed was here, even if here was hell. Jews had nothing but their own strength and the fraught solidarities they built with people they had been raised to see as enemies. As his voice rose, Erlich conjured up the Vilna safe house, the red banners hung in the woods, the self-defense squads who fought the tsar's goons with their Browning pistols, the mythology of his party. A party that would always fight.

“Your liberation lies not in passivity and servility, not in empty dreams built on sand and English guns...but in the community of struggle with the working class, in the fight right here where you live, where your grandfathers and fathers lived.... Salvation lies here and nowhere else, in untiring struggle for freedom, hand in hand with the working masses of Poland!”

Chapter 19 The Eve

(1938 to 1939)

Refugees

T He Bleed of Refugees Continued. Pacifists and Reds fled—I don't want to be exclusionary—but above all, refugee meant Jew. Jews spilled out of Germany and Austria, which Hitler annexed in March 1938. They besieged the closed doors of consulates, filled out paperwork till their hands contorted, not knowing that their visas had been denied in advance. They chartered death boats like the Syrians of 2015, rickety little wrecks with which to reach not Europe but Palestine. The British caught some boats and deported the passengers. Others sank into the sea. Whole scam industries sprung up to exploit these refugees. Visas to Latin America, jobs in India, fake papers in Casablanca, permissions to cross into the Soviet Union (where most travelers ended up in gulags), all available in exchange for their last stores of cash. Celebrity helped a few people find places in the West. We all know about Albert Einstein. Mostly, neither west nor east nor north nor south would take them. Three hundred thousand of the most refined, elegant, assimilated Jews that Christian Europe had ever known had been stripped of their identities, so that nothing remained but the crude facts of their lineage and the irritating urgency of their need. No one wanted them. No one ever wants a refugee. Mexico found them culturally unsuitable. Australia didn't want to “import a race problem.” The United States declined a plan to take twenty thousand kids. Even the American Jewish Committee didn't want the borders opened. They were afraid it would cause more antisemitism. The next year, the poet W. H. Auden wrote “Refugee Blues.”

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors:

Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Marek Edelman

At seventeen, Marek Edelman was alone. His mother, Tsipie, had died of ulcerative colitis right after the Bund's 1937 conference. At her funeral were hundreds of poor women. They had swarmed out of the Krochmalna cellars to pay their respects to the flinty fighter who gave them the notion of a better life. Afterward, Marek went a little crazy. He was seventeen, scrawny, sullen, with the wispy mustache of a boy trying to look grown. A wretched student, he would not have graduated if it was not for the party. The Erlichs took him under their wing, with Sophia's younger son Victor tutoring Marek in Polish literature until he managed to squeak through his exams. The Bund fostered a familial sort of responsibility. They couldn't let Tsipie's son fail.

Warsaw felt smaller. Whole districts were Falanga territory. Marek didn't walk near Theater Square, especially not on Sundays, when Father Trzeciak did his sermons. Trzeciak was an admirer of Hitler who ranted about how Jews invented porn and murdered Jesus. His speeches had already inspired three knife murders. After church, Falanga boys marched with clubs in their razor-studded shin guards to put Trzeciak's teachings into practice. They only caught Marek twice, but each time, they sliced him up badly. The Falanga newspaper incited. "Jews, with the help of communism and freemasonry, murdered a hundred thousand people in Spain," read one headline from April 1938. The back pages advertised guaranteed Christian shops, so Poles could buy from Poles.

Now funded by Christian merchants' associations, anti-Jewish pickets grew in size and fury. In April 1938, there were picketers outside every single Jewish shop in Lodz. In Volkovysk, pharmacist Hugon Tyminski's followers encircled the Jewish shops on Broad Street and wouldn't permit Christians to enter. The courts charged thousands of Jews with “insulting the Polish nation.” Bombs went off around the country. On May Day, a nationalist bomb exploded in the main square of Warsaw's Jewish neighborhood, minutes before the Bund's procession was scheduled to pass. Later that month, ozon published their pompously titled Thirteen Theses on the Jewish Question, stating that Jews were a tribe of rootless liar-thieves who needed to be forced out of jobs, universities, and public life, until the happy day when the government could finally ship them all to Palestine.

Henryk Erlich

Jewish political parties sought different paths to deal with Poland's spiral into fascism. The Orthodox Agudah Yisrael party counseled prayer and patience. Zionist groups proposed a united front in the form of a Jewish self-help congress. The Bund, predictably, refused. For many historians, this was another example of incomprehensible Bundist sectarianism. Here Jews were, on the edge of ruin, and the Bund, as usual, refused to play nice with their own people. Not just that. In the summer of 1938, the Bund attempted to make their own competitive Congress of Jewish Workers. The Polish government soon banned their efforts.

Henryk Erlich's father-in-law, the renowned Jewish historian Simon Dubnov, publicly scolded the Bund for their stubbornness. In Dubnov's view, the Bund had cut themselves off from the Jewish people at the very moment when they most needed to unite. In response, Erlich wrote an open letter that would become the Bund's iconic statement on Zionism.

Of course the Bund didn't cut itself off from the Jewish people, Erlich wrote. They'd fought for the Jewish people for forty years. They organized self-defense squads in tsarist Russia. They defended Mendel Biellis at his famous blood libel trial in Kyiv. In Poland, they built a vibrant counterculture with little more than love and grit, then marshaled it to protest racist violence. Of course they fought for Jews. That was why they refused to ally with Zionists.

While the Bund fought for Jews' place in Poland, the Zionists sided with a government trying to force Jews from their homes. While the Bund called protest strikes against pogroms, Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky pranced on Polish stages, giving speeches that supported the pogromists' demand for Jews. to leave. After Polish foreign minister Józef Beck said that three million Jews must be deported, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann smiled and shook his hand.

“Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism,” Erlich wrote. “Zionism has always regarded the law of force, of nationalistic action, as the normal law of history, and on this law has based its perspectives on Jewish life. In the forty years of its existence, it has always appeared lost and helpless in the presence of any victorious freedom movement.... The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and make the Arabs second-class citizens.”

Erlich spelled out a fatal conflict at the heart of Zionism. The establishment of Israel would lead to perpetual war with its neighbors and the people it had dispossessed. “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine.... Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?” Erlich asked. “Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”

From that same year, I found a faded poster advertising the Bund's candidates for the kehillah elections in Volkovysk. The writer accused Zionists of collaborating with the government campaign to drive Jews out of Poland. "We are not foreigners! We will not leave!" the flyer declared. "We will fight for our freedom, together with Polish workers and peasants! And if Zionists, left or right, try to interfere with our struggle, we will kick them off the Jewish Street!"

Here where we live is our country.

Evian

By 1938, over three hundred thousand Jews had fled Hitler's Germany. Inevitably, many sought safety in America. That July, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called an international conference in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains to figure out how the world might deal with the burden these refugees represented. Delegates from thirty-two countries attended. For nine days, they swapped business cards, ate steaks, puffed on good cigars, and toasted their own beneficence with flutes of fine champagne. They dodged and dithered. They shed crocodile tears over the three hundred thousand Jews—poor things—brutalized by fascism, and concocted excuses for why their countries could not take a single one.

The Zionist movement sent three Histadrut leaders as observers to Evian; one, named Golda Meir, would become the prime minister of Israel. The observers aimed to paint Palestine as Jews' only possible refuge. For the Histadrut's chief, David Ben-Gurion, refugees were not individuals so much as building blocks for a potential state, and if the conference offered them other places to flee, it might damage his movement. Mounting persecution didn't change his view. A few months later, after Kristallnacht, Ben-Gurion said he preferred that half of all German Jewish children take refuge in Palestine rather than all of them finding safety in England.

Ben-Gurion's concerns proved unjustified. The only country at Evian to make a concrete promise to accept refugees was the Dominican Republic, whose rapacious dictator Raphael Trujillo offered visas for a hundred thousand Jews. Trujillo needed the good press, since in the previous year he had ordered his army to machete murder twenty-five thousand Haitians in an attempted genocide. Trujillo hoped the Jews would bring money, and that their pale skin would racially whiten the Dominican people.

Evian deeply affected Golda Meir. According to historian Seth Anziska, “When she returned to Tel Aviv, Meir stepped up her campaign against British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Jews needed a demographic majority because, as she wrote in her memoir, 'only here could Jews live as of right, rather than on sufferance, and only here could Jews be masters, not victims, of their fate.'”

As for the Bund, they viewed the refugees with characteristic internationalism. For them, mass displacement was not a Jewish issue. It affected any person of conscience who lived in a fascist state. Fascism created refugees, Naye Folkstsaytung knew, whether they were Jews or Reds or others. Taking a thousand or two refugees was like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. As long as Hitler remained in power, millions would continue to flee.

Germany

That August, the Bundist Jacob Pat passed through Berlin on his way home from New York. For a Jew, this was an act of manic daring. He could easily have been arrested or killed. Pat saw a city he once loved covered with shrieking signs. Jew. Jew. Aryans Only. Jew. He sat in forlorn little rooms, bare of furniture, where former grand dames of the Jewish faith lived after their fifth eviction. He learned about the terror of the concentration camps. Ruined businessmen explained the inanities of visa applications. One had an Argentine visa. It had fallen through. "My life hangs by a hair," he said. Pat also heard stories of German customers who still patronized Jewish shops. "Not all of Germany is lost," he wrote hopefully in Naye Folkstsaytung. "Germany isn't all Nazi. Not every German is a beast."

More anti-Jewish laws passed in Hungary, Romania, and Italy. In September, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, a German-majority area that contained all of the country's defensive fortifications. Poland tagged along to grab a few hundred miles of borderland for themselves. Instead of helping a fellow League of Nations member, England and France pressured Czechoslovakia to cede their territory to Hitler. When the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain came back from the treaty signing at Munich, he did so with a promise: “I believe it is peace for our time.” Jewish refugees poured out of Sudetenland.

The Labor and Socialist International collapsed over the Munich Pact. At the International's next congress in Brussels, French socialists supported the pact, while the British demanded that every effort be made to stop Hitler's expansion. The Czechs withdrew and expelled all Jews from their party. Erlich would undoubtedly have agreed with the Brits, but he was not at the congress. The Polish government had refused him a passport.

By the late thirties, Bernard Goldstein was a legend. To the tabloids, he was “ruler of a band who terrorized Warsaw,” his mythos burnished with false stories about nights at the lubricious Club Adria, where he supposedly danced the tango and handed out roses to the dames. To the Krochmalna thugs, he was a role model. To the city's Jewish poor, he was a protector. To Chief Runge of the Security Police, he was a menace. Once, after cops arrested Bernard at a street fight, Runge threatened to send him to a notorious concentration camp in Kartuz Bereza.

“Who's the boss of Poland's capital?” Runge screamed. “You or me?”

Bernard sized him up. In a quiet voice he answered, “As long as you refuse to protect the Jewish people, I'll do it. If I am to get Kartuz Bereza for that, go ahead and send me there.”

Runge released him.

That fall, Bernard got a tip from his Polish socialist friends that the Naras were plotting to murder Henryk Erlich. Pretending to be defendants in need of legal help, their assassins had set up an appointment with Erlich. When they showed up, they'd shoot him dead.

Erlich lived on the Polish side of town, where the Bund's militia couldn't go without attracting unnecessary attention, so Bernard arranged a gang of Polish workers to assist him. On the appointed morning, Bernard staked out Erlich's building. He stationed one group of workers at the gate, with another hidden inside the courtyard and a third in the stairwell, a half story up from Erlich's apartment, where they could jump the assassins the moment they made it to Erlich's door. The assassins showed up at ten. They were tall and arrogant, in fedoras and bespoke suits, their every step conveying their privileged lives. One rang the bell. Bernard was on them in a second. The assassins tried to back away, with flowery protestations of innocence, but the luxuriance of their elocution only increased Bernard's rage. He marched them downstairs. In the courtyard, Polish workers surrounded them. A worker pressed his revolver to an assassin's forehead, then clicked the safety off. The assassins raised their hands. The Polish workers frisked them, confiscating revolvers from their pockets.

“Give me your passports!” Bernard barked. The pair handed them over. He wrote down their names and addresses. They lived in the nicest part of town.

Bernard raised his handgun, letting them get a good look. He stared at them. His scarred face was like a mask. He spoke slowly, so they could absorb what he said. If anything happened to comrade Erlich, with or without their involvement, he would hunt them down himself and put a bullet through each of their fancy foreheads. For now, they could get the fuck out of his boss's building.

Afterward, Bernard went to breakfast. He was starving.

Later, Bernard's comrades criticized him for not killing the assassins or at least breaking their kneecaps. Bernard shrugged. At nearly fifty, he had seen enough bloodshed for ten lifetimes. He'd avoid it when he could.

Zbaszyn

No one ever wants a refugee. Refugees come in waves, like poisoned water. They are a flood, which drowns. They swarm like insects. They inundate. They swamp. They must be quarantined in camps, like lepers, but they are themselves the leprosy, the virus that rots the body politic.

The more refugees, the greater their need, the less anyone wants them.

Poland didn't want Jewish refugees, even if these refugees were its own citizens. Afraid that Germany might deport Polish Jewish residents en masse, on October 6, 1938, the Polish government announced a decree that stripped the citizenship of anyone who had lived abroad for more than five years, unless the Polish embassy stamped their passports by the end of the month. Inside Germany, Polish embassy staff declined to stamp Jews' passports.

Poland's ambassador to Germany, Józef Lipski, met with Hitler on October 21. The Führer reassured him that now that the issue of Sudetenland was settled, Germany would demand France and Britain grant it colonies of its own, to which eastern Europe could exile its Jews. "If [you] can find such a solution we shall build [you] a beautiful monument in Warsaw," Lipski responded.

On October 28, three days before the deadline set by the Polish government for Poles abroad to have their passports stamped, the Gestapo began to round up Polish Jews. They grabbed sixteen thousand people from their beds and dumped them at the border, with nothing but ten reichsmarks in their pockets and the clothes on their backs. Over the next weeks, thousands more Jews joined them. Rabbis, school kids snatched from class, Jews caught queuing in front of the Polish embassy for their special stamps. After an endless train ride to the border, guards shoved the Jews out of the carriages at bayonet point and told them to run. Machine guns sprayed them from behind. They sank up to their knees in frigid mud, crawled through barbed wire, lost their children, broke their bones. At last, they reached the Polish frontier at Zbaszyn. Though they were Polish citizens, the Polish police refused them entry.

Encircled by police, thousands of deportees camped in fields near the Zbaszyn railway station. They could not enter their country, since, as the pro-government paper Gazeta Polska complained, “overpopulated Poland has the largest percentage of Jews in the world and is now...menaced by a Jewish invasion.”

For days, then weeks, then months, the deportees waited in the frozen mud of Zbaszyn. The elderly began to die.

The Bund formed a help committee. They raised funds, brought in doctors, and organized press delegations to visit the deportees. (When Naye Folkstsaytung reported on their conditions, the government confiscated the issues.) Tsukunft kids passed out soup and tea. It reminds me of the solidarity work that today's anarchists do with people trapped by border regimes. How many times have I watched punks hand out coffee to refugees on different continents, because that's what humans do, regardless of papers? We shouldn't have had to, of course. We are only there because of the failures of the state. The Bund shouldn't have had to either, but Poland refused to spend a zloty on these Jewish citizens. The Bund stepped into the breach to do what was needed.

Other people would also take matters into their own hands. On November 7, Herschel Greynszpan, the teenage son of two deportees trapped in Zbaszyn, talked his way into the German embassy in Paris. There, in the name of his countrymen, he shot the Nazi ambassador five times in the stomach.

Kristallnacht

The night of Ambassador vom Rath's death, Nazi government unleashed a series of attacks on the Jewish population that would go down in history as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The name obfuscates the savagery of what took place. Around Germany, Austria, and Sudetenland, state-backed mobs torched hundreds of synagogues, destroyed thousands of businesses, and killed hundreds of Jews. They invaded homes, Jews' sole sanctuary from violence, dragged out Berlin hipsters and elderly Viennese professionals and, under hails of blows, forced them to clean the streets with toothbrushes. Then they raped the women. The humiliation was the point. Afterward, hundreds of Jews committed suicide. They would have left if they could have, but no country would accept them. They had nowhere on earth to go.

Germany painted Kristallnacht as a spontaneous response to the ambassador's murder, but it was choreographed by Joseph Goebbels and instigated by the S.S and the Hitler Youth.

Unlike most of the Polish press, Naye Folkstsytung covered “the horrifying pogrom” in detail. Readers knew about the thirty thousand Jews shipped off to concentration camps after Kristallnacht, about the one-billion-Reichsmark fine imposed on the Jewish community, and the wealthy couple in Munich who threw themselves out a window because they couldn't continue living after what they'd seen. A week after Kristallnacht, Henryk Erlich wrote an article titled “In the Darkest Night.” In it, he berated the Polish nationalists who bayed like “jackals” to repeat Kristallnacht on their own soil, and the feckless Polish government, which flirted with the Nazis, oblivious to the fact that one day, they too might be a target.

For Sam Rothbort, Kristallnacht gave him a terrible premonition about his hometown. He realized that his Volkovysk would not last forever. It was not waiting for his glorious homecoming, when he would pass out money and tell tall tales of Columbus's land, like returning immigrants had done throughout his childhood. More than an ocean lay between him and his birthplace. History rushed forward, and against it, art was a fragile refuge. In the late thirties, Sam Rothbort began to paint the world of his childhood. In these memory paintings, patriarchs read the torah. Grandmother circled her hands over the sabbath candles. Boys spied on the women's bathhouse. Tsarist soldiers bared their swords. These paintings showed me another Volkovysk as well, one struggling into the turbulent twentieth century, where young people raised red flags in the woods, burned down factories, beat strike breakers, and snuck across borders in the dead of night on a quixotic quest to reshape the world. I saw Itka the Bundist, a corseted girl in a crepuscular alleyway, who threw rocks through a window as if she could release the future waiting for her on the other side of the glass. Over the next decade, as his hometown's fate became clear, Sam Rothbort would paint 616 of these watercolors. It was there that I discovered the Bund.

Elections

“We struck back at every action of the Polish anti-Semites, believing that the Jews would retain their civil rights only if they showed that they could protect themselves,” wrote Bernard Goldstein. At the same time, the Bund appealed for international intervention against fascism, “but our efforts were too puny to turn back the powerful forces that were pushing an indifferent and unresisting world toward a precipice.” Though the Bund's appeals abroad went unheeded, their resistance earned them the loyalty of the Jewish community at home. This love shone when the municipal elections came in December 1938. The weather was icy, but when housewives saw Bundist canvassers from their windows, they ran outside with kettles and poured them steaming glasses of tea. Kids paraded down Smocza Street with red rags tied to sticks as makeshift socialist flags. To suppress the vote, the city had put the Jewish neighborhood's voting place in a rough Polish area that voters had to cross a mud pit to reach. Rumors flew about nationalist attacks, so to forestall any trouble, Bernard organized patrols, and the Bund's militiamen walked voters to the polls.

When the results came in, they were greater than the Bund could have dreamed. They had won victories in almost every major Jewish city in Poland, including sixteen out of the nineteen seats won by Jewish parties on the Warsaw city council.

As of 1938, the Bund was the most popular Jewish party in Poland.

一

When Parliament Reopened A few weeks after the elections, ozon representatives issued plans to divide the country's population into three tiers. Poles would be full citizens. The rights of the German and Slavic minorities would depend on their perceived loyalty. Jews would be stripped of citizenship, then expelled from the country, with their property seized to fund their deportations. ozon warned the world to make space for this newly stateless population. Otherwise, Poland would be forced to resort to "discriminatory measures" to solve what they called "the Jewish Question."

Spain

For the Left, calamities accumulated. In February 1939, the Spanish Republic fell to Franco's fascists. As kah-moo wrote later, "It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense." Ten thousand International Brigades fighters died in the war, including the young Warsaw Bundist Beniak Livshitz. His comrades buried him in the medieval city of Lérida, under the nom de guerre of Barcelona Lorenzo.

Five hundred thousand people fled across the Pyrenees into France, where the French government locked them in concentration camps.

On March 15, Hitler invaded what was left of Czechoslovakia.

More refugees fled.

Germany

While Poland had okayed Hitler's annexation of Sudetenland, they were perturbed when he took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, since Germany now bordered Poland on three sides. Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took on an increasingly belligerent tone in his dealings with the Polish ambassador. Hitler demanded more concessions, including that Poland give Germany the city of Danzig, where the German minority regularly attacked Jews and Poles. On March 23, Hitler seized Memel, a Lithuanian port city that Poland regarded as its turf. Even the medal-festooned blowhards in government could see where things were headed. The army began a partial mobilization, and Poland signed a mutual defense pact with Britain to bolster the treaty it already had with France. If Hitler invaded, at least they could count on help from the two powerhouses of Western Europe.

On April 28, Hitler told the Reichstag that the Polish-German nonaggression pact was “no longer in existence.” The delegates broke into thunderous applause.

Palestine

In the spring of 1939, one more country closed to Jewish refugees: Palestine.

After three years of war against Palestinian guerrillas, Britain had crushed the Great Palestinian Revolt with the same cruelty they used from Dublin to Delhi. They had bombed villages, tortured hostages, demolished homes, exiled leaders, and doled out the death penalty for offenses as minor as the possession of a few bullets. Historian Rashid Khalidi estimates that at least 14 percent of the adult male Palestinian population was injured, imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Britain also shaped the Haganah into a vicious counterinsurgency force. (Throughout the revolt, the illegal Irgun also bombed and shot hundreds of Palestinians.) Now that they'd defeated the Palestinian uprising, it was time for Britain to put policies in place that would prevent things from kicking off again. In May, they released the White Paper, which promised an independent Palestine within ten years and severely curtailed Jewish immigration. Britain intended for the White Paper to address the demands that had led to the Great Palestinian Revolt. It also shut the doors of Palestine to Jewish refugees from Hitler exactly when they needed the refuge most. For the Zionist movement, this was a grave betrayal. The militias that Britain armed would soon turn their guns against their benefactors.

Cuba

The same week that the Brits announced their white paper, S.S St. Louis departed from Hamburg for Havana with a cargo of 937 Jewish refugees. Each held a landing certificate for Cuba. Five days before the ship pulled into the Havana port, forty thousand Cubans staged a rally against the refugees. A spokesman for the former Cuban president told the crowd to “fight the Jews until the last one is driven out.” Only 34 passengers were permitted to disembark. The remaining 903 sent desperate supplications to the United States, but Roosevelt, eyeing his election chances, gave his regrets. Several passengers attempted suicide. The boat was forced back to Europe.

In Naye Folkstsaytung, Leivik Hodes wrote about the St. Louis, and all the other ships that wandered across the oceans filled with German Jews and antifascists whose “good Aryan blood” had been rendered null by their convictions. The ships bobbed helplessly. As long as the world refused to crush fascism, refugees would continue to flee Europe. Their ships would find no port.

Poland

Everyone knew that war with Germany was inevitable, so the Polish government decided to rearm. To fund a new air force, they forced citizens to buy bonds. Those who resisted might be sent to concentration camps. Jews gave generously to the armament funds, but they were still smeared as misers and war profiteers in the nationalist press. The pro-government newspaper Gazeta Polska dismissed Jewish efforts to unite in the face of the Nazis. "The fact that our relations with the Reich are worsening does not in the least deactivate our program in the Jewish question." They threw the Bundist city councilman Leon Feiner into a concentration camp and refused to release him unless his party supported ozon's plan to ship Jews to Palestine. Despite all this, the Bund was at its peak. In Warsaw, a hundred thousand people marched in their May Day parade. That summer, they swept the next round of municipal elections. They were now the most popular Jewish party in Vilna, Lublin, and Bialystok. Even in little Volkovysk, the Bund got three thousand votes and sent the brick factory owner Schlossberg, the activist Ravitzky, and the teacher Merkin to the city council. Morgenstern was the most popular sports club in the country. A hundred thousand workers belonged to Bundist trade unions. Hundreds of kids recuperated in Medem Sanatorium, where they learned to eat broccoli, peered into fish ponds, and acted out idealistic plays. Eighty years later, the sanatorium director's son Victor Gilinsky could still recall flashes of that time. He was tiny, the sanatorium's mascot. He could envision the handsome counselor named Batya, who ran up a path while Victor bounced on his shoulders, terrified he would fall. Batya shouted the Bund's greeting: Khavershaft. Comradeship. In Warsaw, the comedienne Ina Benita batted her eyelashes on the silver screen and the hit tango "Golden Chrysanthemums" wafted out of sweetshops. The Yiddish operetta Shulamith continued its sold-out run at the palatial Nowosci Theatre. "A Triumph!" wrote Naye Folkstsaytung. Every evening, Marek Edelman and the other young Reds gathered on Lezno Street. Communists walked on the left, Bundists on the right. Each group shouted insults at the other. Morgenstern soccer teams played friendly games in city parks. When the new forward Rubinstein scored an epic goal, the Bund's sports correspondent noted his athletic promise.

Those who could retreated to their summer cottages to hike in the forests and swim in the country's many rivers. Viktor Alter's wife took their son back to Belgium for their annual vacation. Sophia joined her father Simon Dubnov in Riga. Tsukunft and skif set up their summer camps in the woods outside Wloclawek, on the bank of the Vistula. The two groups used to pitch their tents separately, but racists liked to attack them when they slept, so now they kept together for safety. In July, Bernard Goldstein took a New York comrade to visit them. As their car turned onto the forest road, they saw lines of tanned young people waving red flags to greet them. Bernard felt a flush of pride. Later, as they ate around the campfire, Bernard's New York comrade told him that the summer camps in America might have been fancier, "but what you have here, we don't have." There were tears in his eyes.

On August 23, 1939, Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop flew to Moscow, where he and the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed a nonaggression pact. Erlich denounced the pact in Naye Folkstsæytung, demanding to know how the workers in German concentration camps felt seeing the Soviets empower their persecutor. He didn't know, of course, about the secret protocol that would split Poland between the two powers, but he would find out soon enough. In response to the pact, Viktor Alter called the Polish prime minister, Felisjan Slawoj Skladkowski, to propose a unity government. The prime minister brushed him off.

The government called the Bund's office and told them to liquidate their summer camp in Wloclawek. They didn't say why, but Bernard knew it was in an area where military fortifications would be built. Sadly, he helped the campers fold up their tents. Henryk called Sophia at her father's home in Riga. The country was mobilizing. She needed to come home.

Even as the Germans readied their panzer tanks, the colonels who ran the Polish government maintained an oblivious sangfroid. Pompous military men who had spent the years since Pilsudski's death creating a cult around their army, they could hardly admit that they were woefully unprepared. They had kicked everyone's ass in the Polish-Soviet war, had they not? Their air force may have been out of date, but they had their cavalry, who had terrorized the Reds less than twenty years before. And they had iron-clad defense treaties with France and Britain. Newspapers repeated the propaganda slogan: "United, Strong and Ready!"

Despite everything that Poland had done to them, the country's three million Jews rose to new heights of loyalty. They enlisted en masse in the military, raised fortunes for the Air Force. "At the hour when the country's fate is to be decided," wrote the Bund in an August 29 proclamation, "we declare once more, in the name of the great Jewish masses, their readiness to make the supreme sacrifice, together with the entire working population of Poland." An organization founded by border-flouting revolutionaries who were critical of all national independence movements had transformed into a party of patriots.

Trench

Warsaw was calm, the writers at Naye Folkstsytung noted in their August 30 issue, the final one to make it abroad. The government had advised the population that there was no need to horde food or arrange transport for an evacuation, so there were no longer lines at shops. The weather was lovely. Kids capered around the parks, enjoying the last days of summer. Crime continued as it always had. A railway worker found a beheaded woman's body at 26 Gorczewska Street. A fight broke out between Engineer R. and Madame Wronski over a forty-five-zloty debt. Two women committed suicide around town. Two drowned men were pulled from the Vistula. In their headquarters at 26 Dluga Street, the Bund continued its usual schedule of meetings for Tsukunft, skif, Y.A.F, the trade unions, and a division for former Hasidic kids known as the Arkady Group. A children's charity at 30 Nowolipki Street ran a short-story contest for Jewish youth. Entries were due on October 15.

Most of all, Naye Folkstsæytung noted the digging. For the last week, thousands of Varsovians had turned up to dig defensive trenches around the city. The Bund organized brigades. Every morning, hundreds of workers marched out of each of the Bundist union locals in military formation, shovels slung over their shoulders, revolutionary ballads on their lips. The Y.A.F women dug. The Morgenstern athletes dug. One Naye Folkstsaytung writer, who went by the initial Y., was amidst the throngs at the Gesia Street registration point. At last, Y. found his group, Tsukunft members in blue blouses and red scarves. When they arrived at their worksite in the Polish neighborhood, they found a mob of people already tearing up the earth. Among them Y. might have seen white-blond railway men and their sturdy wives. Criminals. Lawyers. Doctors still wearing their coats. Rabbis heading up lines of yeshiva students in sidelocks and gabardine. Even the same nationalist scum who had once sliced open their faces during battles at the university. All of them were there to dig. Here where they lived was their brutal, fucked, and beloved country, and it belonged to all of them, together. For the first time, Warsaw was united. For once, everyone knew who the enemy was.

Part Four

Fire

1939 to 1948 Arthur Zygielbojm

Chapter 20 Invasion

(September 1, 1939–October 4, 1939)

Day One

U N September 1, Warsaw'S Yiddish daily Haynt published its final issue. It ran a chess game, noted the mobilization of the British army, and let readers know what to consider when purchasing a gas mask. It also mentioned that German planes had entered Polish airspace. Another provocation.

By the time the issue was released, 1.8 million German troops had already crossed the border into Poland. Nazi bombers clouded the sky, targeting railways, and striking sixty cities at once. Panzers tore up telegraph wires, cutting military leadership off from units in the field. The Wehrmacht poured in from the north, the west, and the south, surrounding the Polish army and sending it into a desperate retreat. In Naye Folkstsaytung, Henryk Erlich published an appeal for “unstinting sacrifice and armed resistance,” but within a day, it was clear the army would collapse.

Poland's only hope was to hold out long enough for their allies France and England to come to their aid. When the two countries declared war on Germany on September 3, Varsovians marched to the French and British embassies with tricolors and union jacks to honor their saviors. No help came.

The next evening, government ministries began to evacuate Warsaw. They burned their documents and took with them anything that might have been useful during a siege. Lines of limousines crept over the Vistula, filled with the puffed-up mediocrities who constituted Poland's ruling class. Over the next few days, ozon leaders Edward Rydz-Smigly, Józef Beck, and Adam Koc, and even Cardinal August Hlond, would all abandon the capital.

Day Two

The luxury shops were still open on Warsaw's grand boulevards, albeit with sandbags in the windows. Women might need evening purses, even at the end of the world. The radio broadcast a torrent of contradictions. The Nazis have arrived! The French are bombing Berlin! The mix of lies and truth only spread more panic. The government called a press conference to announce their imminent evacuation. Naye Folkstsæytung's correspondent Pinkhos Schwartz was in the audience. He immediately telephoned Henryk Erlich. That night, the Bund's central committee convened to grapple with the news. Thousands of party activists gathered in the courtyard below Naye Folkstsæytung's offices to await the central committee's decision. Most of the leaders wanted to stay. Warsaw was the largest Jewish city in Europe. How could they abandon their people? The well-heeled union leader Maurycy Orzech insisted that they needed to fight shoulder to shoulder with their comrades in the Polish Socialist Party. But how could they fight without an army? They had no heavy weapons, just revolvers and brass knuckles. Who would follow them into battle? Voters might have chosen them for city council, but that didn't mean they'd join them in mass suicide. And when Germans bombed Warsaw in reprisal, wouldn't Poles blame the casualties on the Jews? There was a train headed out of Warsaw, with three seats reserved for the Bund's leaders. Would it be wiser to go east, or would it be betrayal? They talked in circles, unsure of where their responsibilities lay. The advice they got was no help. Orzech consulted with Polish Socialist Party leader Zygmunt Zaremba, who swore that his people would stay in Warsaw till the end and advised the Bund to do the same. Over at city hall, Mayor Stefan Starzynski told Alter and Erlich the opposite. As Jews and socialists, they were doubly dead when the Nazis entered the city. They should flee.

Day Three

The next morning, Alter and Erlich visited the Polish Socialist Party's headquarters on Warecka Street. Party secretary Kazimierz Puzak was eager to talk. A lifelong revolutionary who had survived six years of Siberian slave labor, Puzak had seen his share of trouble. He contemptuously dismissed the government's plans for a counteroffensive: a hare-brained scheme for the army to retreat to the Bug River, a hundred and fifty miles east, and restart the fight from there. "If Poland can't defend itself at the Vistula, God himself will be unable to help it at the Bug," he sneered. Unlike his friend Zaremba, Puzak realized the acute danger that the Jewish leaders faced. He urged Alter and Erlich to run. The train's departure drew closer, but the pair refused to leave. Zaremba had called a city council meeting, and they wanted to hear him out. Erlich ordered a comrade to take his ticket. At the central committee's final meeting, the mood was somber. After speaking with Puzak, Erlich and Alter were convinced that Warsaw would fall quickly, and that the Gestapo would consider the Bund's leadership a juicy catch. The central committee formed a plan. Top leaders would flee Warsaw, while the second tier stayed behind to reform the Bund as an underground organization, just as they had been in the days of the tsar. Alter wanted to lead this clandestine party. Having survived one world war already, he knew that escape was no guarantee of safety. “One hundred of us will leave here; after the war, perhaps ten will return. I have just as much chance of remaining alive in Warsaw,” he said. Erlich insisted Alter was too famous to go underground. Reluctantly, Alter complied. All around Warsaw, rank-and-file Bundists were making similar calculations. Should they stay or run? Around six hundred party members joined the exodus out of the capital. Others balked at the thought of abandoning their homes for the uncertainty of the road. The sky was a perfect blue, the sort that portends disaster. Newspaper headlines screamed that the government had left Warsaw. In the Erlich apartment, the family filled their knapsacks. Henryk added an old photo of Sophia and their boys. Was it from Saint Petersburg, their long-lost capital, or Lublin, their first city of exile? Her memoirs do not say. She didn't go to her desk. All of her notes, poems, and manuscripts suddenly receded, as if into a void.

They were five people: Sophia, Henryk, their two sons, Alexander and Victor, and Alexander's wife, Shoshke. The family waited until dark, when pilots had a harder time spotting targets. At the threshold, Sophia did something that showed her experience as an itinerant revolutionary and refugee. She left the door open. She knew that, whatever happened, she would not be coming back.

The street was a human river. That night, Colonel Roman Umiastowski of the Warsaw Defense Command had ordered all military-aged men to set out for the right bank of the Vistula, where they would be mobilized into the army. It was an idiotic idea—there were no weapons there for these recruits—but the men heeded the call, as did many of their family members. Three hundred thousand people left Warsaw, on bicycles, on horseback, and on foot.

The Erlichs made their way to Praga, where the central committee had arranged for a truck to take them east. By the time they showed up, the truck had been seized by other refugees. Comrades procured a car with two empty seats for Sophia and Henryk. Sophia looked at Alexander and Shoshke. Both seemed too fragile to walk. She shoved the couple into the car. “Mama!” Alexander screamed. Her legs shook. They had to stay together, she thought. They could tolerate anything if they stayed together. She forced herself to stand still until the car drove away. Sophia and her men joined the crowds shuffling east. The footsteps on cobblestones reminded her of a funeral march.

On September 8, just before midnight, Arthur Zygielbojm, a Bundist councilman from Lodz, arrived in Warsaw after a harrowing journey on foot. On one bucolic country road, the German bombers had strafed his group. He had been separated from his twenty-year-old son Józef in the chaos, and hoped the boy would find him later.

Though he worked in Lodz, Warsaw was the city of Zygielbojm's heart. One of a dozen children, he had been born into shetel poverty and got his first job at age ten. His carpentry apprenticeship ended when he lost two fingers to a table saw, so he tried his luck as a glove maker. This trade sent him to Warsaw, where he reinvented himself. He cut his teeth in the labor movement and traded his humble wife for a gorgeous actress. As a writer, he found endless inspiration in Warsaw's antic streets, in the stab and jab of its municipal politics, in the lissome women he continued to chase. Now he found his beloved city shattered by bombardment, and his friends unmoored after their leaders' flight. At the offices of the Polish Socialist Party, Zygmunt Zaremba gave him an earful about the Bund's perceived desertion, then filled him in on the workers' brigades that he and his comrade Mieczyslaw "Mek" Niedzialkowski had formed to defend Warsaw.

Despite the evacuation of the government and the collapse of the army, the two men had convinced Mayor Starzynski not to surrender. The country's leaders may have abandoned them, but thanks to the Polish Socialist Party, the city would fight alone.

Workers' Brigades for the Defense of Warsaw

Commanded by socialist infantry captain Marian Kenig, Zaremba's workers' brigades would lay mines, dig trenches, and fight alongside the 140,000 troops still in Warsaw. Thousands applied, even though the government provided them with little more than shovels and pickaxes. Zygielbojm implored Zaremba to let him form Jewish battalions, but, still angry at the Bundist exodus, Zaremba refused. Instead, the Bund sent thousands of recruits to the Polish Socialist Party.

When he was not coordinating defense, Zygielbojm was at Naye Folkstsaytung's offices, where the Bund published the city's last Yiddish paper. Their journalists instructed readers to dig wells and to collect broken glass to be melted into new windowpanes. In the announcements section, people inquired after laundry that fell from lines during bombardments and about relatives lost in the chaos. Naye Folkstsaytung ran a distribution center where fighters could request necessities; Bundists delivered them under sniper fire.

A tight little crew began to emerge: Zygielbojm, the hard-drinking bon vivant David Klin, the gentle engineer Abrasha Blum, the journalist Victor Shulman, and the refined teacher Sonia Nowogrodska, a frequent political prisoner whose husband Emanuel was fortuitously in New York when war began. These five activists would form the nucleus of an underground.

Warsaw filled with refugees, who camped out in abandoned ministries and on streets. Food grew short, and the lines at bakeries made easy targets for German planes. Sonia Nowogrodska organized a kitchen out of the Bund's headquarters at 26 Dluga Street, until a bomb hit their building. She set up a new kitchen around the corner.

Zygielbojm organized Tsukunft members into civil defense brigades. There was no water to put out fires, so they collected buckets of sand. They stood on rooftops with their little buckets, ready to smother incendiary bombs as they fell. Poles worked alongside them. Shrapnel does not distinguish on the basis of identity. In basements and on barricades, they were simply the people of Warsaw. The city became their country.

Henryk Erlich

Erlich's group spent nine days on the road, traversing highways jammed with the chaotic remnants of the Polish army. Nazi warplanes strafed them relentlessly. They slogged through mud, mosquitos, and sand. Their group had a single horse cart, which the group took turns riding in. Henryk refused to sit longer than his due.

Their group contained the brightest stars of the party. Viktor Alter, Bernard Goldstein, Shloyme Gilinsky, Shloyme Mendelson. Each shtetl greeted them as celebrities. Locals elbowed each other. Can you believe it's the attorney Erlich? One of the top people in Poland! And here he is in Bereza Kartuska? In Maltsh?

In tiny Miedzyrzec, thirty miles outside of Warsaw, the group heard that the capital had refused to surrender. Bernard Goldstein and Viktor Alter decided to turn back. The military had closed direct routes, so the pair took the long road, through Lublin. In the bombarded city, they managed to publish two issues of their newspaper before it was time to skip town. The pair decided to split up to increase their odds of reaching Warsaw. When Bernard hugged Alter goodbye, he didn't realize this was the last time he'd see his friend.

The rest of Erlich's group moved on. Their first night back on the road, the sky opened into an inferno. They ran into the woods to hide. Beyond the sparse trees they saw peasant cottages on fire. More bombs fell. They pressed themselves face down into the dirt. Union organizer Joseph Rothenberg noticed that Erlich remained standing. "An intense look had come over him. Was he concentrating on the vastness of the night, on the sky aflame with the crimson reflection of the fire?" But Erlich just told him that they had to help the peasants. He walked toward the burning cottages.

The Siege

The Wehrmacht reached Warsaw's outskirts on September 15 and the city fell under siege. The next night, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Luftwaffe pounded the Jewish quarter. Twenty blocks went up in flame.

The Naye Folkstsæytung editors moved into the office with their families. Like all of Warsaw, they were starving. Once, Sonia Nowogrodska managed to procure an onion from the soup kitchen. She divided it between four people. It was their only meal that day.

The city gasworks were shut to prevent an explosion, and electricity was cut, so Lazar Klug, head of the Jewish Printers' Union, set Naye Folkstsaytung's type by hand. Every day, the crew cranked out ten thousand copies on a rotary press.

In one article, Zygielbojm described the newspaper's wartime ambience.

The machinists work quickly, because who knows where a bomb will drop. Faster, faster. The street needs to hear the Bundist word. We work faster, with heart, and while we work, we crack jokes at Hitler's expense.

Suddenly, Boom Boom Boom. A bomb explodes nearby. Everything becomes still. We hide in corners...One of the printers gets up...He sings the refrain from one of Goldfaden's operettas:

Since bombs have bombidibombled

Never was there such a bomb,

Never was there such a bomb [as this].

Everyone laughs. We sing together, we set the copy, and the newspaper comes out at the appointed hour.

Pinsk

On the night of September 16, the Erlichs' group reached Pinsk, a pretty little market town in the northeast. At this point, Warsaw was the sole part of western Poland not in Nazi hands. After their nearly two-hundred-fifty-mile journey, the group was beat. When they arrived at the house of the local Bund leader, they nearly collapsed on his porch. While someone went to fetch them drinks, their host turned on the radio. A voice emerged from the static. It was Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs.

It's been two weeks, and Poland has already lost all its industrial centers, most of the large cities and cultural centers.... The Polish state and her government have actually ceased to exist....

The Soviet government considers it as a sacred duty to give a helping hand to their Ukrainian and Byelorussian brothers living in Poland.... [and] ordered the high command of the Red Army to order troops to cross the border.

The Soviet Union was invading Poland.

Collapse

Due to the German invasion, few Polish soldiers remained on the Russian border, so the Red Army entered with ease. That day, the entire national government, diplomatic corps, and military leadership abandoned Poland. An endless parade of official vehicles, including trucks filled with the country's gold reserves, crossed the little bridge into Romania. Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly departed without even giving a final order to his army. The colonels had promised to build a blood-and-soil nation. They were now nothing more than refugees.

Volkovysk

Since the war started, the mood amongst Volkovysk's Jews had been bleak. Nazi warplanes circled menacingly. The first victim had been the mother of the Bundist councilman Schlossberg; she was hiding beneath a bridge that the bombers hit. Soon, Sam Rothbort's hometown was filled with burned houses and desperate refugees.

The local nationalist leader, pharmacist Hugon Tyminski, was practically orgasmic. Poland would beat the Germans fast, Tyminski bragged. Then they'd deal with the Jews. His crew marched around with flags and patriotic hoots, smashing the windows of Jewish shops. Rumor had it that Tyminski and his friends had prepared a list of Jews to murder when the moment was ripe.

When news of the Russian invasion hit, the Polish army fled, and a mob descended on the Jewish neighborhood. They murdered seven Jews, including elderly Alexander Markov, and cheerful Itcheh, who always danced so well at weddings.

The night was long and vile. Shlomo Markus, son of the Bundist leatherworker Avram Markus, hid with his girlfriend, Nechama Schein, in a warehouse next to his father's home. From there, they might have heard the screams as Tyminski's friends plundered the Jewish neighborhood. With dawn came a miracle, at least by Shlomo and Nechama's reckoning. They heard the rumble of Soviet tanks.

Nechama would never forget her joy that day, despite everything that happened afterward. It was “as if we had conquered the world and everything in it,” she later wrote. The Red Army's arrival didn't just halt Tyminski's pogrom. It promised protection from the Nazi advance. Nechama and Shlomo ran out to greet the Soviets. Nechama clambered up the tank's body to embrace the gun turret, tears streaming down her cheeks. Elsewhere in the Jewish neighborhood, Sam Rothbort's old comrade, the Bundist shoemaker Meir Zeleviansky, strode out with a Russian song on his lips. Spry as a kid, he climbed atop the Red Army tank, hugged its driver, and rode through the streets beside him, singing as if he had also fought and won. Perhaps he had, in his fashion. At sixty-some years old, Zeleviansky had seen Volkovysk change hands six times and be held by four regimes, three of which no longer existed. This time, he could support the winning side. Perhaps that's why he did what he did. He had lived long enough to know that all victories are temporary. Change is the only constant, so when one gets the chance to bring justice, they should take it.

Later that day, Volkovysk watched in astonishment as old Zeleviansky strapped a rifle to his back, walked to the pharmacy that belonged to Tyminski, and arrested its proprietor in the name of the Soviet Union. Tyminski was executed shortly afterward.

Henryk Erlich

It took the Red Army only a day to reach Pinsk. Locals trotted out to welcome their new bosses. There were even a few Bundists amongst the group.

Erlich's group and the rest of the Bund's central committee were still in Pinsk when the Red Army invaded. They spent the first week of the occupation locked inside a local Bundist leader's home. The inactivity galled them. Erlich was so stupefied by boredom he snuck out just to wait on breadlines. When the N.K.V.D called a local comrade in for a friendly interrogation about the central committee, they knew it was time to leave.

The central committee decided to head for Vilna—all of them except Henryk Erlich. He chose to travel to Lublin, his hometown, which everyone believed had ended up in Soviet hands. No one could agree on why he went. His comrade Joseph Rothenberg wrote that Erlich wanted to visit his family before traveling to Vilna. His son Victor believed that his father intended to stay in Lublin, reckoning it easier to operate on familiar turf. Erlich had no illusions about his prospects under the Soviets, but his chances were still better with them than with the Nazis.

Whatever his intentions, Erlich decided to travel alone. He likely wanted to spare his family trouble. On September 30, Sophia hugged her husband goodbye at the Pinsk railway station, and he boarded a train west, toward his birthplace.

Warsaw

As September waned, Poland's capital seemed like it would hold out longer than the country.

Impatient with Warsaw's stubbornness, the Nazis redoubled their brutality. German siege guns pounded the city. Five-hundred-pound bombs fell on buildings, shattering them into an incoherence of scattered bricks. Dazed survivors poked through the wreckage. What could be salvaged? A tea kettle? A parakeet? A lover's body?

Parliament was gone. Belvedere Palace was gone. The Grand Theatre was gone. Only a single hospital still functioned. Polish socialists begged the British Labour Party for help. None came. Mayor Starzynski begged the French and British governments for help during his daily Polish radio addresses. None came. The Paris of the East was burning, and the mermaid with the sword, the city's guardian, was nowhere to be found.

Workers' brigades tore up tramways and used the tracks to construct anti-tank barricades. When a Panzer tried to cross, the spikes flipped it upward to expose its weak underbelly, and Varsovians ran at it with Molotov cocktails. fashioned with the rags of their ripped-up clothes. Naye Folkstsæytung shut down. Zygielbojm was on the barricades, alongside teamsters, adolescent boys, and women armed with kitchen knives.

On September 27, the end was imminent. There was no food, no water, no help. Hitler watched the battle from across the river. Mayor Starzynski and Major General Michal Tomaszewski called a meeting of every opposition party, from the Polish Socialist Party to the Endeks. They didn't think to invite the Bund, or any other representative of Poland's Jews. Together, these men created the political base of what would eventually become the Polish Home Army, the largest underground resistance force in occupied Europe. The next day Mayor Starzynski surrendered Warsaw to the Nazis. Only the Polish socialist leader Mek Niedzialkowski refused to sign. “The working class does not capitulate,” he said.

Henryk Erlich

When the Nazis entered Warsaw, they tore through the city looking for Henryk Erlich. The Gestapo visited the Naye Folkstsaytung offices and the ruins of his apartment. They kidnapped other, random Henryk Erlichs on suspicion that they were him. The real Henryk Erlich was elsewhere, hidden in a safe house in the east.

Erich never made it to Lublin, which had ended up on the Nazi side of the border. Instead, his train stopped in Brest-Litovsk, the last city in the Soviet zone. The city swarmed with Bundist refugees, and the Soviet secret police had already questioned several local leaders about Erlich's whereabouts.

When Bundist Leybetchke Berman turned up at Erlich's safe house, he was astonished at how dapper the leader looked. Erlich wore a neatly pressed blue suit, and his collar was iris white. This costume of ostentatious dignity contradicted the sadness in his eyes. Erlich paced, lighting one cigarette from the last. The claustrophobia was killing him. Except for brief nighttime walks, he couldn't leave his rooms.

The reason was obvious. Everyone knew that Viktor Alter had never made it back to Warsaw. He was in Kovel when the Soviets seized the city. Alongside a delegation of Polish socialist railway workers, Alter had presented the new authorities with a statement expressing hope that they would help Poland liberate itself from the Nazis. The Soviets arrested the entire group. With his own arrest seemingly imminent, Erlich decided his best bet would be to strike out for Bialystok, and from there to Vilna, where the rest of the central committee had fled.

Berman begged Erlich to put on rags, shave his beard, and blend in with the other refugees. Erlich refused. Hiding was beneath his dignity. Let the Soviets do what they would.

On the night of October 4, Berman and Erlich walked to the Brest-Litovsk railway station, where they hoped to catch the train to Bialystok. The station was lit like an interrogation room. Refugees crouched on the floor, chewing their last onions or picking lice out of their hair. All eyes turned to Erlich when he entered. He wore a sharp fedora and a tailored blue coat. His silver beard sparkled like betrayal. Berman went to the cashier to buy a ticket. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a Jewish communist he knew from Warsaw walk up to Erlich, inspect his face, then disappear through a side door. Berman ran to Erlich's side.

“We have to run!” Berman whispered.

“I do not wish to run. I will not. I am not a criminal,” Erlich responded.

Berman would have argued, but the look on Erlich's face shut him down. Five minutes later, the communist returned with a secret policeman and two Red Army soldiers. They led Erlich through a side door. The Bund's leader was under arrest.

Berman stayed all night in the station, hoping for Erlich's release. Occasionally, soldiers allowed him to visit his comrade in the back room. Erlich sat very straight. He smoked compulsively and answered his guards with the same cold dignity as always.

The last time Berman saw Erlich, a Red Army soldier was leading him to the bathroom, with his rifle pressed into Erlich's back. Berman noticed Erlich's unwrinkled suit, his handsome beard, the proud bearing of his head. Berman got on the next train out of the city.

Chapter 2.I Occupation

(October 1939–October 1940)

Warsaw

W Hen Bernard Goldstein Returned To Warsaw in October, he could not believe the ruination. German bombs had leveled 10 percent of Warsaw's buildings and killed forty thousand of its people. Dazed survivors wandered between structures shorn of their facades. Every pane of glass was broken. The windows gaped like empty eye sockets. Walls leaned against each other for support, threatening to collapse into the dust of the Paris of the East. This was the price of resistance.

Bernard moved back into his old apartment on Nowolipie Street, where his brother was living after losing his own home during the siege. Outside, posters announced the Nazis' latest executions. Makeshift burial sites pocked city gardens. At the corners of Marszalkowska Street and Jerozolimskie Avenue, the cobblestones had been pulled up to make way for a mass grave of Warsaw's defenders, the workers who had fought beside Zaremba and Zygielbojm on the barricades. Residents blanketed it with flowers.

Immediately after they entered Warsaw, the Germans ordered Mayor Starzynski to supply twelve prominent hostages, to be shot if order broke down. Starzynski approached the Bundist councilwoman Esther Iwinska. When she put it to the party committee, Zygielbojm refused to let a woman go into Gestapo custody. He falsified Warsaw residency documents and took her place. The hostages didn't remain captive for long; the Germans released them as soon as they had secured control.

This was the last time the city stood together. The brotherhood of the siege faded quickly as Jews and Poles adjusted to their new places in the occupation hierarchy. With characteristic meticulousness, the Nazis stoked hatred between the two communities. They covered the walls with racist caricatures and filled their puppet press with stories about Jewish treachery. The Gestapo installed itself in the former Ministry of Education on Szucha Avenue and staged spectacles where they forced Jews to strip and hand their clothes to Poles.

Many Poles appeared to approve, thought the Bundist David Klin. In fact, Jude seemed to be the first German word that some of his neighbors learned. “Jude!” barked the Polish kids when Jewish women lined up to get water at the Vistula. Wehrmacht soldiers pulled them from the queues by their hair. “Jude!” kids shouted at the Jews lined up for free bread on Dluga Street. The Wehrmacht clubbed the Jews with rifle butts.

Wehrmacht men strutted through ashes, hookers on their arms, their faces plump and pink. They liked to have fun. They mugged the Jews, smashed their skulls for laughs. They forced well-dressed Jewish girls to cut rabbis' beards while they took snapshots to send to their girlfriends in Munich. Why not? They were masters. The East was their playground.

On October 12, 1939, Hitler annexed Lodz and Poznan to the Reich. The rest of Poland would become a province, where half a million German “pioneers” could settle on dream plantations, served by Polish slaves. Poles of German extraction, the so-called Volksdeutsche, would have special privileges. Jews would be ghettoized in cities, starved, and murdered. This Nazi plan came straight from Western imperial projects in Africa and Asia. If, as Martinican philosopher Aimé Césaire later wrote, fascism was colonialism turned inward, then Poland would be the European ground zero for its most savage technologies of degradation, separation, and erasure.

Judenrat

Ten days after capitulation, the Gestapo marched into the kehillah building at 26 Grzybowska Street and arrested the interim chairman, the genteel Adam Czerniakow. Czerniakow was an engineer by trade and a lukewarm Zionist by conviction who had forgone his Palestine immigration certificate to serve Warsaw's Jewish community during the siege. After two days of torture, the Gestapo informed Czerniakow that he was now the “elder” of a mirror-world kehillah. To distinguish this institution from its predecessor, I'll use its German name: the Judenrat. Whereas the kehillah functioned as a communal charity, the Judenrat was a classic colonial device to implicate victims in their own oppression.

The Gestapo ordered Czerniakow to make a list of twenty-four Jews to serve as Judenrat members, with twenty-four more as alternates. Czerniakow requested a delegate from the Bund. Though the Bund rejected the Judenrat on principle, they had no choice but to comply. Because the Germans already knew Zygielbojm as a hostage, they decided he would be the sacrificial lamb.

The Underground

“The Bund decided.” Even these words seem impossible. Most of their leaders had fled. The occupation banned newspapers, radios, gatherings, the very act of being outside after eight P.M. Yet, alone of all Jewish political parties, the Bund rebuilt within two weeks of Warsaw's surrender. They could do this because they came from the underground.

The men and women who founded the Bund in 1897 did so as criminals. They knew the insides of interrogation rooms, the rigors of conspiracy, the smell of bullets. Bundists hid weapons, built bombs, and fought on the barricades of the Revolution of 1905. They forged documents, incited mutinies, taped pamphlets to their bodies disguised as pregnant bellies. They assassinated cops and broke nationalists' kneecaps. When the tsar fell and the Bolsheviks booted them from Russia, the Bund relearned the lessons of the underground in Poland. This experience would serve them well.

That October, twenty Bundists met at a communal party kitchen, with bowls of soup set in front of them as alibis. Among them were Bernard Goldstein, Sonia Nowogrodska, Arthur Zygielbojm, Lazar Klug, and Abrasha Blum. They sketched out a strategy. They would build more tearooms and soup kitchens to serve as clandestine organizing hubs. They would secretly contact their prewar labor leaders, establish illegal trade unions, and set up an underground political organization. As for Bernard, he was too famous to wander the streets. He would lie low, see no one but trusted operatives, and stay locked in his apartment. Warsaw's legendary enforcer needed to disappear.

Soviet Vilna

When Leybetchke Berman returned to Pinsk, he told Sophia Dubnova the news of her husband's arrest. The family decided to leave at once for Soviet-occupied Vilna. It was the largest city in northeast Poland, and they guessed that Henryk Erlich would wind up in its notorious Lukiskes prison. Sophia waited outside the prison with the rest of the wives, as she had during Henryk's last arrest, in 1921. When she got to the front of the queue, the dour officer refused to confirm or deny Henryk's incarceration. She quickly realized that further inquiries were dangerous.

Memory is long on the left, and the Soviet Union knew how to nurse a grudge. They had not forgotten their decades spent sparring with the Bund. They remembered how Vladimir Medem had walked out of the 1903 congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and how Henryk Erlich led delegates out of the Smolny Institute to protest the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Not to mention the obnoxious way that Mark Liber and Raphael Abramovich had tried to organize resistance to the newborn Soviet state. Even when Bundists joined the Communist Party, as many had in Ukraine during the civil war, the party never trusted them. During the purges of the 1930s, these Bundists-turned-communists ended up in mass graves.

In the first weeks of World War 2, the Soviets rounded up hundreds of Bundist activists. The seventy-year-old leader Anna Rozental disappeared into Lukiskes, as did yivo director Zalman Reisen, and every Bundist on the city council. Arrests gobbled up the Bund's leadership in Lviv. When the Naye Folkstsaytung writer Baruch Shefner visited Soviet-occupied Bialystok, he found buildings plastered with posters that read, Down with the Reptile Traitors of the Polish Socialist Party and the Bund.

The two thousand Bundists who fled into the Soviet zone learned to keep their heads down.

Borders were still fluid between the German and Soviet zones. If you had enough money, you could even leave Europe altogether, or try. Leaders sent smugglers back to Warsaw for their families. Shloyme Gilinsky's son Victor was five when his father paid a staggering price to get him and his mother out. "When we left it was sudden, after dark, in a canvas-covered truck. (I still have the pajamas I wore.)...It took us out of Warsaw and plunked us down on a road where we continued with horse and wagon," he told me in an email. But the Soviet zone was too dangerous for Bundists. In November, they breethd a sigh of relief when the Soviets granted Vilna to independent Lithuania. Gilinsky and, days later, his wife and son slipped over the border past Soviet guards and their howling dogs. It was a still winter night, and the guide who carried Victor told him, "Don't cough or we all die." He didn't.

In Lithuania, Bundists could focus on survival. “The sea overflowed and flooded Vilna,” wrote the Bundist librarian Herman Kruk. “A place to lie down is a dream. A piece of bread is rare. A shirt—who thinks now of shirts?” The crème de la crème of Yiddish intelligentsia was crammed into classrooms and attics. Normal people were lucky for a patch of floor. In a dormitory on Sadowa Street, Zionists and Bundists fought the same ideological battles as always, if with a new wartime twist. The Bundists argued that they were not mere Jews who fled the Nazis but political refugees, like their brothers in the Polish Socialist Party, whose fate was tied to theirs. That year, they published a declaration: “Poland is our homeland, where we are entitled to equal citizenship rights, where our future lies.... Any other solutions offered, under present conditions, by Zionist or other Jewish groups, are wrong and utopian, as they always were.”

The Bund scrambled to set up its own infrastructure. To stay with comrades, wrote Kruk, was better than “being jumbled up in a herd of faceless uprooted refugees.” For money, they turned to three members whom the war had stranded in New York: Benjamin Tabachinski, Jacob Pat, and Emanuel Nowogrodski, whose wife, Sonia, helped lead the Warsaw underground. All of them now worked for the Jewish Labor Committee. trio begged their comrades to leave Europe and even secured pricey British visas for two dozen party leaders. The leaders refused. They had abandoned Warsaw. How could they abandon the continent? From Lithuania, they could at least funnel support to their comrades under Nazi occupation.

They even managed to publish books. I own one: an anthology devoted to the recently deceased Arkady Kremer. Pati wrote the first essay. Amid reams of bland political hagiography, it stood out as an affectionate portrait of her flawed, infuriating beloved. He was not the stern man whose photo hung at party conferences. He was the friendless student in a Zavalne Street attic who had asked her with such bewitching rudeness, “Have you ever seen how poor children live?” and so embroiled her in a love triangle. Girl. Boy. Revolution.

She wrote about what happened after Arkady stepped down from leadership in 1906. She had not regretted their loss of status. For the first time since university, they were together. After years in Paris, the couple returned to Vilna in 1921, leaving their daughter, Vera, to her bohemian paradise. Arkady taught math for the tishoh schools. He never learned good Yiddish, and his students mocked his Russian accent. She wrote about his final illness, when old men whom he had radicalized back in tsarist times came over to argue politics, and he asked, “Why me? Do they think I'm something special?”

Pati had remained in Vilna after her husband's death. In the winter of 1939, she was seventy-two. Her health was shot, and her heart broken by her comrades' arrests, but she remained a revolutionary. She wrote to the Bundist pioneer John Mill in New York, "I believe that our holy idea will triumph, and I will remain faithful to my final breath."

Before they got started on the Jews in earnest, the Nazis murdered the Polish elite. In the first months of the occupation, Nazis killed forty-three thousand Poles, including doctors, priests, scholars, military men, and socialist politicians. The Gestapo arrested the Polish socialist leader Mek Niedzialkowski and hauled him in front of S.S boss Heinrich Himmler for interrogation. The veteran radical looked over his glasses and said, “From you, I neither want nor demand anything. With you, I fight.”

The Nazis wanted to remold Poles into obedient and stupid servants, unable to add numbers larger than five hundred. They shuttered all education institutions beyond tenth grade, banned Poles from libraries, burned Polish classics, and forbade the orchestras to play Chopin. They shipped thousands of Polish men to the Reich as slaves. Still, The New York Times's anonymous German correspondent tried to strike a chipper note. "Today, Poland's society is dancing once more with undeniable grace and chic on the parquet floor," he wrote. Only the eight P.M. curfew marred the fun.

The correspondent said little about Warsaw's Jews, except that they were treated better there than in the provinces. He didn't note the cavalcade of humiliations.

Jew, you do not live in this nice apartment anymore. It's ours. You do not work for Christian firms. You do not work in slaughterhouses. You do not work in textiles. Your bank account is frozen. You ride in the yellow streetcar. You don't ride any streetcars. You walk in the gutter. You learn your place.

You will not eat from the soup kitchens. You will not take from breadlines. Our aid is for Aryans only. At Zygielbojm's urging, Mayor Starzynski protested this discrimination. On October 27, the Gestapo dragged him to their headquarters at Szucha Street. He was never seen again.

Jew, you will work for the Reich. We will make you productive, parasite. We will civilize you. Teach you what labor means. Patrols seized men and women off the streets to fill in the trenches by hand, to move stolen furniture, to bury the bodies of resistance members shot beside the ruined Parliament. Zygielbojm saw them at the Judenrat building afterward, “covered with mud and blood, their hands torn and bleeding, faces pale, breaking under the strain of witnessing the daily executions.”

When Zygielbojm arrived at the Judenrat, a dead body often lay in the entrance—a poor Jew whose relatives could not afford the burial fee.

To survive, Jews depended on the same mutual aid societies that had helped them weather other repressive regimes. The richest of these was the Joint Distribution Committee, or Joint, an American funded charity that provided sixty thousand meals a day in Warsaw and worked hand in glove with the underground. Many activists got cover jobs with the Joint, including Bundists Sonia Nowogrodska and David Klin. The Bund ran their own mutual aid network out of the party's soup kitchens, which gave six hundred of their members meal tickets, financial support, and home employment.

Warsaw housing blocks turned themselves into mini societies. Building councils collected supplies for people sent to labor camps, set up poetry readings and children's play groups, took up food collections, and funded it all with voluntary taxes and benefit soirées.

With most workplaces shut, peddlers filled the streets. Fear of labor roundups kept Jewish adults inside, so they sent their children to sell black bread and onion, cookies baked from God knows what, hand-rolled cigarettes, and carbide lamps, indispensable since the power was out. Germans beat the kids, but they were nervy and had strong legs. They evaded the occupiers to provide for their families.

Zygielbojm watched one teenage soap-seller in Saxon Gardens. After Germans swiped her stock, she ran after them, shouting that she had a sick mother and a father killed by their bombs. Though they slapped her face and called her a kike, she kept chasing them, clawing at their uniforms, screaming at them to give her what belonged to her. One German punched her. She crumpled into the mud. When she got up, her lips were pressed together in a tight line. A trickle of blood ran down her chin.

“You only live once,” she shouted in Polish. She slapped one German hard across the face. She kept fighting all the way to the Gestapo headquarters.

Naye Folkstsaytung was no more, of course. The Germans had seized their press, along with all the others in the city. But some farsighted Bundist had hidden a mimeograph machine in a party member's home on 67 Mila Street.

Marek Edelman worked the machine. He printed all night by a sputtering carbide lamp, running the paper between ink-coated cylinders, cursing the cramps in his hand. He ran off handbills in Yiddish and Polish by anonymous authors and handed them to girls he knew only by nickname, to be distributed throughout the country. That November, he would print the first issue of a new monthly newspaper. It spoke about Nazi repressions of Jews and of Poles, and about the socialist and democratic Europe that would come after the present nightmare.

At the end of October, a Gestapo lieutenant stormed into the Judenrat building and ordered Adam Czerniakow, the reluctant “elder” of the Judenrat, to assemble the members and their alternates in thirty minutes, on pain of death.

The Gestapo officer's jackboots shone, as did his vulpine smile. He lined the men in rows.

In front of a film crew brought in to document the moment, the Gestapo officer gestured at a map of Warsaw and announced that the city's 360,000 Jewish residents would be shoved into an area of the city smaller than New York's Central Park. The Judenrat had three days to execute this order. If they didn't, the alternates would be shot. The Gestapo led the twenty-four alternates into trucks, leaving the Judenrat alone.

The Bund's delegate to the Judenrat, Arthur Zygielbojm, stared at the paintings of the rabbis that decorated the conference room. These generations of wise men had no wisdom for the moment. Instead, he drew inspiration from his party's rebel past.

They couldn't go into a ghetto, Zygielbojm said. What would their people think? How could they face their kids? The men in that room were leaders. They needed to reject the Gestapo's order, whatever the consequences.

Terrified of collective punishment, the Judenrat refused to listen.

Rumor of the ghetto spread. By Monday, ten thousand desperate people had converged on the Judenrat. Zygielbojm went out to meet them. Two Bundists lifted him on their shoulders so he could address the crowd. He told the Jews to keep their heads up, refuse the order, and to resist, with their bare hands if necessary, anyone who tried to drag them from their homes. There was scattered applause, but also terror. Wouldn't this make things worse?

Afterward, Zygielbojm resigned from the Judenrat. He knew exactly what this meant. Yet he felt a strange sort of calm, one that he had felt since the Wehrmacht marched into Warsaw. “It is the total readiness to die which provides you with the indomitable strength to fight for life,” he later wrote.

Refugees

Intra-German squabbles postponed the construction of Warsaw's ghetto, but each day, ghetto logic strangled the city's Jews. Stars marked the shops. Stars marked the arms. At first, some Poles showed support for Jews forced to wear armbands, but after a hellish winter, sympathy faded. Poles averted their eyes when their Jewish neighbors passed. They had their own problems.

At the start of November, two young men arrived at the Warsaw Judenrat from the tiny town of Sierpc. Their clothing was torn and bloodstained, and their faces taut with horror. They described how a militia of local Volksdeutsche had herded Sierpc's 1,700 Jews into the town square, forced them to strip, and savagely beat them, all while they ordered the Polish fireman's band to play a cheerful march. Robbed, tortured, crammed into airless trucks, and taken to the small town of Kutno, Sierpc's Jews were now being forcibly marched to Warsaw. The two young men had barely managed to escape.

Over the next months, seventy-eight thousand Jews arrived in Warsaw from the parts of Poland annexed to the Reich. They were driven out of their towns with nothing after mass rape, after relatives were burned alive in town squares, and after the theft of their last possessions. Hundreds of refugees walked from Lodz with their kids strapped to their backs and their fingers lost to frostbite. Zygielbojm met a Bundist woman who had been detained with her children in a concentration camp on Lodz's outskirts. Hundreds of women were “ordered to undress naked, perform calisthenics for the amusement of the German soldiers who brutally kicked and beat them. On the pretext of searching for hidden jewels, the women were sexually molested,” he wrote. These internal refugees had been workers, intellectuals, shopkeepers, but in Warsaw, they had and were nothing. The Bund organized their displaced members by city, found them places to sleep, to launder their rags, to eat watery soup, to remember who they had been.

Since he'd quit the Judenrat, Zygielbojm had lived an excruciating half existence. “The water began to boil and every minute the threat of catastrophe hung in the air,” he later wrote. Death seemed to follow him. One afternoon, he dropped off a message for a Polish socialist comrade at a homeless shelter. The Gestapo arrested his comrade the next day. Zygielbojm blamed himself. He was too well-known to leave Warsaw illegally. He'd be caught, along with his helpers. At last, salvation came in the form of a corrupt Dutch consul who, for a hefty bribe, provided Zygielbojm with a visa. For protection, a Polish socialist worker would shadow him on his perilous journey out of Poland. From there, he would travel through Germany and onward to the Netherlands.

On his last night in Warsaw, Zygielbojm's friends threw him a farewell party at David Klin's apartment. One miraculously produced herring, another a bottle of wine. It could have been one of their prewar soirées. They stayed up all night evaluating the calamity that had befallen their country. Klin typed up six copies of their conclusions. Three would be smuggled abroad and three hidden in Poland, to be unearthed later. Before Zygielbojm left, Bernard embraced him. "So, my friend, tomorrow you'll be on your way. You're a lucky man and I'm certain you'll make it," he said. He told Zygielbojm not to forget them. At the doorstep, Zygielbojm realized he had no pen. Klin handed him his luxurious Pelikan fountain pen. A gift for the road.

Jacob Selemenski

The Nazis divided Warsaw into zones for Poles, Jews, and German overlords, with the fanciest quarters their exclusive preserve. They forced Jews into sadistic labor camps from which they would return disabled and broken.

Nazis forbade most Jews to ride trains, so cities became islands. To communicate, the Bund used couriers. Since a man's status as a Jew could be revealed by pulling down his pants, most couriers were young women with light hair and button noses that let them pass as Poles. These couriers were born actresses, steel-tempered and cucumber cool. On smuggling missions, Klara Zachariasz of Tomaszow donned a swastika armband and flirtationously asked Wehrmacht soldiers to carry her suitcases full of contraband. These exploits became legends.

One of the Bund's rare male couriers was the tailor Jacob Celemenski, whose brutish blond looks provoked a friend to tell him, “You not only look like a goy but also an antisemitic goy.” He arrived in Warsaw in February 1940 to report on conditions in Krakow. Sitting in Bernard Goldstein's shabby quarters, he listened to the leaders explain their methods for organizing under the Nazi occupation. Bundists operated in five-member cells. Members of one cell would not know any details about other cells, in order to prevent them from disclosing information under torture. Each member swore loyalty to the death. Through an illegal radio transmitter, the Bund received foreign broadcasts, which they disseminated in their underground press. They set up what they called a socialist Red Cross to provide medical help, find safe houses, and aid comrades in concentration camps. Money from New York Bundists arrived sporadically through Vilna; the Gestapo caught two of the four couriers who made the trip. They also moved money through the hawala system, a means of transfer still used in war zones today. Someone in Warsaw would give the Bund a hundred dollars, after which the Bund's foreign committee would give a hundred dollars to the depositor's cousin in New York.

When the Nazis banned Jews from education, the Bund organized an expansive underground school system. They ran youth groups, choirs, sports. After the Nazis sealed their Bronislaw Grosser Library, Bundists tunneled into the building through an adjoining cellar and rescued the books. They organized secret lending libraries in members' apartments. Their representatives showed up in ransacked houses to tell the survivors to endure.

They even reopened the Medem Sanatorium. The sanatorium's children had been sent home at the start of the war, and the director, Shloyme Gilinsky, fled east with his family. When the Nazis invaded Miedzeszyn, they let Polish locals loot the buildings. The locals stripped it down to the windowpanes. The sanatorium's new director, Shloyme Abramson, swept up the broken glass and gathered the remaining teachers, and by November the sanatorium was back in business. Soon, it cared for two hundred orphans.

The Poles

Through it all, the Bund remained close with the Polish Socialist Party. These bonds, born in street fights and prison cells, were now nurtured in safe houses where leaders of the two parties gave speeches garlanded with the phrases “joint struggle,” “socialism,” and “solidarity,” and in the joint escapades, like Zygielbojm's flight from Poland.

The Polish Socialist Party was the only political group to tackle their own country's antisemitism. In one May Day proclamation, they swore that “the new Poland must repair the mistakes of the past.... The ordeals of the Jewish people of which we are the daily witness must teach us how to live in harmony with those who suffer the persecution of a common enemy.”

Their words were a balm compared to the actions of other strata of society. In Warsaw, what had started as individual attacks grew into mass pogroms. At regular intervals, hundreds of Poles would invade Warsaw's Jewish neighborhood with crowbars and even guns, chant “Long live Poland without Jews,” and bludgeon every person in their path. The German occupiers looked on with amusement. Jewish workers fought back, but they were no match for armed mobs reinforced by the Wehrmacht. Other Poles seldom intervened in the attacks. Where was the church? Silent. The Polish underground press sometimes warned Poles not to help in Nazi persecutions, but that was it. In Jewish memoirs of the time, I find stories of decency, of peasants who offered bread to deportees, of the Polish woman who warned Zygielbojm to “cover up [your star], sir, a pig is coming this way,” when a Nazi approached, but these were exceptions.

Good Friday

On March 22, a glittering, frosty Good Friday, the Nazis organized a tour de force of violence. They paid poor Polish youth four zlotys a day to storm Jewish Warsaw, cracking bones, breaking glass, and snatching whatever valuables they could. German cameramen documented the destruction. After the pogrom stretched into a second day, then a third, men belonging to Bundist labor unions besieged the party's soup kitchens with demands to defend their neighborhoods. The Bund convened an emergency meeting in Bernard Goldstein's apartment to make a plan. They didn't want to provoke reprisals by killing the pogromists, so they armed themselves with pipes and brass knuckles rather than knives and guns. Teamsters, water carriers, coalmen, and slaughterhouse workers formed battle squads around the city. When the pogromists came, they were ready. The battle lasted for hours, spilling from one neighborhood to the next, as Jewish workers and some Polish socialists joined in. Ambulances hauled the bloody pogromists away. Injured Jews had their wounds sewn up in private apartments. The next day, the Germans called off the pogrom. Later, the Bund would realize that the Nazis had staged the Good Friday pogrom with documentation as their primary purpose. When the images ran in Munich cinemas and glossy Berlin magazines, viewers would see three things. Subhuman Jews. Savage Poles. Civilized Germans, beneficently keeping the peace. This propaganda only worked because enough Poles were willing to play their parts. After all, “Long live Poland without Jews!” was not a German chant. It came from the Nara boys whom Bundists once fought in Saxon Gardens. The Bund realized that racism was a fault line to be exploited by the occupier. “So-called Polish antisemitism is a betrayal of Poland, because it places a weapon in the hands of [the] enemies, because it permits the Nazis to execrate, besmirch and harm the coming Free and Just Poland,” wrote the Bundist press. Again, they were Cassandras.

Walls

In March, the Gestapo summoned the Judenrat chairman Czerniakow with a demand that the Judenrat pay for walls to encircle Warsaw's Jewish neighborhood. Protection from savage Poles, the officer said. The Gestapo told the Poles the walls would protect them from typhus-spreading Jews. Twenty walls had gone up by June. They were eight feet high, topped with barbed wire, and coated with broken glass.

Brussels

In April, Arthur Zygielbojm arrived in Brussels after a death-defying trip through the Reich. As a parting gift, in Aachen, by the Belgian border, the Gestapo whipped him for two hours straight. Worse than the torture, he had seen how average Germans—the wholesome teen boy, the buxom chick he flirted with—relished his country's destruction. He was rotten with hate. On April 6, in Brussels at the last few-tul meeting of the Labor and Socialist International, he calmly presented facts about the life of Jews in Poland. Though his words shocked the delegates, they did nothing but approve an anodyne May Day resolution, constructed to offend no one.

A few weeks later, the Nazis invaded Belgium. Zygielbojm fled across the border into France.

France

Hitler didn't stop at Belgium. The panzers that broke Poland now rolled over the Weygand Line, then the Somme. "When Paris ends the world ends," wrote the dissident Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, but cherry blossoms still sprinkled the Rive Gauche.

Like Victor Serge, the Bundists fled the German advance. They were used to exile. Here where I live is my country, they once said, but after five displacements, home just meant the ground beneath their feet. The Bund's stalwart archivist Franz Kursky packed his precious papers into twenty crates and tried to find a truck to take them south. When none came, he hid the crates as best he could and joined Raphael Abramovich, Arthur Zygielbojm, and the rest on the blasted road to the unoccupied zone.

They crowded into Marseilles. The Mediterranean port was now a massive encampment, with refugees shoved together in flophouses, abandoned buildings, in front of consulates where they begged for visas out of Europe. In this scramble for survival, Victor Serge noted that “we former revolutionaries are utterly beaten…and among us a squalid battle is beginning for places on the last lifeboat from the sinking ship.” Political parties that once fought to change the world were now only useful as a means to help their members escape the continent. Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Claude Lévi-Strauss, ahn-dray Breton, and other art stars had a network run by American journalist Varian Fry to get them out. The leaders of defeated socialist movements, like the Spanish Republicans, the German social democrats, the Italian Anti-Fascists, and the Russian Mensheviks, all turned to the Jewish Labor Committee.

Back in New York, Nowogrodski and American Federation of Labor president William Green drew up lists of hundreds of socialist refugees and their families and presented these names to the immigration authorities to request emergency visas. The authorities dallied. The assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, had little affection for refugees. A scion of confederate aristocracy and an admirer of Mein Kampf, Long took pride in making sure immigration quotas remained unfilled. He reflected popular sentiment. Americans didn't want Europe's trash. Father Coughlin demonized Jews on the radio. Members of the Christian Front beat them on the New York streets. In Congress, one Southern senator bellowed, "No living nation need permit its own conquest by unselected immigrants." Afraid of backlash, even American Jewish groups didn't ask for the immigration quotas to be lifted but instead lobbied for Jews to be permitted into Palestine, which neither Brits nor Palestinians would tolerate. Open borders might have saved the Jews of Europe, but they were not on offer, by anyone, anywhere on earth.

To learn how the Jewish Labor Committee fought their way through immigration bureaucracy, I sat for days in their archives at New York University and twirled the bobbins of microfiche like a wicked witch at her spinning wheel. On these slides, desperate telegrams appeared, begging for help for this old socialist stranded in Geneva, that stateless journalist trapped in a concentration camp in Gurs. For someone's mother. Someone's brother. Someone's wife.

My son. Stop. My friend. Stop. Karl Kautsky's widow. Stop. Not a communist. Stop. Name misspelled on visa. Stop. Uncle Pat. Stop. Abramovich. Stop.

Picture Raphael Abramovich as he was then, a small, gray man in Hotel Regina in Toulouse, surrounded by the remnants of his party. He had lost his revolution, then his country, then his oldest son to Stalin, but he could still argue in four languages about all the ways the leftist dream had gone so wrong. He was the Jewish Labor Committee's conduit to Mensheviks and Bundists in southern France. He stood on the endless lines at consulates, and rejected French comrades' prognostications of future victory with a cynicism he had learned from his own fugitive youth. At last, the visas came. The Jewish Labor Committee wired Abramovich five thousand dollars. Soon he and the rest of his comrades were crossing the Pyrenees on foot, lugging suitcases and scamming border guards, perhaps passing Walter Benjamin on the way. Then they were in Lisbon—he, Franz Kursky, Arthur Zygielbojm, and all the rest. Then they were on ships to New York.

Sam Rothbort

What of those who stayed? My mother takes another note from her shoebox, written to Sam in the swooping hand of his gallerist David Caz-Delbo. “My dear Sam Renoir,” it begins, “I am in perfected agony. I am trying to paint but my thoughts are always with my family [in France and Poland].... I am avoiding people and remain most of the time in my room or wandering in the park.... Let us hope that better times will come, and I will be able to see before I die my family.”

The page is mottled with tears.

Chiune Sugihara

While Nazi Germany was invading France, the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania. After the Red Army took Vilna, Chaim Fizshitz, former head of the Bundist emigration bureau in Warsaw, presented the Soviets with a list of his comrades in need of exit visas. They threw him in the gulag. Other Bundists adopted fake names and hid themselves in the countryside, or in Kovno, where they were less likely to be recognized. Sophia and her sons split up to increase their chances of survival.

“Our only hope will lie in the frail web of understanding of one person for the pain of another,” wrote the American novelist John Dos Passos, at the end of 1940, about the plight of refugees. This understanding struck the Japanese vice consul to Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, in June of that year, when he looked out his embassy window in Kaunas to see it surrounded by mobs of Jews. A week before, the Dutch honorary consul Jan Zwartendijk had started to grant Dutch yeshiva students visas to the colony of Curacao. Soon, rumors of the miraculous Dutch visas spread to both Bundists and ordinary Jewish refugees. The island was never their intended destination. The visas were in fact a ruse to enable their bearers to travel to Vladivostok, on the far eastern edge of Soviet territory, just across the sea from Japan. They would figure things out from there. After they had obtained their visas from Zwartendijk, refugees crowded in front of Sugihara's consulate in pursuit of Japanese transit visas, the final slips of paper that would allow them to escape the continent.

A career diplomat and expert on Russian affairs, Sugihara had little in common with the crowds outside his office. He didn't need it. He saw people desperate enough to kiss his shoes, and he decided that he didn't give a damn about his bosses in Tokyo. Ignoring requirements that he only grant visas to people with money, Sugihara calligraphed forms for twenty hours a day while his wife iced his arm so he could keep going. When the Japanese embassy closed three weeks later, he had produced papers for nearly three thousand people. Two hundred and fifty of them were Bundists, including Sophia Dubnova and her family.

Armed with false papers and dodgy visas, the Erlichs crossed into Russian territory. They were about to put to test a proposition tried by the Malian ruler Mansa Muhammad ibn Gao seven hundred years prior, when he set sail for the edge of the map to find out once and for all if the earth was round or flat. If the world was flat, then your way was barred. But if it was round, then you needed only to walk in the opposite direction to the one you had intended. Look neither right nor left. Let nothing stop you. Eventually, you would arrive wherever you wanted to go.

Gaza

As I write this passage I exchange text messages with my friend J. in Gaza. I worked with him nine years ago, when I reported from the besieged strip, and we kept in touch. Then came October 7 and the Israeli invasion that turned Gaza into a charnel house. J.'s father-in-law died because the blockade kept out his meds. J. lives with thirteen family members in a tent in Khan Yunis. Whenever he leaves a voice note, I hear the drones in the background.

My friends and I tried to help J. leave. For a while, the only way out of Gaza was to pay five thousand dollars a person to get on a list run by businessmen tied with Egyptian security. Impossibly, we raised the money. Some came from Victor Gilinsky, son of Medem Sanatorium director Shloyme Gilinsky, whom the Jewish Labor Committee bribed out of Europe back in 1941.

My inbox is full of requests from Gaza. “My name is X. I beg you, help us.” There are too many to answer. Each is a universe of need, created by a state that claims the Holocaust as its justification. Two million people cannot crowdfund their way out of a killing cage, any more than the Jewish Labor Committee could pay enough bribes to save the Jews of Poland. It all comes down to who has motivated friends in wealthy countries. And often, even that isn't enough.

We raised the money. We brought the unmarked bills to Cairo, to give to J.'s relative. Then Israel invaded Rafah, sealing the border. J.'s family could not get out.

Ghetto

On October 12, Yom Kippur, loudspeakers announced the creation of a ghetto in Warsaw's Jewish neighborhood. The 113,000 Poles who lived in the neighborhood would leave their homes, as would 138,000 Jews and Christians of Jewish ancestry who lived outside it.

Most Poles didn't resist the ghetto but instead fought to tighten its boundaries and get more land for themselves. Priests and businessmen bickered over every street. A tumult of real estate swaps began, as rich Jews who lived outside the ghetto tried to exchange properties with poor Poles who lived within it.

Not every Polish group fell into this frenzy. After the announcement, the Polish Socialist Party's underground press wrote, “The burden of all wars and subjugation forever falls on the working man, regardless of nationality. How degradingly cynical is the fact that the walls of the ghetto being raised by Polish and Jewish laborers...are meant to become a barrier between them, as if different fates awaited them.”

This was an idealistic statement, full of the sort of humanistic solidarity that both the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party excelled at. What followed would put it to the test.

Chapter 22 Divided City

(October 1940–June 1941)

Ain Pounded Warsaw for the last two weeks of October as the Jews dragged the remnants of their lives into the ghetto. Weary convoys hauled their possessions from as far away as Praga. They herded shrieking kids, pushed their elderly parents in wheelbarrows, guided scrawny cows. Nurses carried their patients on stretchers; some died on the way. The Bund tried to cope. On Smocza Street, they set up a refreshment stand. They grabbed every wheeled conveyance they could and helped. Their militiamen protected the displaced.

For a few weeks, the Germans permitted Jews to go to their jobs and shops in other neighborhoods, until, on November 15, they locked the gates. From then on, there would be two Warsaws—the Aryan side, where life continued as it had since the occupation began, and the ghetto, a teeming microcosm of humanity in extremis.

“In its unfinished chain of crimes and atrocities committed in our country, the Hitlerite occupiers have added a new link: the living body of the Polish capital has been cut up by a shameful wall,” wrote the Polish Socialist Party in their underground newspaper. For the brief time that the ghetto stayed open to visitors, hundreds of Poles arrived with food parcels for their friends. “The astounded gendarmes saw Aryans and arm-band wearers kissing each other at exit points,” wrote sociologist and ghetto inmate Emanuel Ringelblum.

For other Poles, the ghetto fulfilled a cherished dream. At long last, they had Warsaw without Jews. “All houses vacated by Jews were immediately locked by the Germans and then, with all their contents, gratuitously given to Polish merchants and hucksters,” wrote Marek Edelman.

Heritage Tourism

The Nazis set most ghettos in towns' traditional Jewish neighborhoods. For this reason, when a Jewish traveler looks for her heritage in Eastern Europe, she will by and large be walking through the places where her ancestors waited to be killed. This sets a certain tone for the trip.

Sometimes a ghetto will have been erased altogether, burned by its inmates, as it was in Bialystok, its old birzhes and synagogues now dumpster-filled alleyways behind Soviet apartment blocks. Sometimes, as in Krakow, it will be preserved in forensic detail, with a touristy Jewish restaurant and an antique store whose stock of Yiddish-inscribed baubles is enough to send a shudder down an observant shopper's spine. (I felt the same in Jaffa's souk, which Zionist militias ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian inhabitants in 1948—but I digress.)

In 2022, I spent six weeks traveling through the Bund's stomping grounds. I wanted to see how these activists lived. Instead, I felt only the heaviness of their murders. The cities, with their new names and strident nationalisms, had been cleansed of us so thoroughly that we only exist on commemorative plaques. In Eastern Europe I saw four things. A thousand-year civilization could be ended. It was irreversible. The place belonged to the grandchildren of the people who helped do it. It wasn't the grandchildren's fault. I sat in Ukraine with a new friend and told her how it disturbed me when I learned that Lviv had been one-third Jewish before World War 2. "Things change," she responded kindly. Indeed, they do.

The Other City

The Warsaw ghetto was fixed in the heart of the Jewish city, but with parts amputated. Neither the Gesia Cemetery nor the Grand Synagogue nor the Mirowska Square market made it within the walls. There were no gardens in the ghetto, hardly even a tree. What remained was half a million souls crushed together. There were more Jews in the ghetto than there were in Palestine.

People slept everywhere, in corners, hallways, cellars, curbs. The streets were so crowded it took an hour to walk five blocks. You shoved through peddlers, scammers, and feral skeletons who would snatch the bread out of your hands and eat it even while the crowd showered them in blows. The horses had all been slaughtered, so former professionals yoked themselves to rickshaws. Riksha in Yiddish.

Despite all manner of degradation, humans stubbornly resist their own erasure. They refuse the role that fascists have written for them. They mock their oppressors. They create and love.

There was high culture in the ghetto. Eighty members of the Warsaw Philharmonic and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra were ghetto inmates, as were the performers of the legendary Yiddish Art Theatre. Grand concerts played in the old movie hall. There were art exhibits, and there was Hamlet.

There was mutual aid, from Aleynhilf, the Jewish self-help committee whose soup kitchens kept people from starvation, from the Joint, and from the thousand building committees that had emerged during the siege and now were the bedrock of hyperlocal organization. The Germans planned a population density of seven to a room, so each tenement became a universe. In the courtyards, the committees threw concerts to raise money for the families of men taken to labor camps. They might follow up with vaudeville, a clothing collection, a public meeting, or a lecture on I. L. Peretz. Marek Edelman watched his Tsukunft comrade, the gorgeous Pola Lipszyc, sing for the kids in a Krochmalna Street courtyard. “We'll do everything to make the world happy.”

There was God. Underground synagogues, yeshivas, even a kosher butcher, as well as a church for Catholics of Jewish descent, tended to by one Father Godlewski.

There were quarrels. Squabbles. Beefs. You'd be the same if you were shoved cheek by jowl with your enemies. All the old battles continued. Competitive Yiddish and Hebrew cultural organizations fought over language politics. Following the party line from Hitler-allied Moscow, Jewish communists celebrated the fall of France as a victory over capitalism. The Orthodox pestered soup kitchens to keep kosher. The Bundists and the Zionists insulted each other in whatever mediums they had.

People got pleasure where they could. Brothels and pastry shops, yes, but also the lounge chairs that entrepreneurs dragged into a patch of sunlight, where girls could work on their tans. “Every dance is a protest against the occupier,” wrote the sociologist Emanuel Ringelblum. “The mania for parties exceeds all limits. People say that every morning [at dawn] they see people going home from the dance halls…with balloons in their hands, half-drunk, singing in the street like in the good old days before the war.”

There was the pretense of self-government, in the form of the Judenrat, which would administer the ghetto for their Nazi bosses. The Germans didn't use the word ghetto at first. They called it the Jewish “quarter,” like the German or Polish “quarter,” as if this quasi concentration camp was merely a neighborhood like any other. With typical perversion, the Nazis framed it as a gift. Walls equaled protection, they said. The Judenrat equaled autonomy. Its chairman, Adam Czerniakow, was now rebranded as a “mayor.”

To enforce their dictates, the Germans created the Jewish Police Service. Each cop had nothing but a starred hat and a rubber truncheon, but membership in the force meant exemption from forced labor, so rich boys flocked to join. Their “chief” was a Catholic convert named Jozef Szerynski, who had been a colonel in the prewar force. The Jewish Police even had their own prison on Gesia Street. The Bund forbade its members from joining.

There were even tourists—buses full of gawping Wehrmacht soldiers, officers in onyx mur-say-dees—all keen to see the untermenschen up close. “Occasionally a young officer would pull out his revolver and shoot into the crowd. How amusing these scampering Jews were,” wrote the famed hematologist Ludwik Hirszfeld, himself a ghetto inmate.

The ghetto quickly grew its own culture, a lexicon of songs, slang, jokes, and insults, all of them meticulously chronicled by Emanuel Ringelblum and his fellow scholars of the Oneg Shabbat archive, their attempt to create an anthropology of the apocalypse.

Ringelblum was a Zionist, so when he invited the Bund to contribute to his Oneg Shabbat project, they refused, citing ideological incompatibility. Instead, the Bund compiled their own archives to document Nazi crimes and their party's resistance and hid them in an apartment on Swietokrzyska Street. These archives have never been found.

Borders

The ghetto would never be sealed. Nazi aspirations didn't matter. Nor did the layers of German, Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish guards. Man has never made a border that would not be crossed. Jews and Germans battled over the porousness of the enclosure. The ghetto became a shadow city whose paths could not be delineated on any map, a Lovecraftian architecture of bunkers, warrens, blind alleys, smuggling tunnels, holes concealed by removable bricks, passages bored between Jewish and Aryan houses. An Aryan tram rolled through a gate in the wall and down the Jewish boulevard. A Jewish bridge passed over the Aryan market. There was even a sort of stock exchange, a courthouse with one entrance on Lezno Street and the other outside the ghetto, in whose corridors Jews and Poles conspired for black market success. No wall could separate the two peoples of Warsaw, even if what drew them together was less affection than the cool logic of trade.

The Germans allotted Jews only 184 calories a day, so the vast majority of food needed to be smuggled in. Writer Rachel Auerbach called the smugglers “saints and heroes of our dark age,” and they were the patrons of the ghetto's survival. Through the twenty-two official gates and the thousands more unofficial holes squeezed kids little older than toddlers. As the months passed, the kids kept squirming out to beg or thieve the Aryan side. Then there were the Poles who snuck over to the souk on Gesia Street where they could barter a potato for a wedding dress, some old flour for a golden ring. The deals were good, but even so, you can't besmirch their courage; in November, the Gestapo shot a Pole for smuggling in a sack of bread. There were the Jewish workers who lined up by the wall each day to join labor battalions that the Germans organized to work outside the ghetto—the jobs were shit, but it was a chance to find some food in the Polish city. Then there were the professional smugglers, the porters and gangsters of Bernard's old milieu, who moved their cargo in corpse wagons, tram cars, and trucks while corrupt guards pretended not to see. It was not just food. Poles brought in raw materials, and ghetto Jews became geniuses of manufacture. They set up home workshops to churn out commodities that their Polish partners smuggled to the Aryan city: cigarette holders, wooden-soled slippers with cardboard tops, aluminum spoons made from the wrecks of planes, mattresses, rag rugs, dyed linens, toys assembled by six-year-olds, and twenty-five thousand brushes a day. The ghetto, against all odds, became self-sufficient.

Top smugglers spent lavishly at the new cabarets that catered to the ghetto elite. At Café Sztuka, run by the showgirl turned informant Madame Machno, at the brothel Britannia, or at A la Fourchette, they enjoyed performances by the aristocracy of Warsaw's prewar nightlife. There, exquisite Vera Gran sang "Her First Ball" while the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman accompanied her with a buoyant legato. The poet Wladyslaw Szlengel satirized ghetto life in his weekly sketch show. Society girls fought for the chance to work as taxi dancers. At the cabarets, smugglers, Judenrat members, and Gestapo informants sat next to German occupiers, who liked to go slumming in the ghetto for a bit of kinky frisson. They blew thousands of zlotys a night, at a time when people had already begun to die of starvation. At tables set with crystal, they ate duck till the fat slicked their chins, drank till they puked, and stepped over the corpses on their way out. Models and bottles.

The Party

Since his Nowolipie Street apartment fell within the ghetto's boundaries, Bernard Goldstein didn't need to move. He grew a thick beard to hide his famous scar and stayed inside as much as possible. Couriers kept him apprised on the party's underground activities. To kill time, he played cards with Abrasha Blum and scrawny, sarcastic Marek Edelman. A childhood friend of Bernard's son Janek, Edelman had grown up around the Goldstein home, filching Bernard's cigarettes and worshiping the old fighter as a hero.

In the ruins of bombed-out buildings, Marek taught kids to sing the skif's anthem: We are young, and the world is open. When Marek led his charges home, through the rubble and the smoke of burning trash, they sang together. "In all the filth that lay about, the hunger, the humiliation and waste of every kind of human feeling...we managed to give these children a little joy," he later wrote.

“In order to defend ourselves against the feeling of helplessness that engulfed us, we tried to rebuild and strengthen all the prewar institutions, to create at least the illusion of a life that used to be,” Bernard Goldstein wrote. The Bund turned their former schools and newspaper offices into party kitchens and tea halls, which served as meeting points for activists and for illicit schools. They ran libraries out of couriers' briefcases. Ghetto residents sought stories of other holocausts—one favorite was The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, an epic born of the Armenian genocide.

The Bund's most important arm was its youth movement, Tsukunft. Energetic teenagers whose futures had crumbled in a matter of months, Tsukunft activists had less time for theoretical disputes than their elders. Their overwhelming concern was for ghetto youth like themselves.

In the courtyards, Tsukunft assembled groups to read the party press, discuss the French Revolution, and collect necessities for refugees. They set up job co-ops that served as safe havens from forced labor roundups. They issued a pamphlet to honor the anniversary of the Paris Commune. It began with a Victor Hugo quote: “In the grave is the corpse. The idea lives.” These hungry youths risked their lives for poetry readings. I think of all the plump pundits in America who claim that art is a frivolity to which the poor are indifferent. For the Tsukunft kids, art was as vital as bread.

The Bund ran secret printshops in the basement of the Naye Folkstsaytung building, in the old Bund club, and in comrades' apartments. Their newspapers' names changed constantly to evade the Gestapo, and they were distributed by five-person cells. Each copy of their newspaper had at least twenty readers; it was passed house to house, to be read aloud to groups of neighbors. The most important rule: “Shut up!...Loose lips are an offense against the movement.”

The papers, with their sixteen single-spaced pages and their crudely drawn covers, are reminiscent of the hectographs Pati Kremer printed three generations before. The news they published was always bad. Most of Western Europe had fallen under Nazi rule. The Luftwaffe pummeled London. Field Marshal Rommel's tanks rolled toward Palestine.

In their op-eds, Bundists agitated against the ghetto elites with headlines like “The Masses Pay—the Rich Rule” and “What Happened to the Bread?” They dreamed big. “We stand fast in favor of a free, independent, socialist Poland in a voluntary federation of socialist republics in Europe,” Maurycy Orzech wrote.

They wrote in a grandiose manner I recognized from my great-grandfather's pronouncements. When my grandmother Ruth married, Sam could not afford catering, so he bragged instead about serving raisins made from "succulent rubaiyat grapes" grown in his own "orchard"—in truth, his Brooklyn backyard. I imagined that this was Sam's own style, but I now realize it was the idiom of the Jewish working class that he came from. They all used words to bridge the chasm between their meager means and their glorious aspirations.

The underground press was costly and dangerous. Activists flirted with starvation just to afford ink. If they were caught, they could expect torture at best. Despite this, each Jewish party used their press to launch attacks on other Jews.

Even in the ghetto, Bundists clashed with Zionists—"prisoners of the ideology of statehood," in the words of Marek Edelman.

In Neged Hazerem, the newspaper of Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, writers excoriated the Bund for their rejection of a Jewish state. “Upon reading the Bund's small periodical, our hearts are filled with pity for the masses in whose eyes the eternal scattering of the Jews is idyllic.... The [Bund's] tremendous and victorious party didn't grant—nor can it do so—any spiritual support during these terrible days.”

When Zionist youth cut a deal to work on Polish farms, Bundist papers called it a betrayal of their homeland. These youth replaced Polish men whom Nazis kidnapped for slave labor, and every farm job they took made it easier for Nazis to deport their fellow citizens. The Zionists rolled their eyes. On the farms, they had milk and potatoes. Besides, what had their fellow Polish citizens ever done for them?

Warsaw

We are surrounded by mighty walls. There is no way out. Every wall seems to mock you as you approach it: You'll go no farther, and everything on my other side is hidden from you now and forevermore.... But those walls and the people who built them and stand behind them are mistaken.... Today we know that even when they wish to isolate us, thousands of fibers connect us with all the workers...on the other side. Our thoughts are with them, and we are fully confident that they are with us.

So wrote the Bundist newspaper Voice of Youth that winter.

Bundists put their hopes in their Polish comrades, old friends like Antoni Zdanowski, who had accompanied Viktor Alter to the Spanish front lines and shared a prison cell with Bernard Goldstein back in the days of the tsar.

Bundists who could pass as Poles began to sneak over to the other side of the wall to join them.

Polish Warsaw was repressed and hungry, but in comparison to the ghetto, it was a paradise, with parks, fresh vegetables, and apartments that housed less than seven people to a room. But it was dangerous too. An industry of professional blackmailers had sprung up to prey on Jews passing as Aryans. These blackmailers would latch on to a prospective victim—sometimes an old acquaintance, sometimes a stranger—and threaten to expose her unless she paid her savings. Once the victim was sucked dry, the blackmailer might turn her over to the Gestapo anyway.

A new vocabulary emerged for Jews on the Aryan side. Safe houses were called melinas. Once blackmailers showed up, a melina was considered “burned” and had to be abandoned. A Jew could have a Good Face: blond, snub-nosed, and happy. Or she could have a Bad Face: dark, hook-nosed, tragic. Physiognomy was destiny. If you had a good face, you could live in the open; girls with good faces often got jobs as maids. But woe to Jews with bad faces. They hid away in basements or attics, at the mercy of landlords who might throw them out on a whim.

One of the first Bundists to sneak out was David Klin, whose cultivated Polish, stolid blond mien, and job for the Joint Distribution Committee gave him the best chance of survival. The Polish Socialist Party provided Klin with the directions to an underground meeting point. Klin showed up at a vegetable shop on Czerniakowska Street and asked the salesgirl for directions to an avenue that no longer existed. She ushered him through a hidden door, into a forgery lab where operatives manufactured passports, travel permits, and certificates attesting to impeccable Aryan birth. The Polish socialists provided these false papers to Bundist leaders, along with money, underground newspapers, and communiqués from the government-in-exile to be shared inside the ghetto. Polish socialist leaders had themselves smuggled into the ghetto to meet with their Bundist comrades. They risked their lives escorting the Bundists out.

All of this must have assured the Bund that they were right to remain internationalists, that their salvation lay in multiethnic solidarity.

In December, the Bund's Voice of Youth ran on its cover a picture of two hands shaking through a hole in the ghetto wall. "All men are brothers, whether yellow, black, brown or white," read the headline. "Talk of peoples, colors and races is a bunch of nonsense."

When they launched a new Polish paper out of David Klin's safe house, they took its title from an old slogan of the country's independence movement. For Your Freedom and Ours.

On January 17, 1941, the Jewish Labor Committee threw a grand conference at Carnegie Hall to congratulate themselves on their rescue of European socialists, 308 of whom were in attendance. freed-rick Adler, secretary of the Labor and Socialist International, was there, along with Menshevik Raphael Abramovich; the Bund's Noyakh Portnoy; Julius Deutsch, the former commander of Red Vienna's Schutzbund; and the elegantly dressed Arthur Zygielbojm. After a coast-to-coast lecture tour about the persecution of Polish Jews, Zygielbojm had settled in New York, working as an editor at a Yiddish newspaper. Archivist Lucy Dawidowicz remembered him as a debonair man "who enjoyed frivolous pursuits.... His reputation as a skirt-chaser spread quickly from office to office." He did not seem like the hero she expected from the stories she had heard about his defiant stand against the creation of the Warsaw ghetto.

On the podium, the Jewish Labor Committee officials gave stirring homilies to antifascist solidarity. Union boss David Dubinsky thanked State Department secretary Breckinridge Long, who had rubber-stamped his comrades' visas. Dubinsky didn't mention Long's flamboyant racism, nor his obsessive efforts to keep less-connected refugees out of America. After many years in the corridors of power, Dubinsky knew when to hold his tongue.

I wonder what Zygielbojm felt when he sat in the audience. Did he try the wine? Was the chicken juicy, or did it taste like ash? Did his eyes linger on the ladies, or were their faces replaced by the people he'd left behind?

Sophia Dubnova

A few weeks later, three more of the Jewish Labor Committee's beneficiaries disembarked in Moscow: Sophia Dubnova, her son Victor, and her now daughter-in-law Iza, who had managed to meet up with them in Vilna. It had been two decades since Sophia left her homeland. For all the oceans of ink she spent on nostalgic poetry, she never imagined these would be the circumstances of her return.

Despite the cold, the trio took the opportunity to play tourist, visiting the treacly social-realist canvases at the Tretyakov Gallery and catching a performance at the Moscow State Jewish Theatre. In his memoirs, Victor Erlich recalled the Lenin mausoleum. “Thousands of shabbily dressed pilgrims were slowly filing past the mummified leader under the watchful eyes of the stone-faced guards.” He does not mention if they joined the lines. I let myself imagine that they did. Sophia Dubnova could have looked down at the preserved remains of her Exileland acquaintance, whose revolution had driven her and Henryk from their country, and wondered at the absurdity of how their lives had ended up. She a refugee. Henryk a prisoner. Lenin a dummy in a box.

She only knew one person in Moscow: her brother, Yasha, who was now a mathematics professor. Should she contact him? Or would that get him in trouble? When she finally called, she pretended to be a family friend. When he showed up at their dingy hotel, he chided her for her trick.

“I wanted to make it easier for you not to show up if it was truly inconvenient,” Sophia explained.

“I don't think they can do much more to me than they've already done,” Yasha responded. His wife, a communist true believer, had been arrested in the purges.

A few days later, the Erlichs boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway. It took three weeks to cross the continent. Outside the window, the world unfurled like an endless strip of white. The N.K.V.D searched them in frigid Vladivostok. Then they were on a fishing boat, crammed far over capacity with a hundred refugees, crossing the churning Sea of Japan.

They were nauseous and wobbly when the boat pulled into the port of Tsuruga. As Sophia dragged herself onto the deck, her eyes settled on an incredible sight. What stopped her was not just the pagodas that lined the shimmering bay, nor the women in their exuberant kimonos, nor even the brilliance of the azure sky. It was the infinity of pink, of such fragile freshness that it must have reminded her of her youth in Paris, of the soft evenings she walked with Henryk by the Seine, of everything she thought she'd left behind. Beauty. No other word but that. It was springtime. The cherry trees were in bloom.

Warsaw

Winter had been brutal in the Warsaw ghetto. Five thousand people were dying each month. Their families left their naked corpses on the street to avoid burial costs. There was neither food nor fuel. All most people had to eat was bread full of sawdust, "spit out soup" made from unprocessed oats, and vile little fish called stinkies. Typhus tore through crowded tenements. At the end of April, the Nazis ordered mass roundups to provide workers for labor camps. At their order, Jewish Police snatched ghetto youth to clear marshes or dig holes in conditions of such lurid sadism that they came back disabled or dead. The Bund's newspaper reported on the horrors of these camps and berated the Jewish Police, rich boys "with clean hands," for their collaboration. In early May, the Gestapo caught one of the Tsukunft's newspaper distributors, a teenage metalworker named Alter Bas. In a letter that Bas smuggled out of Pawiak Prison, he described how the interrogators had torn out his fingernails. "Be well. Be careful. I'll perish here," he finished. His arrest terrified his Tsukunft comrades. Had they been infiltrated? One afternoon, Maurycy Orzech, head of the Bundist Artisans' Union, was walking down a ghetto street when he saw a Jewish Policeman bludgeoning a woman. He punched the policeman in the face. The cop went down. Orzech got on top and pummeled the cop, to the approving hoots of the crowd, until more cops hauled him to Pawiak Prison. No one seemed capable of getting him out. Soon afterward, two young Jewish men showed up at Bernard's building at Nowolipie Street and asked the janitor to see the ledger book. They lingered on the letter G. Not liking their looks, the janitor rushed upstairs to warn Bernard, who was hosting his usual card game with Abrasha Blum. Bernard glanced out the window and saw a few people milling outside. Gestapo agents, no doubt. He decided to flee.

He ran into the courtyard, squeezed himself through a hole into the adjoining schoolyard, then scaled the wall to drop himself into the courtyard of a friend's building. As he landed, he must have felt every day of his fifty-two years.

Ten minutes later, Gestapo agents raided his apartment. In the wreckage, they left a note demanding he report to their headquarters the next morning. When he didn't show, they arrested his nephew Jacob in his place. Despite his pleas, the party would not allow Bernard to give himself up to save Jacob's life. Bernard was too important, they argued. The Gestapo tortured Jacob to death in their basement. Nothing could quiet Bernard's shame.

After a few days at his friend's place, Bernard's comrades dressed him in a long black capote and a velvet kashket. In the mirror, he looked every inch the pious Hasid. Armed Bundists tailed the "rabbi" to the first of his hideouts. From then on, Bernard Goldstein would live in a series of locked rooms in apartments whose residents were sworn to silence.

Bernard only broke the rules once, when he was hiding at his comrade Manya Wasser's apartment. Ten people shared the flat, among them a teenage girl who organized underground Bundist kindergartens. One day, the girl knocked on Bernard's door. Flushed with embarrassment, she asked his advice. She was in love with a comrade named Kostek, and he with her, but the two were virgins. Did Bernard think it was wrong if they had sex before the Nazis killed them all?

“You're breaking no law. Take your sweetheart and be happy,” he responded awkwardly. He wondered why she had come to him. She said nothing. As he felt her expectant eyes, he laughed at his own stupidity. With Bernard in the apartment, she couldn't bring her boyfriend over, but she had nowhere else to be alone. “Send Kostek to me,” he told her.

The next day, Bernard told Kostek that he wanted him to stop by periodically to deliver reports on party printing presses. When Kostek showed up, Bernard was nowhere to be found. Instead, Kostek's girlfriend was there to greet him.

Jacob Selemenski

In June, the Bund's courier Celemenski entered the Warsaw ghetto in the guise of a utilities inspector. He had a new Polish name, Czeslaw, a sharp suit, and several sets of fake documents provided by the Polish Socialist Party. To keep his cover, he learned to ignore suffering, to stride about with God-granted arrogance. If a Jewish friend called out his name, he would bark at them with such contempt that he could barely live with himself afterward. By the end of 1940, the Nazis had set up Jewish ghettos in most towns and cities in occupied Poland. As in Warsaw, they had herded Jews inside walled-off neighborhoods, where they subjected them to a brutal regime of starvation, forced labor, and terror. Celemenski had spent months traveling between these ghettos, trying to organize Bundist delegates to come to Warsaw for a conference. By the time he arrived back in the capital, everything had fallen apart. Orzech was in jail and Bernard in hiding. The ghetto had grown too dangerous to consider anything like a conference. Their desire to see one another still held, however, and once the Bund managed to bribe Orzech out of prison, they called a meeting of the central committee. Celemenski told the committee about what he had witnessed in his odyssey around Poland. Through his words, the six leaders traveled the battered outposts of their network. He described the arguments over whether to enter the Judenrat. While the central committee rejected the institution, in the town of Piotrkow-Trybunalski, the Bund ran the Judenrat, to seemingly good effect, and in other cities, Bundists wondered which tactic was right. In Miedzyrzec, an illegal brush maker's cooperative gave him 25,000 zlotys for shetels in need. In Lublin, he found the Bundist councilwoman Bella Shapiro working as a waitress at the party soup kitchen and guarding her orphaned twin nephews like pearls. She was arrested shortly after his visit. In Bedzin, he met the Bundist pioneer Yitzchok Mordechai Pesachson, whose daughter had just been grabbed in a manhunt. “Every town must go to battle, no surrender,” Pesachson told Celemenski, cracking his knuckles as he spoke. “We must hit back with arms or bare fists.” Later that day, Celemenski visited a teenage Bundist who had just been released by the Gestapo. The boy took off his shirt to show the mangled flesh of his back. Everywhere Celemenski met young people who wanted to take up arms.

As Celemenski spoke, he took for granted the existence of these Jewish communities. They might have been starved, caged, and tortured, but they lived, and so the Bund lived with them. He could not imagine their absence.

With the conference canceled, the Bund's central committee came up with a new mission for Celemenski. He would deliver aid to the cities he visited, but this time, for safety, the Bund's newspapers would be dropped off beforehand by Jadwiga Wisniewska, a Polish actress who worked as a courier for the Polish Socialist Party.

Jadwiga was an attractive blonde, with something histrionic in her voice. She copied Celemenski's list of addresses onto a slip of tissue paper that she concealed in her gold lipstick case. The next day, she departed to Czestochowa with the newspapers. Celemenski would catch up with her.

When Celemenski reached his safe house in Czestochowa, there were no papers waiting for him. In fact, Jadwiga had never shown up.

In Piotrkow-Trybunalski, his next stop, Celemenski learned the reason for Jadwiga's absence. On the way to Czestochowa, Gestapo officers had blockaded her railway car and searched every passenger. Wisely, she had left her suitcase on the other side of the car. At first, the Gestapo was about to pin it on another traveler. Then they saw the lipstick case.

The Nazi undid the case's latch, opened the top, and shook out the roll of tissue paper with its list of names. "I'm an actress," Jadwiga swore. The Nazi removed the cap from the lipstick tube. He turned the base. The lipstick emerged. He held it next to Jadwiga's lips. A perfect match.

The Gestapo hunted down the names on that list concealed in Jadwiga's lipstick case. They made arrests in Krakow, in Piotrkow-Trybunalski, in Czestochowa, where they clamped the party librarian's breasts in a bathroom door until she passed out. Most of those arrested activists joined Jadwiga at a year-old concentration camp near the city of Oswiecim in southeast Poland. It is better known by its German name: Auschwitz.

Chapter 23

Barbarossa

(June 1941-July 1942)

Volkovysk

Life in Soviet-occupied Volkovysk had not gone badly for the Bundist Avram Markus. Of course, some things took getting used to. The Soviets banned all political parties, and nationalized Avram's little leather tannery—not that a good Marxist like himself believed in private enterprise in the first place. And he must have done a double take every time he crossed Broad Street, which the town's new masters had renamed in honor of Lenin. On the other hand, things were looking up for his son Shlomo. Avram might have argued with Shlomo in the past, but the boy's holier-than-thou communism had finally paid off. If the Poles had refused to recognize Shlomo's medical degree, the Russians had no such compunction. Formerly unemployed, Shlomo Markus now headed Volkovysk's Jewish hospital. He was an important man who traveled between villages on a horse provided by the party. His girlfriend, Nechama Schein, got a similarly respectable job at the state bank. The couple tried to ignore the cattle cars chugging to gulags out east, full of anyone who disagreed with the new order.

Though the Soviet occupation spelled the end of Avram Markus's political career, it did have upsides. "Because there was no longer any antisemitism in the city, Jews breethd more freely," The Volkovysk Memorial Book recounted. The book didn't say how the town's Christian residents felt about this change of affairs as their formerly submissive neighbors got jobs with the new regime, became policemen, and started to act disconcertingly like equals.

Around the middle of June, Markus began to notice German planes. They flew in quick circles before they skittered westward. Like everyone else in Volkovysk, he and the old Bundist shoemaker Zeleviansky argued as to their meaning. And what to make of the Russian tanks that had passed through Ostroger Street toward the German border, or of the new airstrip the Russians were building in the nearby shetel of Rosh?

On June 22, explosions interrupted Avram Markus's breakfast. He looked at his wife, Fruma, then out the window. The sounds were coming from Rosh. The couple ran outside, where, crowded together with their anxious neighbors, they saw a convoy of Soviet automobiles coming from Rosh. German bombers had hit the airstrip, destroying every plane. Volkovysk residents turned on their radios to hear Foreign Minister Molotov announce that Nazis had attacked the Soviet Union. He called on citizens to defend their fatherland. At the same time, the Red Army began to flee toward Minsk.

The next day, German incendiary bombs hit Broad and Grodno Streets, the Tiferet Bakhurim Synagogue, and the Talmud Torah school. “Entire streets were ringed with fire,” The Volkovysk Memorial Book said. People hid in basements, only to be crushed by rubble, or they ran into fields, where German planes gunned them down. Dozens of people died in the bombardment, including my distant relative Joseph Beckenstein. I imagine Sam Rothbort's watercolors. The edges blacken and curl.

Shlomo Markus worked in the hospital till the early hours of the morning. An endless stream of victims came in, mutilated, burned, twitching in shock. They were the people he grew up with.

When Shlomo came home, he told Nechama he was staying. He couldn't abandon his patients. She protested that, as communists, they would be first up against the wall when the Nazis came. He spelled out a plan. The party had given him a horse. She and her sister would ride to Minsk, where they'd find each other when things settled down. Nechama packed a bag with Shlomo's most precious possession, his medical degree.

Around noon, Nechama and her sister rode through the teeming streets. Yesterday's Soviet conquerors were absconding in wagons, in private cars, on stolen bicycles, their frenzied flight like that of wasps from a burning nest. As she tried to lead her horse between the blasts, Nechama was probably too distracted to notice someone else hitting the road. Amidst soldiers packed into a Red Army truck sat the old Bundist shoemaker Zeleviansky, who had arrested the pharmacist Tyminski on the first day of the Soviet occupation and so taken revenge on behalf of Volkovysk's Jews. Though he was Sam Rothbort's age, Zeleviansky had thrown in his lot with younger men. He didn't know what the future would hold, only that his hometown was not in it.

Lithuania

As the Wehrmacht tore through Soviet territory, they were followed by the Einsatzgruppen, mobile death squads assigned to bring about the final solution to the Jewish question. Their first massacre of Jews came days after the invasion's start, in the small Lithuanian town of Gargzdai. Gargzdai's Lithuanians didn't object. In Ukraine and across the Baltics, Soviet rule had hardened opinions amongst people who already considered Jews synonymous with communists. When the Germans showed up, local patriotic partisans immediately morphed into Nazi henchmen. When the next Gargzdai massacre came, Lithuanians would do it themselves.

Kovno fell to the Nazis on June 25. On that day, Lithuanian partisans stormed the rickety-rack Slobodka suburb, tied its famous rabbi to a chair, placed his head on a holy book, and sawed through his neck. Lithuanians herded dozens more Jewish men into a nearby garage and bludgeoned them to death with crowbars while the crowd hooted like they were at a football match. The star perpetrator took time to pose for photos and then, accordion in hand, climbed atop his victims' bodies and sang the national anthem. Kovno is now known as Kaunas. It is a nice little city these days, with many outdoor restaurants. It even has a marketing slogan: "It's Kaunastic!"—a clumsy play on the word fantastic. I noted their awkward efforts to court Jewish tourists, but when I walked past Slobodka's shanties, I had to stop myself from throwing up. The only thing that lifted my mood was a bright little dosa shop that an Indian immigrant had opened. I bought five packs of cigarettes to support him. Only you can fix this place, I thought. It needs new blood. Please, bring your cousins.

Pati Kremer

Nazi bombs pounded Vilna. The walls shook in the fine old tenement on Kwaszelna Street where Pati Kremer lived alone. She had heard about the trucks headed east, filled with commissars' wives and other party bigwigs. Even her friends were skipping town. As for her, at seventy-four, she had no more energy to run. She heard a knock on her door. Her friend, the Bundist librarian Herman Kruk, stood shaking on her threshold. He wanted to evacuate, but his papers were a mess, and the Soviets forbade him to leave the city. She soothed him like a little boy. As the floor rumbled, the pair discussed their futures. A year of Soviet arrests had just about finished the Bund in Vilna. They were no longer an organization, just a few cowed comrades, with their party treasury hidden in Pati's apartment. The Nazi invasion promised worse, but perhaps it presented an opportunity.

The Bund was born in Vilna, in 1897 as the party of Jewish workers. These workers would need them to weather whatever horrors lay ahead. Thanks to an unlucky arrest, Pati Kremer had missed the Bund's founding conference. Decades later, she would preside over its final Vilna incarnation.

Eastern Front

Vilna fell on June 23. Minsk on June 24. Riga on June 27. Sophia's father, the famed historian Simon Dubnov, still lived in Riga. Old and sick, he had rejected his American friends' offers of visas, believing his place was with his people. Weeks later, a Latvian collaborator herded Dubnov toward Riga's newly minted ghetto. Dubnov moved too slowly. The Latvian shot him in the back.

The Nazis took Volkovysk on June 28. In the first days, German automobiles careened through the streets, their passengers shooting out windows at random. The yellow stars and race laws soon followed, but since their bombs had destroyed the Jewish neighborhood, Germans didn't need to delineate a ghetto. Survivors were already crowded in New Alley, the only street where houses still stood.

Nationalist ringleader Tyminski was dead, but his friends remained, and they were eager to share their lists of targets with the town's new overlords. Guided by these tips, the Gestapo locked Jews and communists in the White prison, which had held political prisoners since tsarist times, then put them on buses to the Mayak forest.

Mayak's pits swallowed two hundred people the first week, including the local Bundist leader Avram Markus, his wife, and their daughter.

Sophia Dubnova

Sophia Dubnova's ship, the Heian Maru, docked in Seattle in August 1941.

After a few hours bobbing in the port, they had their first local contact when a representative of the local Association of Polish Catholic Women boarded the ship. The biddy walked amongst the refugees, squinting at their faces, then sighed with disappointment at all the “little Jews” on board. “I was told there were Poles on the ship,” she groaned.

Without U.S. visas, the Erlichs could not disembark, so they boarded a tiny boat to Vancouver. After two years of war, the wealth of North America awed them. Chocolate milkshakes? Miracle of miracles. After they made their way to Montreal, Jewish socialists fêted them like royalty. Sophia and Victor addressed mass rallies in a Yiddish neither would ever master. She waited for messages from her son Alexander, who had already reached New York. He was trying to get them visas.

Sophia Dubnova would be one of 1,300 people whom the Jewish Labor Committee saved from Europe, using networks born in tsarist Russia half a century before. Her timing was impeccable. Shortly after the Erlichs' arrival, Canada closed its door to Jewish refugees. In the government's eyes, Jews were arrogant con men who thought themselves too good to work in Canadian cobalt mines, pushy jerks whose only aim was to import more of their worthless ilk from Europe. The three thousand whom Canada had already admitted were quite enough. From now on, refugees would be Aryan only.

On September 8, the Wehrmacht cut the last road to Petrograd, which had been renamed again and was now Leningrad. Sophia's beloved city was under siege. The Red Army scrambled toward the Russian steppes, abandoning western Ukraine to Nazi rule.

This was the state of Soviet defense on September 23, when a telegram appeared in The Forward.

We continue the common struggle against fascism and for socialism. Convey our greetings to our comrades and friends.

—Viktor alter and Henrik Erlick. Hotel Metropole. Moscow.

Henryk Erlich

Henryk Erlich had spent the last two years in Soviet prisons. After his arrest, the N.K.V.D had shipped him from Brest-Litovsk to Moscow's Lubyanka prison. Each night, guards dragged him out for an interrogation. Shockingly, they didn't beat him. Instead, foul-mouthed dullards shone bright lights in his eyes and barked that he was a fascist spy and a henchman of the recently assassinated Leon Trotsky. Sometimes, they brought in people he knew, detained comrades or Warsaw communists who had foolishly traveled to the workers' paradise. Each witness recited an improbable lie. Erlich tried to explain himself, to argue his innocence. It didn't work.

As the highest-ranking Polish politician in Soviet custody, Erlich was quite the catch. Once, the N.K.V.D chief Lavrentiy Beria even dropped in to observe an interrogation.

Some months into his imprisonment, Erlich asked his jailors for permission to write the history of the Bund. He probably reckoned that his own story was over; he told cellmates that the Soviets would never set him free. In partitioned Poland, enemies hunted his comrades. What would remain of the cause to which he had given his life? Nothing, unless someone left a record. He knew the N.K.V.D would preserve whatever he wrote. Imagining a juicy confession, Erlich's jailers agreed. Every day, guards led him to a little room with a desk and writing supplies and left him to his memories.

Over 252 lucid, detailed pages, Erlich told the history of the Bund in Poland. He didn't write to save himself. That was impossible. Instead, he wrote to preserve the memory of his party. Even an enemy archive held the possibility of survival. Erlich would have known that no empire lasts forever, and that eventually every government must fall. One day, new hands might open dusty boxes. His words might speak to the future.

Erlich wrote about how the Bund had always sought peace between Poland and Soviet Russia, and he had even gone to jail for it, but he rebuked the Comintern, whose social fascism theory had enabled the rise of Hitler. He showed how early persecutions of socialists led inexorably to the fratricidal bloodbath of the Moscow show trials. “The fact of my arrest and custody (and is it only mine?) must also serve me, unfortunately, as confirmation of those darker sides of the Soviet policy that we have always criticized,” he wrote. (Over these lines a secret policeman later scrawled, “Trotskyism!”)

Erlich closed: "I do not feel any guilt, neither for myself nor for my party."

This was not the abject self-denunciation his jailors expected, but despite their fury, Erlich refused to alter his text. When they handed him a prewritten confession, he coldly dropped it in the trash. The interrogator blustered and shoved a gun into Erlich's face. Guards chucked him into a punishment cell.

That summer, three N.K.V.D men frog-marched Erlich into a truck packed with fellow prisoners, then shoved them all into a boxcar. This was the start of a torturous five-day journey to the southwestern city of Saratov. Sun beat the train's metal roof, turning the car into a sweatbox. Prisoners ate only salted herring. Tormented by thirst, they fought over sips of water.

On the first day, Erlich recognized a face across the boxcar. He squeezed through the prisoners, laid a hand on the man's shoulder, and whispered: “Comrade Finesilver?”

At first, Abraham Finesilver didn't recognize the emaciated man “with a head of sparse gray hair and a face of such velvety-soft expression in the deepest eyes,” but he knew the voice, which had soared over Warsaw crowds each May Day. “Comrade Erlich,” he answered. He began to cry.

On the second day, the boxcar pulled into a station, and the prisoners heard the impossible sound of children's laughter. One prisoner pressed his face to the window. Across the tracks, he saw a train so crowded that some passengers sat on the roofs.

"Who are you?" he shouted.

“Civilians from Minsk!” they hollered back.

Through the window, a guard whacked the prisoner in the face with his rifle butt. He fell, spitting blood and teeth.

As an act of solidarity, one of the Minsk evacuees began to read aloud from his newspaper. His booming voice carried into the cattle car. This is how Erlich learned that Hitler had invaded the Soviet Union. He permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. He had predicted it.

In Saratov, guards threw Erlich into a solitary cell. At night, he talked to himself. He pretended that he was back in his father-in-law's summer house in Riga, with Sophia and the boys. Had his enemies caught them, or had they made it out?

At his sham trial, Erlich tried to give a speech, like he had at the Second Congress of the Soviets, back in 1917, but the judge cut him short. The verdict was prewritten. Death penalty. “This court has no right to try me!” Erlich shouted. Guards dragged him to his execution cell.

Death row prisoners were not permitted newspapers, so Erlich didn't know about the negotiations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile that followed the German invasion, nor about the deal to free all Polish citizens imprisoned in the Soviet Union. Neither did he know that, thanks to a campaign led by Bundist refugees in New York City, he and Viktor Alter were international causes célèbres. When Polish prime minister-in-exile Władysław Sikorski presented the Soviets with a list of eight V.I.P prisoners, it included the two men's names.

The first inkling Erlich got of the new political reality came when a jovial N.K.V.D major showed up at his cell to congratulate him. Thanks to the beneficence of the Soviet Union, Erlich's sentence had been commuted to a mere ten years of hard labor, the grinning major said. These ten years had also been commuted. In a few days, Erich would be in Moscow. The major stuck out his hand for Erlich to shake.

The N.K.V.D released Erlich on September 12, 1941, and brought him to Moscow's luxurious Hotel Metropole. He bathed, put in a state-provided set of dentures, and trimmed his famous silver beard. The next day, Viktor Alter joined him.

Babi Yar

At the end of September, Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators murdered almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv. They lined thirty-three thousand naked humans at the edge of the Babi Yar ravine, then shot them all in the head. Ukrainians resold their clothes. Nearly eighty years later, in the midst of the full-scale Russian invasion, I was on the back of a Ukrainian friend's motorcycle, part of a convoy of bikers returning from the Borodyanka displaced persons camp, and they stopped at Babi Yar to split up. It was just a park to them, banal with familiarity, but I asked for a moment to walk around. The ravine seemed large as an ocean bed. It was calmed with grass, topped by a Soviet monument. When I closed my eyes, I could see nothing but the bodies in the pit. My friend hugged me. I felt dramatic—silly, even. Why shouldn't it be a park? What were they supposed to do? Declare the land off limits? All land is watered with blood.

Viktor Alter and Henryk Erlich

Viktor Alter seemed shockingly buoyant after his two years' imprisonment, if much thinner and rather aged. Unlike Erlich, he had not tried to explain anything to his interrogators. Why should he justify himself to them? From the first, he maintained a sardonic silence. He went on a series of hunger strikes, just as he had during his previous stay in a Soviet prison, but the state had changed since 1919. Guards strapped him to a chair, shoved a tube down his nose, and pumped slop directly into his stomach, then locked him in a punishment cell, designed so that a prisoner could neither sit nor stand nor lie down. Alter didn't break. Eventually they acceded to his demand for pencil and paper, which he used to write a treatise on non-Newtonian physics. His hobby, he said. He asked them to send it to a scientific institute for evaluation.

Now Alter was back among the living, his big body slouched in the booth at the Metropole Hotel. He laughed uproariously at the absurdity of it all. It was pretty funny, wasn't it? One day, he and Erlich are in their death cells, and the next, they're surrounded by flunkies in Moscow's finest fleshpot.

The Soviets appeared to need Alter and Erlich. A few days after their release, an N.K.V.D bigwig named Colonel Volkovysky stopped by their hotel suite. Volkovysky was a loquacious sort, gossipy, full of apologies for the injustice of their imprisonment. The Soviet Union would make it up to them later. But enough about the past. With Hitler advancing toward Moscow, it was time for old rivals to unite. Alter and Erlich were influential men, Volkovysky said, with important roles to play in the war against the Nazis. What did they think about helming a Jewish antifascist committee?

As envisioned by the Soviet Union, the Jewish Antifascist Committee would mobilize American Jews to pressure their government to enter the war. Eager to do more to aid their comrades trapped under Nazi occupation, Alter and Erlich proposed additional responsibilities for the prospective committee. It could make antifascist propaganda, enlist anti-Nazi fighters, and help Jews in the camps and ghettos of occupied Europe.

After two years of prison stasis, Alter and Erlich yearned to return to the fray, but they wrote their proposal with full knowledge as to the nature of their newfound friends. Erlich knew Volkovysky's oily compliments had no more substance than the verdict the judge had so recently handed him. All this could disappear like a mirage.

Evacuation

In the middle of October, the Wehrmacht reached the suburbs of Moscow. Stalin ordered the government to move six hundred miles east to the old trading city of Kuybyshev, formerly called Samara. The politburo, the ministries, and the embassies were evacuated, along with the preserved corpse of Vladimir Lenin, which would spend the rest of the war in a rural schoolhouse. Alter and Erlich joined the elite exodus from the capital.

Sophia Dubnova

At last, Sophia Dubnova received the letter she had been waiting for since Henryk Erlich's telegram appeared in The Forward. It had traveled a great distance, carried in a Polish diplomatic pouch from Moscow to the Bund's New York headquarters, brought to her son Alex's Upper West Side apartment, then mailed to her refuge in Montreal:

Sophie, my love, my dearest children...I was brimful of tenderest love for all of you and of the boundless gratitude for what you had given me.... In defiance of common sense, I didn't believe that I would never see you again....

Henryk Erlich didn't dwell on what he'd suffered. The important thing was that he was back. He had a future. He might even come to New York.

Warsaw

The Bund had always said that eastern Europe was their homeland, but what had their homeland become? Who were their eastern European neighbors? Were their socialist friends mere exceptions, or were they harbingers of a decent future?

“We have been physically separated from Polish society with walls and barbed wire.... We effectively no longer share a cultural, economic or social life like we did in 'the before times,'” wrote the Bund's Polish paper, For Your Freedom and Ours. “Out there, we don't truly know what the position of the Polish masses is toward the Jewish masses. Some say there is a rise in antisemitism. Others read thousands of stories that bear witness to the opposite," to the concern that Polish workers felt for the sufferings of their fellow Jewish citizens.

They could not “close their eyes to the fact that the ceaseless, focused antisemitic agitation fomented by the Germans is carving permanent marks in the minds and souls of the Poles.” They were painfully aware of the way Polish police, and even many ordinary people, gleefully turned in Jewish fugitives. They read articles in the underground press that described Jews as harmful foreigners worthy of expulsion and merely objected to the gore of Nazi methods. Yet despite all this, the Bund insisted on their ideal of Hereness. “Poland was never a hotel,” said their party press. It was not an Egypt to escape.

The Bund refused to forget themselves. In October, two thousand Warsaw ghetto inmates took part in celebrations for the party's forty-fourth anniversary. When one of their founders, Noyakh Portnoy, died that same month in New York exile, Tsukunft raised money for a Polish gravesite where, after the war, “the remains of our dear grandfather will rest.”

In their press, the Bund commemorated lost Polish socialist friends, like the politician Norbert Barlicki and the intellectual Kazimierz Czapinski. Both had been murdered in Auschwitz. They promoted the theories of Sigmund Freud and urged young Jews to read the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, to look at his country's independence struggle and find resonances with their own fight. They turned their fierce analytical lens on France and England. Both powers shared blame for Nazi victories, wrote Voice of Youth. "They disregarded Japan's acts of plunder in China and those of Italy in Abyssinia. [They] gazed with equanimity at Germany's resurgence under Hitlerism.... The famous 'nonintervention' policy helped strangle Red Spain."

Foreshadowing the Martinican philosopher Aimé Césaire, Bundists described how the Nazi slaughter was an extrapolation of what Europe had inflicted on the world. “It is the Hitlerites' attempt to invoke the colonial methods of extermination that the European imperialists adopted in the previous centuries…and apply them to weak and small peoples [of Europe].”

When the Nazis wanted to reduce them to bodies, they held most fiercely to critical thought, humanism, and love.

“We must declare a fight to the death against the indifference growing within us. Before the world finishes off Nazism in battle, we must win a victory of morality.... We must oppose brutality with active empathy, the debasement of man with a defense of his dignity, and the madness of racism with the brotherhood of peoples,” wrote the Bundist Ignacy Samsonowicz in an open letter to a Polish comrade, published in For Your Freedom and Ours.

I stand in the death district and look upon its people. Poles. Workers. Brothers of this same shared earth. They build this terrible tomb.... I know powers from hell construct these walls, not Polish workers who are also enslaved. And I know one day, these same Poles will tear down these walls beside us...and form a New Life, a New City, equally happy for everyone.

After all, the workers of Paris built the Bastille at the kings' command, and those same workers smashed it into dust.

Viktor Alter and Henryk Erlich

Kuybyshev groaned under the weight of evacuated ambassadors, apparatchiks, and V.I.P's. It was a city of wood shacks, ringed with hastily built armament factories. Its unpaved streets were arranged like lines on graph paper beneath an endless sky. In winter, temperatures fell forty degrees below zero. Theaters played Chekhov, but the audience's feet were wrapped in rags. Their boots were needed by soldiers at the front.

In Kuybyshev, Viktor Alter relished his return to life. He was eager to read, to talk, to dive back into the fight. He would pause in the middle of a meal, soup spoon hovering in the air, just to win a point of debate. He spoke his mind, writing to British comrades that the N.K.V.D was the essence of counterrevolution. He lived like he was free.

It was different for Henryk Erlich. Ksawery Pruszynski, a conservative writer who worked for the Polish embassy, sometimes shared dinner with the pair. Erlich seemed much older than Alter, “restrained, pensive, and terribly lonely,” with a look of “placid pessimism” in his eyes. Once, Pruszynski spotted Erlich at the Kuybyshev theater. The Bundist leader stood alone near the entrance, “meditating, completely alien to his surroundings.” His face brought to mind the old group portraits taken at congresses of exiled revolutionaries in Geneva.

History held few surprises for Henryk Erlich. He had been in and out of jail, seen an empire fall, participated in one revolution and been the victim of a second. He had lost two countries and been condemned to death. A believer in humane, democratic socialism, he had watched Europe collapse into irrational slaughter despite the entreaties of intellectuals like himself. Yet he still tried. This was the world. There was no other. It was worth fighting for.

In Kuybyshev, Alter and Erlich befriended Stanislaw Kot, the liberal historian who served as Poland's ambassador to the Soviet Union. The three men worked to arrange the release of Polish prisoners. It was too late for some—elderly Bundist pioneer Anna Rozental was already dead—but the Soviets freed dozens more Bundists and Polish socialists thanks to their efforts. Alter and Erlich organized aid for the Jewish refugees, and urged Jewish men to enlist in the new Polish army that General Władysław Anders was raising in Buzuluk.

Jews flocked to join Anders's Army, as it was known. Many of them had no military motives and just wanted a hot meal and a modicum of safety after having survived the gulag. Their arrival infuriated the general. He had never put much stock in Jewish military competence, and after seeing how some Polish Jews welcomed Soviet troops in 1939, he was inclined to tar them all as traitors. (Anders didn't ask himself why Jews might have preferred Soviet to Nazi rule.) Anders ordered his enlistment offices to rudely reject Jewish applicants. Meanwhile, a group of Revisionist Zionists tried to sell Anders on the idea of a Jewish army, which could conquer Palestine when the war was done, and rid Poland of its Jewish problem forever.

After hearing troubling reports from Jews of mistreatment in Buzuluk, Alter and Erlich set up a meeting with Anders. They opposed the Revisionists' plan for a Jewish army, but also the racism they saw festering in Anders's ranks. After Anders described how Jews welcomed the Soviets, Alter shouted, "Those are isolated incidents!" When the pair requested Anders set up a spokesman for Jewish affairs, Anders refused, then threw them out of his office. (Later, after countless reports of discrimination and mistreatment, most of Anders's Jewish soldiers deserted when his army got to Palestine.)

At Kuybyshev's ratty Grand Hotel, Alter and Erlich were surrounded by released friends, Polish intellectuals, and handlers from the N.K.V.D.

Mostly, they plotted to get out. They kept in constant touch with the English ambassador Stafford Cripps and wrote polite letters to Stalin and Beria, asking to be sent abroad. Erlich needed rest. Hunger tormented him, no matter how much he ate. He could barely climb a flight of stairs. Polish socialist ministers in London had nominated him for a post in the government-in-exile, but he longed to go to New York. Let Alter take London. He needed to see his family.

On December 4, just after midnight, Alter, Erlich, and a friend sat in the Grand Hotel dining room, warming themselves with cups of tea. That morning, their N.K.V.D handler had told them to expect a reply to their request to leave Russia. When the hotel employee entered to tell Alter he was wanted at the telephone, no one had to ask who was calling.

Alter returned immediately and told Erlich to get his coat and join him. He said they'd be back in an hour.

They never returned.

London

In March 1942, Arthur Zygielbojm sailed for London to serve as a delegate to the Polish government-in-exile. His inclusion came at the suggestion of the Polish Socialist Party.

Zygielbojm didn't have an easy time amongst the exiled politicians in London, whose policies were only slightly better than those of the prewar government. Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski saw little use for Jews in his country, telling British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “It is quite impossible...for Poland to continue to maintain 3.5 million Jews after the war. Room for them must be found elsewhere." At various times, his cabinet included two Endeks, the ozon racist Adam Koc, the notorious pogromist Józef Haller, and Stanislaw Stronski, who had helped incite the murder of Poland's first president. Soon after Zygielbojm arrived, Endek politician Zofia Zaleska introduced a proposal to deport any surviving Polish Jews to a special homeland that would be established elsewhere. Zygielbojm's fellow Jewish delegate, Zionist Ignacy Schwarzbart, meekly suggested that this homeland be set up in Palestine.

Only Zygielbojm and one Polish Socialist representative voted against the proposal. “The Jewish population has a fatherland. That fatherland is Poland, just as it is the fatherland of the Polish masses,” Zygielbojm wrote in protest. The fatherland disagreed.

Judenrein

Horrific news came from the Jerusalem of Lithuania. That winter, a Polish boy scout arrived in the Warsaw ghetto from Vilna. Once inside the ghetto, he told contacts in Zionist youth movements that Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators had murdered a third of the city's Jews in the Ponar forest, then buried their bodies in pits. Through couriers, Bernard Goldstein asked a Polish union buddy to confirm the rumors. After his return, Bundists smuggled the friend into the ghetto. In Bernard's Gesia Street safe house, his friend told him that the massacres went far beyond Vilna. Whole towns in eastern Poland were now judenrein—the Nazi term for “clean of Jews.”

In early February, a Jewish chemist with the pseudonym of Yakov Grojanowski brought an even more shattering report to the ghetto. At a camp in the village of Chelmno, Nazis had applied their German efficiency to the mechanics of mass murder. Instead of tiresome shootings, they herded Jews into the backs of sealed trucks, which they then pumped full of poison gas. Nazis had forced Grojanowski to bury the bodies. “The execution lasts fifteen minutes, accompanied by the roar of the motor which is set in operation to drown out the screams and groans of the tortured defenseless victims," the Bundist press reported.

Few people wanted to believe them. Who could believe in the industrialized destruction of an entire people? Of course, it had happened in the past. Only thirty-six years before, in what is now Namibia, German colonists had butchered the Herero and Nama peoples in desert concentration camps. But that was far away. And even if some massacres took place in eastern Poland, the ghetto inmates doubted the same could happen in Warsaw, the biggest Jewish city in Europe. They clung to hope.

Leon Feiner

That winter, another Bundist leader showed up in Warsaw: the lawyer Leon Feiner, who had spent months languishing in Lida prison, at the tender mercies of the N.K.V.D.

The Soviets had arrested Feiner during an attempted crossing into independent Lithuania. When he told his interrogators that, before the war, he had often defended communists in court, they only laughed and called him a fascist dog. The verdict came down: enemy of the people. The judge sentenced Feiner to death.

The Nazis came, the guards fled, and the prisoners broke out of their cells. Feiner walked the three hundred miles to Warsaw. When he turned up at a Polish socialist friend's doorstep, he was barefoot, bloody, and covered in lice. A few months later, David Klin smuggled Feiner into the ghetto. Bernard couldn't recognize his old friend. The Feiner of his memories was an incorrigible dandy and champion skier. This Feiner was a battered old man.

The party installed Feiner on the Aryan side. He had one task—getting guns. The submissive deaths of Chelmno's Jews filled the Bundists with shame. Vowing resistance, they resurrected their old militia with the help of a left-wing faction of the Polish Socialist Party. Five hundred fighters stood at the ready, under Bernard Goldstein's leadership. They believed they would take part in the liberation of Warsaw. “The acquisition of arms became the one goal toward which we strained every sinew of our organization,” Bernard Goldstein wrote. “How much time we had we didn't know, but we knew we didn't have enough.” To liberate anything, they needed guns. For that, they needed the Home Army.

The Polish Home Army

By early 1942, scattered Polish resistance groups had coalesced into the powerful Home Army, led by Colonel Stefan Rowecki and under the tenuous control of the Polish government-in-exile. The Home Army had hidden weapons caches, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. They derailed trains, planted typhus-infected lice in Nazi shirt collars, and illicitly published Information Bulletin, the most popular newspaper in the country. Their symbol, a conjoined P and W that resembled an anchor, was scribbled everywhere in Aryan Warsaw. These letters stood for Polska Walczaca ("Fighting Poland").

The Home Army ruthlessly enforced its decrees over Polish society, shooting Gestapo informants and publishing blacklists of collaborators. A Pole who violated their boycott of German newspapers could expect a brick to the head. But as of 1942, the Home Army didn't punish blackmailers who hunted Jews in Aryan Warsaw, nor the Polish police who returned Jews to the ghetto.

Rowecki himself sympathized with Jews under Nazi occupation; he wrote horrified cables to the government-in-exile about the extermination campaign in the East. But he also knew his country. Many Poles had taken over Jewish property that they were disinclined to return, and many more equated all Jews with treacherous communists. (Even the Home Army's own newspaper sometimes indulged in this accusation.) Many Poles bristled when exiled Polish politicians in London spoke about Jewish equality.

The Home Army's political bureau didn't include a single Jewish party, only a two-person “Jewish Department” that consisted of a Polish lawyer and his Jewish wife. Feiner tried to persuade them to give him weapons. He came up empty-handed.

Antek Zuckerman and Celina Lubetkin

Another group of Warsaw ghetto inmates was also contemplating insurrection: the Zionist youth activists at Dror.

Dror was a pioneering movement, in the parlance of the day, that dreamed of building agricultural communes in a Palestine they imagined to be more-or-less empty. To prepare themselves, they had set up training farms in Poland where, when they were not tilling the land, they studied Marx, learned Hebrew, and worshipped Joseph Stalin. Believing toil meant redemption, they worked to harden their muscles for the future Jewish state. Unlike the Bund, Dror was a movement by and for the young. This fact is important. Young people perceive unprecedented events more clearly than their elders, since, at such moments, experience only clouds the vision. Dror had no middle-aged leaders to hold them back.

In the Warsaw ghetto, Dror's leaders were Zivia “Celina” Lubetkin and Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman. Twenty-six and twenty-five respectively, Celina and Antek were lovers. They were also hardened operatives who had abandoned their families to organize behind Nazi lines. (Lithuanians had murdered Antek's parents in the Ponar forest.) Unlike many activists, Celina and Antek grasped that the Chelmno gas vans were early steps toward a mechanized slaughter of Europe's entire Jewish population. A genocide.

They could only fathom one response to this extermination: united, armed resistance. They needed the sort of weapons that only the Polish underground could provide. Only one Jewish group had these contacts: the Bund, their enemies.

The Meeting

On March 23, seven delegates from the ghetto's leftist parties met at the Bund's soup kitchen on Orla Street to discuss resistance. Abrasha Blum and Maurycy Orzech were the Bundist representatives.

Neither Blum nor Orzech left an account of the meeting, so I rely here on testimony by Antek Zuckerman and the left-wing Zionist Hirsch Berlinski, both of whom considered Bundists their enemies. Keep this in mind as you read what follows.

Antek opened the meeting with information about the mass murder of Vilna's Jews. He appealed to the delegates to forget their differences in the face of extermination and come together to form a combat group.

Orzech shot Antek a withering look. “You're still a very young man, and your evaluation of the situation is too hasty,” Orzech said—or so Antek remembered. Berlinski also recalled Orzech's icy mood, the way he bristled at sharing space with ideological opponents. “Were it not for the conditions in the ghetto, we would not be sitting around the table with the present political composition,” Orzech said—at least by Berlinski's telling.

Orzech explained that Jews were not the only victims, and that the Nazis also gassed Poles in Auschwitz. Sooner or later, the Poles would rise up, and on that day, the Bund's militia would rise with them. "We have to wage our struggle together for a better world, for the redemption of mankind," Orzech declared. He ended by telling the delegates that the entire meeting had been pointless.

In his memoirs, Antek reviled Orzech for his refusal. How could he ask Jews to wait for some far-off Polish uprising? Why did he care about ideological differences when, within a few months, most of the ghetto would be dead? I try to see it from the Bund's perspective. Their party had spent the last twenty years working with Polish socialists to build a future in their shared homeland. They had pledged their loyalty to a socialist movement, which they expected would protect them in turn. What could have seemed more delusional than some vague proposal for Jews to rise up on their own? Jews had no guns, and no support from the Aryan city. Before they managed to kill a single Nazi, the Germans would burn them alive. And the kids advancing this plan were not just any kids but representatives of an ideology that the Bund had loathed since its inception.

Without the Bund's help, a Jewish combat organization was dead on arrival.

Cats

That spring, Bernard Goldstein noted new arrivals to the Warsaw ghetto—thousands of beautifully dressed Czech and German Jews. They came with engraved leather luggage and blistering contempt for their trashy Polish brethren. So loud, so dirty, and that Yiddish! They gave everyone a bad name. German Jews knew their purgatory was temporary. After the war they'd go back to their nice apartments in Berlin. Many were Christian—Aryan except for a grandmother who had converted from Judaism. Some even had sons in the Wehrmacht.

“We called them cats,” a survivor friend told me. In Polish, the phrase “I had” is miałem, pronounced “meow-em.” I had a factory. I had a brass bed stand. I had a box at the opera. I had German friends. I had a country. Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.

Bernard Goldstein

Before dawn on April 18, Bernard Goldstein tossed in his narrow bed. He seldom slept through the night. When he closed his eyes, his mind ran through a rosary of horrors. His nephew's death in the Gestapo basement. His fault. The teens rounded up for labor camps. He couldn't protect them.

He woke up in a sweat. Was it a bullet? Or was that only a dream? Outside, a searchlight glared on the wall of the Gesia prison. He heard two shots and saw two silhouettes fall. Then it was dark and silent.

He didn't know when he fell asleep, only that when his eyes opened, it was light. Downstairs, two Jews scrubbed blood off the pavement.

That night, Gestapo men had invaded the ghetto with a list of sixty activists to kill. Guided by Jewish Police, the Gestapo pulled each activist from their bed and shot them on the sidewalk. Bodies stayed where they fell.

Polish socialists had warned Maurycy Orzech about a potential raid, but only Sonia Nowogrodska and the printer Lazar Klug managed to get his message and to escape. The Bund lost ten comrades.

A few days later, Adam Czerniakow summoned Orzech to the Judenrat office, to tell him the executions were a punishment for the Bund's underground activities. He begged the Bund to stop issuing its newspaper. Orzech refused. He reminded Czerniakow about the gas vans in Chelmno, proof that the Germans would kill them no matter how obediently they behaved.

More executions came. Two weeks later, the Gestapo killed sixty people, many of them printers for the underground press. They brought Bundist printer Moishe Sklar back from Pawiak for a curbside execution. When friends found Sklar's body, they saw that the Gestapo had cut his flesh into strips, burned holes through his feet, and crushed his penis. A Jewish Policeman stole the shoes off his corpse.

The Bundist press warned the ghetto that these murders were not random. They were terrorism, meant to paralyze the people into submission. Privately, Bundist leaders vowed resistance until death. They begged their Polish socialist friends for weapons. None came.

London

At the start of May, a Home Army courier arrived in London, carrying two letters from Leon Feiner, the elegant lawyer who was now the Bund's agent on the Aryan side of Warsaw.

In the first letter, addressed to the Polish government-in-exile, Feiner described how Germans and their Lithuanian henchmen were systematically murdering the entire Jewish population of eastern Poland, using bullets and poison gas. (He also documented the murders of Roma.) Feiner criticized the antisemitism or complicit silence of most of the underground press but praised the Polish socialists. He insisted on the Bund's future in a free Poland.

The second letter, addressed to Arthur Zygielbojm, was intended for public distribution. Feiner estimated that the Germans had already murdered seven hundred thousand Polish Jews, and millions more faced “immediate annihilation.” He demanded that Allied governments declare that German prisoners of war, and even German citizens who lived in their countries, would be killed if the annihilation of Jews continued.

Zygielbojm tried everything to publicize the Bund's report. He sent it to Prime Minister Sikorski and the British government. He placed an article in The Telegraph and read it on the B.B.C. On July 2, The New York Times printed a small item, of the sort it now runs about similar far-flung genocides. Thanks to the Bund, Americans read about the final solution at their breakfast tables. Then they turned the page.

Warsaw

In May, German film crews arrived to make a documentary about Jewish life in the Warsaw ghetto. The directors forced well-dressed girls to kick starving beggars. They stood a plump smuggler's wife next to a bald wretch in a potato sack. In the shuttered Jewish ritual bath, they ordered Hasidim to mime sex with young girls. They set up a floor show at Café Sztuka, sat artists down at the well-stocked tables, and made them applaud the showgirls till their palms bled. They ordered Judenrat chairman Czerniakow to insult a crowd of rabbis. "Wave your hands," they commanded. "Jews wave their hands!" They brought a menorah to his apartment and lit all the candles, to give it the proper Jewish ambience. Their cameras caressed every detail.

That same month, Nazis started to ship Poles to a slave labor camp near a small village fifty miles northeast of the capital. There, they ordered the Poles to build something. They would not explain its purpose.

——

by the end of July, Warsaw's Jews had spent nearly two years inside a ghetto. A hundred thousand of them were dead. Every day, the Gestapo rounded up young men for their sadistic work camps. Germans gunned down Jews for any reason, or none. The once proud community kitchens had so little food they could only prolong starvation.

All the while, the Bund's old guard kept up their talk about working-class solidarity and the need to maintain ideological distinctions. The youth began to drift away. They couldn't understand why the leaders had refused to join a united combat group. Who cared if their fellow fighters were communists or Zionists? No one was going to Moscow. Palestine might as well have been Mars. The ghetto was their country. Did the leaders really think they had more in common with walled-off Polish workers than with Jewish teens dying before their eyes?

Tish Bav

Rumors circulated that the Germans wanted to deport Warsaw's Jews to worksites in the East. The Judenrat denied it, but a blanket of anxiety fell, thick and paralyzing. Ghetto inmates whispered that maybe the order would only apply to the people in refugee hostels, or the smugglers in Gesia prison. Each treasured a wild hope that she would survive.

July 22 was Tisha b'Av, the day when Jews mourn the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. A young Bundist named Vladka Peltel was in her mother's home when her neighbor burst in to tell them about the posters.

“The street was thick with people, streaming from every doorway as news spread from house to house, jostling and elbowing to get close enough to read the notices pasted on the wall. Each, it seemed, was consumed by the need to see the notices with his own eyes,” Vladka wrote.

By order of the German authorities, all the Jews of Warsaw, regardless of age or sex, will be deported. Only those employed in German workshops, the Judenrat, the Jewish Police, and the Jewish hospital will be exempt.... Those failing to comply with this edict will be liable for death.

Chapter 24 Boxcar

(July 1942–January 1943)

The Great Aktion

T was drizzling on July 22, 1942, when the Nazis began to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto.

Deportations followed their own satanic rhythm. The Jewish Police, supervised by S.S men and their Latvian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian helpers, would surround a building, bash down the doors, and force the residents into the courtyard. Anyone who couldn't walk, they carried. Once in the courtyard, S.S men inspected the Jews' documents to decide who stayed and who went. Henchmen shoved those marked for deportation into waiting horse carts. As the carts began to roll, those inside threw notes onto the pavement for their relatives. "I love you. Save me."

Carts went to a collection point at Stawki Square, next to the train tracks. History calls it by its German name, the Umschlagplatz. There, thousands of people stood packed like cattle in a factory farm. There was no food and no water. There were also no toilets, so they sat in their own shit. “In this crowded square all the continually nursed illusions collapse,” Marek Edelman wrote. “This is the moment of revelation, that soon the worst, the unthinkable, the thing one would not believe to the very last moments, is about to happen.”

In the morning and the afternoon, Jews were forced into the boxcars. One hundred people to a boxcar. Thirty boxcars a shift. Six thousand people a day.

The Germans assured the ghetto that they would spare workers in their factories. The ghetto believed them. Everyone hunted for a work card, paying Germans handsomely for their enslavement. “All of us felt that active resistance and obstruction of the deportations were the only possible course,” Bernard Goldstein wrote. “The ghetto had no right to sacrifice sixty thousand human beings so that survivors might continue their slave existence a little longer.” The first night, activists embarked on a flurry of meetings, at least one of which was attended by a Polish socialist. They knew they couldn't launch an uprising alone and unarmed, but they could forge work passes and pull their comrades from the boxcars. They would save one another while they found weapons and persuaded the ghetto to act. The next afternoon, representatives from various political movements met at the offices of the Jewish self-help group Aleynhilf at 25 Nowolipki Street. Abrasha Blum and Maurycy Orzech represented the Bund. The party had instructed them to urge their fellow representatives toward a united resistance. Two Zionist youth movements—Dror and Hashomer Hatzair—had the same idea. Dror's general secretary, Antek Zuckerman, who had clashed with Orzech several months earlier, continued advancing his idea of a united Jewish combat group. He reminded the activists that the Jewish Police were only armed with rubber clubs, which were hardly better than the sticks and rocks that littered the ghetto. Any organized group could take them. They just needed the will. This time, Blum and Orzech agreed with him, but Antek's words shocked the other delegates. Rebellion meant mass suicide, Labor Zionist Ignacy Schiper warned, not just for the participants but for the entire ghetto. Orthodox leader Zisha Friedman counseled faith in God. The majority voted against organized resistance. The meeting ended at twilight. Blum was lingering on the corner of Nowolipki Street, chatting with Marek Edelman, when a comrade, Berek Sznajdmil, ran up with shocking news. Unable to endure the upcoming deportation of the ghetto's children, Judenrat chairman Adam Czerniakow had swallowed cyanide. “Did he leave a note?” Edelman asked. He had, Berek said, but it was nothing special.

Gina Klepfisz

At first, Bundists, communists, and left-wing Zionists tried to make a committee to organize resistance, but roundups soon made communication between the groups impossible, as each activist fought to keep their immediate circle alive. In their underground newspaper, the Bund urged defiance. Maurycy Orzech wrote, "Do not believe you are being sent to work.... You are being led to your deaths. This is the devilish continuation of the extermination campaign which has already been carried out in the provinces. Resist! Fight tooth and nail! Do not report to the Umschlagplatz!" In late July, Nazis offered the starving ghetto inmates an enticement. Anyone who volunteered for deportation would get three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade. The Bund's best fighters went like this. Big men, teamsters and porters who had once made nationalists weep, now lined up meekly at the collection point. They were not afraid of work, and why would the Germans feed them only to kill them the next day? As the seizures spread, the Bund fought to keep their members alive. They set up workshops to counterfeit employment documents like those assigned to the Judenrat and Aleynhilf, whose workers were exempt from deportation, which they distributed amongst their comrades. Even these cards caused more guilt. Every Bundist who survived meant that someone else would end up in a boxcar. The old Jewish hospital sat beside the Umschlagplatz. A clinic still functioned, as if to maintain the illusion that people were being deported to work. Nurses circulated in their crisp white uniforms. They were permitted to go into the Umschlagplatz, and sometimes they could snatch a person out. There were many Bundists amongst the hospital staff, including Gina Klepfisz. Before the war, Gina had stitched up wounded Tsukunft fighters after brawls at the university, while her brother Michal fought the nationalists with his fists. Both brother and sister were Morgenstern athletes. Photos show Gina in a tie, her hair cropped and slicked. A glamorous, ideal butch.

When the deportations started, Gina had put on her starched dress, clean like nothing else around her, and made her way to the hospital. From the windows overlooking the Umschlagplatz, she tried to spot her comrades. When she saw one, she grabbed a doctor's smock, shoved her way into the scrum, and before anyone could see, put the smock on her friend's back. Thus dressed, he could leave with her. She had to work fast. Nurses still risked being shoved into the boxcars. These rescues had their own moral agony. A rescuer could only save a few people each day. The rest went into the boxcars.

In one roundup, the Germans took Gina's parents. She could not manage to save them.

Zalman freed-rick

When cheerful letters began to arrive from relatives sent away on the boxcars, the ghetto deluded itself as to their significance. They wanted to believe the letters were real, that their relatives were alive. The Bund knew better, but to convince the ghetto, they needed proof. They smuggled blond Zalman freed-rick to the Aryan side of the city, where Polish socialists provided him with a railway worker's uniform and information on the movements of the ghetto boxcars. He followed their trail about fifty-four miles east, to Sokolow Podlaski. There, railway men told him that the Germans had built a new spur, heading toward a village called Treblinka. Twice a day, boxcars packed with Jews went in that direction. They always returned empty. In the Sokolow Podlaski market, freed-rick spotted a naked, blood-soaked man, his face rendered unrecognizable from beatings. It was an old comrade, the nephew of the Soviet ambassador to America. He had just escaped from the Treblinka death camp.

Vladka Peltel

The Bund's past mocked its present. One night, in one crowded hideout, Vladka Peltel listened to her former teacher reminisce about Red Vienna, which she had visited during the Workers' Olympiad in 1931. The teacher spoke about how she carried the Bund's banner down the Ringstrasse, and how the Viennese children cheered as she passed.

Her memories infuriated the others. They had also believed in universal brotherhood, in a world without exploitation and war, but now such sentiments seemed like cruel jokes.

“Where are they now, your noble-hearted Austrians?” one of her companions sneered.

The teacher insisted that Austrians were not all monsters, that they didn't know the atrocities done in their name.

A few days later, she was deported to Treblinka.

Sonia Nowogrodska

Locked together in a comrade's attic, Bernard Goldstein and Sonia Nowogrodska listened helplessly to their city's murder. Through Jacob Celemenski, news came of the liquidation of the Medem Sanatorium. Before the deportation, teachers told the older children to flee into the forest, but peasants caught them and handed them over. The younger kids kicked and bit as the Nazis loaded them into trucks; their teachers accompanied them to Treblinka. Afterward, Poles looted the sanatorium. The geese and rabbits the children raised went straight into the peasants' soup pots.

Bernard and Sonia had passports listing them as a married couple, and fake work permits they didn't trust. They passed the time discussing their own deaths. As she spoke, Sophia dealt herself games of solitaire. Her hands were steady as she matched up the cards.

Sometimes she said they should give themselves up to the Umschlagplatz. Only scum remained in the ghetto, she told her former student Marek Edelman. The good people had gone to Treblinka, leaving only selfish, amoral brutes. What right did she have to stay? Her place was with Jewish workers, wherever they went. “If I shall be with them, then, perhaps, they will not forget that they are human beings,” she said.

Marmalade

After a year spent begging every contact in the Polish underground, the Bund finally seemed on the verge of getting guns. A Polish socialist friend told Maurycy Orzech that the underground had diverted a railway car full of German rifles to the Warsaw station, where it sat, ready for the Bund to loot. Maurycy slipped over to the Aryan side to arrange the theft. He told Marek to wait for his call at Sonia Nowogrodska's old apartment, one of the only places in the ghetto with a working phone line. He would call the morning of August 13. Marek waited in Sonia's empty flat. He was hungry, and the light glittered tauntingly on a jar of marmalade that sat on the kitchen shelf. Hours passed. The sun moved west. He waited for the phone to ring. He heard a clamor from the window. Outside, Nazis drove a crowd of Jews toward the Umschlagplatz. Marek saw Sonia Nowogrodska among them. Only one photo remains of Sonia in the ghetto. She is thin and intelligent looking. She wears a silly fedora. Her suit is so sleek it makes her armband seem like a fashion statement. It was afternoon when they loaded Jews straight into boxcars. Marek knew he could not save her. After the sun set, he ate the marmalade. The telephone never rang.

Cauldron

Bernard Goldstein ran from one hiding spot to the next. Old acquaintances saved his life a thousand times. The workers he had unionized hid him in their factories. A thief he once threatened gave him precious bread. He crouched beneath rag piles, stood in the closet of the Jewish hospital, squeezed beneath the floorboards of an abandoned building, crammed into a cubbyhole to find a young woman, warm and soft, who clung to him like he was life. In a Niska Street attic, the rats kept him awake. He didn't mind. “They were friends—rats.... We were not so far apart. I too, lying hidden in my own burrow, was a hateful and hunted animal.”

On September 6, six weeks after they started their deportations, the Germans forced the last hundred thousand ghetto Jews into a single block for a two-day selection that prisoners nicknamed “the cauldron.” Documents meant nothing anymore. All that mattered was a numbered slip of paper. Anyone without one went into the boxcars. “The chances of receiving [one] were almost nil, but the mere fact that such chances did exist was sufficient to confuse people, to cause their attention to converge solely on the means of securing the numbered slip,” Marek Edelman wrote. Numbed by horror, even young Bundists followed the herd. When the Germans surrounded their workshop, the Tsukunft member Vladka Peltel's comrades decided to rebel. Henoch Russ mounted a chair and called on his fellow workers to stay at their posts, and resist anyone who tried to drag them out. There was an awkward silence. A supervisor ordered them down to the courtyard. The workers streamed out. Vladka and her friends followed.

Birthday

The mass deportations ended on September 21, 1942. They had taken most of Warsaw's Bundists with them. Despite their people's decimation, the Bund managed to publish their newspaper a week later, with Zalman freed-rick's report on the Treblinka death camp. They implored their readers to face the truth.

Every Jew should know the fate of those resettled. The same fate awaits the remaining few left in Warsaw. The conclusion is: Don't let yourself be taken! Run away!...Help one another! Take care of the children!...We must survive so that we can demand a reckoning for the tortured brothers and sisters....

That night was Yom Kippur. It had been exactly forty-five years since the Bund's creation.

Bernard walked through the streets without recognition. Stores gaped obscenely. Possessions lay strewn around the ravaged courtyards. Survivors scurried like mice.

Only fragments remained of the largest Jewish city in Europe. Where were the Krochmalna brides and Yankl Scarface? The showgirls of Qui Pro Quo? The worshippers at the thieves' synagogue? The Seven Lions of Praga? The Yiddish actresses who painted a new face each night? Where were the slaughterhouse workers, the commies, the black hats, the housewives, the hacks, the brats who followed Khaskele Hunchback to the forest on bright spring days and returned to the same day?

Gone.

Crossing

That autumn, Abrasha Blum ordered Bernard Goldstein to leave the ghetto. Inside, he was a burden. Outside, he could convince Polish socialists to get them guns. Comrades would sneak him onto a work gang headed to the Okecie airport. He could run from there.

Dressed in his white hospital uniform, Marek Edelman led Bernard to the assembly point at 51 Mila Street. Bernard's beard made him look older, and his feet were so swollen he could barely walk. He examined the sloppy kid he'd known since childhood and thought about how their roles had switched. Two years before, Bernard had been the Bund's strongman, and Marek had walked behind him like an acolyte. Now Marek gently led him by the arm. At the assembly point, the supervisor, a former Morgenstern athlete, pressed a bribe into the S.S man's palm. He looked the other way while Bernard joined the workers on a wagon. As soon as they crossed the gate, he saw a truck with the blond Bundist Zalman freed-rick in the back. At freed-rick's signal, Bernard jumped off the wagon, pulled himself up into the truck's passenger seat, and ripped the Star of David from his arm.

It was an exquisite fall day in Aryan Warsaw. The sun shone across the ornate balconies of Wolska Street, and the oak leaves flamed in Titian red. The cafés were packed. Passengers hung off the sides of street cars. Pretty girls ran errands. Their heels were vertiginous, and they set their hats elegantly off-kilter atop meticulously waved blond hair.

This was his city. Every alleyway had known his feet. The police chief had feared him. Tabloids had fêted him. Workers had shaken his hand. Bernard Goldstein stared at the rushing river of humanity. He felt nothing at all.

The Aryan Side

Twenty thousand Jews hid on the Aryan side of Warsaw, in conditions of abject fear.

The Polish city was more hostile than ever. Some of it was due to Nazi propaganda, but the hatred had a material base. Many Poles had profited from Jewish persecution. Their debts to Jewish lenders were canceled. They were given Jewish stores as trustees. There was a glut of nice apartments after their Jewish owners went into the ghetto. Who would want to give that up? The deportations to Treblinka did little to increase Polish sympathy. The seeming passivity of the Jews disgusted them. Even the underground press berated the victims for failing to fight back. These articles didn't mention that the Polish underground refused to give Jews weapons.

At Bernard's first meeting on the Aryan side, Orzech and Feiner filled him in on their comrades' conditions. Unable to find refuge, many Bundists slept in cemeteries or bombed-out ruins. After the raid on Medem Sanatorium, Arthur Zygielbojm's wife, Manya, had wandered the countryside with her young son until finally returning to the ghetto in desperation.

To save other comrades from Manya's fate, the Bund relied on couriers like Adina Blady. Once a doctor at the Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital, Adina had poisoned her young patients to spare them from Treblinka. On the Aryan side, she and her former co-worker Marisha Feinmesser found melinas for fugitive Jews. The pair rented dozens of rooms under a panoply of fake names, using elaborate pretexts and eye-popping bribes—even enduring sexual molestation from one of their Polish helpers. They had no choice. Melinas meant survival.

Through it all, the Bund continued to give, as well as receive, solidarity. In addition to the telegrams they sent abroad about their people's extermination, they sent others to call for Indian independence and demand the release of Mahatma Gandhi, arrested in August for his Quit India campaign.

This humanism in the context of a genocide amazes me. If anything sustained it, it was perhaps the help that Polish socialists gave. Though they failed to provide the Bund with weapons, Polish socialists still risked their lives to save their comrades. At a time when Nazis punished such aid with the executions of entire families, Polish socialists hid Bundists in their humble homes. When she fled to the Aryan side, Gina Klepfisz, the Bundist nurse who saved her comrades at the Umschlagplatz, found refuge with two old acquaintances, the Polish socialist sisters Anna Wachalska and Maria Sawicka. Like Gina, Maria was an athlete; as a sprinter for the Polish Socialist Party's sports club, she had even traveled to Red Vienna with the Bund for the Workers' Olympiad. She and Gina had been friends since their teenage years. They grew closer now—so close that, decades later, Maria asked the Klepfisz family if she could be buried in Gina's grave. The women shared a single bed.

Sophia Dubnova

In October 1942, the Erlichs disembarked at New York City's Pennsylvania Station. In the three years since they set out from Warsaw, they had nearly circumnavigated the globe. Viktor Alter's sister Esther Iwinska was there to embrace them. "America is ruled by old women," she said, a grin lighting up her usually acerbic face.

The Erlichs moved into a dingy apartment near Columbia University, amidst their fellow socialist refugees. Like the rest of the New York Bundists, they fought to learn what had happened to Alter and Erlich. But the leads were drying up. Fiorello La Guardia, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and Clement Attlee in the U.K. all made inquiries, which turned up nothing. When Polish ambassador Stanislaw Kot tried to intervene, the Soviets told him Alter and Erlich were Soviet citizens and thus none of his business.

The Warsaw Ghetto

After the deportations stopped, twenty-five Tsukunft members gathered in a Franciszkanska Street apartment near the brush factory to scream out their grief. They were the first generation raised in independent Poland. The beneficiaries of the Bund's social infrastructure, they grew up as a family. They had marched together on May Day, read Sholem Aleichem at the Tseecho schools, learned to ice-skate at the Morgenstern sports clubs, had their first hookups at Bundist summer camps, fought nationalist students in the Tsukunft militia. They had been raised on an ee-thoss of universalist socialism and physical resistance, to believe in the better and more beautiful tomorrow.

All of this was gone. They had lost their families, their sweethearts, and most of their comrades. The Bund's adult leaders were dead or hiding in Aryan Warsaw. The youth were on their own, with no more elders to restrain them. This best explains the choice that they made. They no longer cared about political doctrines or ideological spots, not when they had seen the Umschlagplatz. They would join the Zionists in a suicidal act of rebellion.

The Jewish Combat Organization

The Jewish Combat Organization—Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, known by its Polish initials, zob—was founded by Antek Zuckerman, Celina Lubetkin, and their Dror comrades just after the Great Aktion began. They had not managed to accomplish much. They made one ally—the People's Guard, a communist paramilitary that the Soviets created inside Poland after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union—but it was a small group, with few weapons to share. The People's Guard gave the zob several pistols, which they used to wound the Jewish Police chief. They also burned down warehouses filled with looted property. But their actions frightened other ghetto inmates, who worried about German retaliation. When the zob hung copies of their manifestos, other Jews beat them up. The Gestapo found their guns without trying, and most of the young people they sent to join partisan groups in nearby forests were caught and shot. By October, they were so ashamed of their failure that they wanted to set the whole ghetto on fire. Eventually, Antek prevailed upon his comrades to stay alive a bit longer. If they had to die, they ought to take some Germans with them.

This left them in the same position as the Bund's militia. To fight, they needed guns, which only the Polish underground could provide. Though the Home Army had hundreds of machine guns and over seven thousand small arms hidden around Warsaw, they were loath to share them with the Jewish resistance. The Home Army had a solid strategy: shun open confrontation with the Germans and instead build up strength until Allied troops were close enough to support them in an uprising. General Rowecki claimed that a ghetto revolt would be premature and doomed to failure. Yet even as he said this, he swore to protect Poles from Nazi extermination. “If the occupiers decide to direct the same methods they are using against the Jews against the Polish people, they will meet with ferocious resistance,” the Home Army's newspaper promised. Jews might have been Polish citizens, but they were not Poland's responsibility.

After they finally made contact with the Home Army in October, the zob concocted a serious-sounding body called the Jewish National Committee in order to look legitimate. They just needed to convince the Bundists to join them.

This was not an easy task. For decades, the Bund had been loath to team up with other Jewish political groups, preferring instead to work with non-Jewish parties like the Mensheviks or the Polish Socialists, whom they found to be more natural ideological bedfellows. After the mass deportation of the Warsaw ghetto, young Bundists no longer saw the wisdom of this plan, but their elders outside the ghetto still held fast to old political distinctions. There was also a more banal obstacle to unity. Bundists and Zionists had disliked each other since childhood. In a ghetto blighted with informers, they wanted to fight alongside their friends. The Bundists bickered, until Tsukunft leader Henoch Russ cast the deciding vote for unity.

In late October, the Bund joined the zob, with Marek Edelman as their commander. (The Jewish National Committee was a step too far, so the Bund cooked up a coordinating committee to be a bureaucratic condom between themselves and the Zionists.)

Even then, unity only went so far. The zob would have nothing to do with the ghetto's other resistance group, the right-wing Zionist Z.Z.W. Some bridges are too far to cross.

After the deportations, the Germans cut the ghetto into enclaves, which Jews were forbidden to cross between. The zob split these enclaves into twenty wards. Parties made their own combat units, each comprised of a commander and five fighters armed with knives, axes, and brass knuckles. The zob units would operate autonomously, allowing each unit to fight alone if communication broke down. For the mostly ceremonial role of commander in chief, the zob elected a tough, grandiose boy named Mordechai Anielewicz, a member of the left-wing Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair whose mother once sold rotten fish down by the river. They picked him because he wanted it so much.

Bundist battle squads assigned themselves to the brush factory, where four thousand Jews manufactured camouflage for military trains. Admission was tough. The Bund only accepted fighters who had their own weapons, and whom the party had known before the war. They chauvinistically rejected women, until one Tsukunft member threatened to quit if his girlfriend couldn't fight alongside him.

The zob's first act was to rid the ghetto of collaborators. Fighters shot Jakub Lejkn, second in command of the Jewish Police, and Israel Fuerst, a liaison with the Gestapo. Afterward, they posted communiqués to explain the executions. Their posters warned the ghetto not to trust the occupiers who had murdered their families. Nazism “throws a boat to the next victim before slaughtering him.... Do not delude yourself and let yourself be deluded.... Prepare yourself to defend your lives.”

When German guards arrested three Bundists who had beaten a sadistic foreman in Hallman's factory, Bundist Gabriel Frishdorf led a raid to free his men. These acts of defiance transformed the zob into legends. Bakers baked them bread, leatherworkers made them holsters, and ladies turned over their jewelry to fund the cause.

In December the Home Army finally gave the zob ten revolvers. Despite the zob's pleas, no more guns arrived. Rowecki didn't believe that Jews would use them.

Jan Karski

That October, Home Army courier Jan Karski met two Jewish leaders in a ruined villa on the outskirts of Warsaw. One was the Zionist Adolf Berman, and the other was the Bundist Leon Feiner.

At first, Feiner's appearance shocked Karski. With his silver whiskers, ruddy face, and bespoke suit, he looked exactly like a Polish aristocrat. "Our entire people are being destroyed," he said, pressing his hands to the table. "A few may be saved, perhaps, but three million Polish Jews are doomed. This cannot be prevented by any force in Poland, neither the Polish nor the Jewish underground. Place this responsibility on the shoulders of the Allies." Feiner described the deportations, and the Bund's report on Treblinka.

The two leaders told Karski to demand that the world try to halt the extermination, that they execute Germans in Allied countries or pay bribes to rescue Jews. Anything but sit and watch them die. When Karski asked them what to tell Jewish leaders in the West, Feiner gripped his arm so tightly that it ached. His eyes were no longer those of a Polish aristocrat but of a shattered survivor.

“Tell them that there are moments when we hate them all....because they are safe 'there' and do not rescue us. Because they don't do enough.... Let the Jewish leaders, then, do something that will force the other world to believe us.... We are all dying here; let them die too.... Let them crowd the offices of Churchill and others, let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest and not retreat until they believe us, until they will take some action to rescue those of our people who are still alive."

Before Karski left, Feiner handed him a report he had written at the height of the Great Aktion, describing the Nazi extermination campaign that had already consumed over 1.2 million human lives. It was the first major Jewish report on the Holocaust.

Arthur ZygiElbojm

Arthur Zygielbojm's London post as a Bund delegate for the Polish government-in-exile had not been easy, but he tried his hardest. He sent death camp testimonies to indifferent bigwigs. He appealed to international law. He gave speeches at pen clubs, union rallies, coal mines, and synagogues. He organized petitions, wrote essays, let labor politicians use him in their factional squabbles just to get their ear. He convened conferences. He gave broadcasts on the B.B.C. "It will actually be a shame...to belong to the human race if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in human history," he cried when news broke about the use of poison gas in Chelmno. Afterward, England's chief Rabbi suggested a polite day of prayer and mourning. Zygielbojm could have poked. British Jews should smash up the streets, he replied, like his people in Warsaw would have done if British Jews were being butchered. The respectable British Jews did no such thing.

After all the fake reports of German atrocities that the British media put out during World War 1, the British public was skeptical of Zygielbojm's claims. Exiled German socialists worried he would make all Germans look bad. At the foreign office, top diplomat Frank Roberts refused to accept the idea that Hitler treated Jews worse than other peoples under Nazi occupation. All Zygielbojm could do was send cash. Thanks to his efforts, that October, Home Army parachutists brought five thousand dollars to Bundist leaders hiding on the Aryan side of Warsaw.

The Polish Home Army courier Jan Karski arrived in London in November, with a microfilm copy of Feiner's report hidden inside his hollowed-out fake teeth. On December 2, Karski met Arthur Zygielbojm at the bustling Stratton House, where the Polish Ministry of the Interior was headquartered. Zygielbojm had a hard, skeptical face. Karski imagined he had started life out as a street cleaner.

“My dear man. I am a Jew. Tell me what you know about the Jews of Poland,” Zygielbojm demanded. He sat tensely, staring into the distance.

Karski pulled no punches about Feiner's report, nor about the horrors he had witnessed when Feiner snuck him into the ghetto. When Karski repeated some British naysaying, Zygielbojm jumped up in rage. "Don't tell me what is said and done here.... I came to you to hear about what is happening there! What they want there!"

In the underground, comrades nicknamed Karski “the tape recorder” for his faculty of reproducing words in all their emotional cadence. He began to speak. Or rather, Leon Feiner spoke through him.

There are moments when we hate them all; we hate them because they are safe “there” and do not rescue us. Because they don't do enough... Let them do something that will force the other world to believe us.... Let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest and not retreat until they believe us....

We are all dying here; let them die too.

Zygielbojm sprung back as if he had been slapped. It was impossible to have this sort of public hunger strike in England, he explained. Police would carry him off to an asylum long before he could starve himself to death. After a few moments, he calmed himself down enough to ask Karski for details. How did Feiner look? What was he wearing? Was he nervous? What was the ghetto like?

When the time was up, Zygielbojm looked at Karski as if he were one of his lost Warsaw friends.... “I'll do everything they demand if only I'm given a chance,” he said. “You believe me, don't you?”

After Karski visited British and American leaders, their countries' spokesmen issued ferocious denunciations of Nazi atrocities. This was cold comfort to Arthur Zygielbojm. Words didn't save anyone, he knew, even though they were all anyone would offer. The guilt ate him alive.

Zygielbojm tried harder. He distributed hundreds of copies of Feiner's report to British politicians, celebrities, and journalists, to little result. He cabled Winston Churchill. Churchill's underlings blew him off. He met with Deputy Prime Minister Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, to demand the Home Army use their guns to defend Polish Jews. Mikolajczyk told him this went against the Home Army's strategy of waiting for the right moment to rise up against the Germans, and that the very suggestion was treasonous.

Every day that passed, Nazis murdered more of the world he came from. As he told B.B.C listeners, “I am aware right now that perhaps I am a representative of a community of the dead.”

Contraband

Everyone told Gina Klepfisz not to get the operation. You can survive ulcers, they said. But she had always been athletic, strong enough to pull people out of boxcars. She didn't want to be weak. She checked herself into a Catholic hospital under the name of Kazimiera Juzwiak. Afterward, an infection developed. A father confessor prattled in Latin at her deathbed.

Did she have anything to confess? he asked.

"I am a Jew," she spat back.

As her niece, the poet Irena Klepfisz, later wrote, “Such a will to be known can alter history.”

On December 5, comrades buried Gina at the Catholic Brodno cemetery, with her Polish pseudonym engraved on the tombstone. They were Bundists and Polish socialists.

Tsukunft member Vladka Peltel attended Gina's funeral. She had snuck out of the ghetto that morning, with a map of the Treblinka death camp hidden inside her shoe. A few days later, she met Leon Feiner in a convent restaurant on Sewerynow Street. Feiner gave Vladka her missions. Befriend Poles. Find melinas for women and children. Assist Jews in hiding. Get weapons. When Vladka bought her first revolver, she couldn't even tell if it worked until she showed it to Bernard Goldstein. It was legit, he told her. She turned it over in her hands, like a jewel.

With the help of Polish socialist friends, the Bund bought stolen guns from the guards at army dumps, from demoralized German soldiers returned from the Battle of Stalingrad, and from Poles who worked at arms factories. They also had contacts in the underworld, like pickpocket king Roman Kowalski, aka the Tsar of Venice, who refused payment for weapons out of loyalty to his Jewish fellow thieves.

Each weapon had to be smuggled into the ghetto. Dressed as a Polish peddler, Vladka concealed revolvers in boxes of nails and hid metal files in potato sacks. (Prisoners used files to saw through barred boxcar windows.) In Feiffer's factory, which adjoined the ghetto, she repackaged dynamite into smaller parcels, then bribed the guard not to notice. She paid a smuggler to use his ladder, tied a kerchief around her arm in lieu of an armband, and dropped over the wall. Despite everything, she was always relieved to be back inside. “I was among my own,” she wrote.

Children

Everyone knew the end was near, and they needed to smuggle out their children. It was hard to find them placements. Most Poles didn't want to hide kids, who might reveal their identities with a clumsy phrase and get their host families murdered. Polish families sometimes mistreated their charges, or stole the money meant to maintain them. And there was the pain of separation.

Gina Klepfisz's brother—the handsome, athletic engineer Michal Klepfisz—was a new father when the deportations began in the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, he left his one-year-old daughter, Irena, outside a Catholic orphanage. He had to watch from a distance as the brides of Christ took away his only child. He never saw her again. Once, he tried to speak to the Mother Superior, to give her chocolates for his daughter. The Mother Superior told him that if he ever came back, she would throw Irena out on the street.

Mordechai Anielewicz

The Home Army's ten revolvers were hardly sufficient, but they were a start. They let the zob kill snitches and save arrested comrades. As a show of force, the zob planned a public demonstration. On January 21, fighters would take over several streets in the central ghetto, hang wreathes and banners to commemorate the fallen, and light a bonfire in Muranow Square. They would also arrest any Jewish Policeman they could catch. In advance of the demonstration, they published a manifesto calling on Jews to resist. "Our slogan must be—all are ready to die as human beings."

The demonstration would never take place. On January 18, 1943, just before sunrise, Nazis entered the ghetto for a new round of roundups. They banged doors, demanding Jews come out. Instead, the ghetto inmates retreated to their hiding places.

The raid took the zob by surprise, catching most of their members away from their arms caches. Only the kids from Mordechai Anielewicz's Zionist Hashomer Hatzair youth group were prepared. They wandered outside, guns and hand grenades hidden beneath their clothing, and allowed themselves to be taken. I say kids, not fighters, because that's what they were. Most had never fired a gun. The kids wove themselves through a column of Jews headed toward the Umschlagplatz. At the corner of Mila and Zamenhof, it was now or never. Someone shouted, "Fire." Seventeen-year-old Margalit Landau pulled a grenade from beneath her dress and threw it at a German. The kids, now fighters, began to shoot.

Chapter 25 Revolt

(January 1943–May 1943)

Halinka

F{®} or A few seconds, the Germans were paralyzed. How did Jews get guns? In the shock, Mordechai Anielewicz managed to wrestle a weapon away from a German soldier. He dove behind some rubble, firing wildly, until a hand popped out from a bunker and pulled him to safety. The trance broke. The Germans gunned down the deportation column.

For the next three days, clashes raged around the ghetto. In the Schutz factory, Bundist Avram Feiner died trying to grab a German's carbine. Germans caught Boruch Peltz's Bundist battle squad unarmed and herded them to the Umschlagplatz. There, Peltz implored the Jews not to enter the boxcars. The commandant shot them all.

Of all January's victims, I think first of a fourteen-year-old girl named Halinka Kipman, whose name I found in journalist Janina Bauman's youthful ghetto memoir Winter in the Morning. Few facts remain about Halinka's life. Her parents were doctors. She went to a Bundist school. She was pretty. She slept with her boyfriend. Girls gossiped that she was a slut.

She tried to seize joy where she could.

Janina Bauman spent the January revolt huddled behind a wardrobe. When she went outside afterward, she found Halinka's body, dark hair spread over the bloodstained snow, and her handsome boyfriend beside her. "I cried for them, and hated myself, a righteous virgin, hiding like a coward while others fought and died," Janina wrote.

This chapter is dedicated to Halinka.

As Frantz Fanon wrote, “violence is a dis-intoxicating force.” The gains of the January revolt were not military—the zob was only able to steal seven weapons—so much as psychological. The ghetto learned that defiance was possible. German supermen could bleed.

The zob fighters became the ghetto's kings. They raided the Gesia Street jail and liberated its prisoners. They levied taxes on anyone who still had money, and kidnapped or shot those who would not pay. They robbed the Judenrat treasury, hauling off cash in a soup vat. They clashed with the right-wing Zionists of the Z.Z.W, who they considered little more than Mussolini-style fascists. At one meeting between the groups, a Z.Z.W fighter shoved a pistol into Marek Edelman's face and demanded to be given control of the rebellion. When the Z.Z.W tried to muscle in on a zob robbery, it ended in a shootout.

No matter how just their cause, when a group militarizes, they are faced with impossible moral choices. Once, zob fighters caught a boy of thirteen eavesdropping on a meeting. Was he a spy? Or just a curious potential applicant, like he claimed? Whatever the truth, the zob shot him. It was too dangerous to keep him alive.

Michal Klepfisz

January's unplanned revolt had another effect. It raised the zob's status in the eyes of Home Army leadership. General Rowecki sent another shipment of guns into the ghetto. He no longer doubted that Jews would use them.

How many guns? Polish and Jewish sources differ, but according to Marek Edelman, the zob received forty-nine revolvers, five hundred bullets, fifty grenades, and one machine gun. The rest was either stolen in transit or simply never sent.

On the Aryan side, Bundists plotted to get more weapons. They could afford to pay. In addition to ghetto robberies, the Bund had another source of funds—the Jewish Labor Committee. But money didn't help if they couldn't find honest sellers.

The situation inspired Bundist engineer Michal Klepfisz to think back to his university studies. He brought out an old chemistry textbook and read the part about what happens when you mix potash, hydrochloric acid, cyanide, sugar, and gasoline. The promised results seemed tantalizing. He tested the recipe in a deserted lime kiln on his landlord's property. He threw the bottle. The glass shattered. The liquid burst into flame.

In an abandoned church, a Home Army officer helped Klepfisz refine his skills with explosives, teaching him to manufacture grenades, land mines, pipe bombs filled with shrapnel, and souped-up Molotov cocktails. Klepfisz used this knowledge to create bomb factories inside the ghetto, with chemicals provided by the Polish Socialist Party.

In rooms silent as sanctums, teenagers stirred vats of incendiary liquids, then transferred them into old vodka bottles to be weighed, measured, and lined up. A single misstep and the house could blow. Marek Edelman sometimes saw Klepfisz astride the wall on Parysowski Square, passing down enormous packages of benzene and potassium chloride while the smugglers kept their respectful distance. The stockpiles accumulated.

Stefan Machai

Someone was watching the Bundists in Aryan Warsaw. Melinas burned. S.S men showed up at the homes of the Polish families hiding their comrades' kids. When blackmailers raided Vladka Peltel's apartment, she barely blustered her way out. The Gestapo caught Michal Klepfisz at the end of January and put him on a boxcar to Treblinka. He took a file hidden beneath his clothes and sawed through the window bars, then pulled himself through and jumped from the moving train. A guard shot him in the ankle as he ran.

The losses were too numerous to be coincidental, and the party began to suspect Klepfisz's old friend Stefan Machai, a working-class Polish socialist who let Klepfisz hide in his apartment. No one wanted to believe it. Klepfisz had known Machai for years, since their days working together in a metal factory. He had done a lot for the Bund, sheltering activists in his basement and hustling to get them guns. But Machai had changed over the last few months. Maybe it was the weapons trade, where contacts with the underworld were inevitable. He drank too much. He quit his backbreaking job as a rickshaw puller, bought bespoke suits, and stayed out late gorging himself at Warsaw nightspots with friends he refused to talk about. He wouldn't say where he got his cash.

Machai knew the most sensitive details about the Bund's underground operations in Aryan Warsaw. He was their only possible betrayer.

After Klepfisz limped back to Warsaw, the Bund cut off contact with Machai, except for an anonymous letter to warn him what happened to snitches. Jacob Celemenski wanted to ask the Home Army to shoot him. The Gestapo saved them the trouble.

The Jewish Combat Organization

The Nazis knew that Jews would resist new deportations, so they turned to trickery. In March, they appointed the German industrialist Walter Toebbens to convince the ghetto's forty thousand remaining workers to voluntarily load themselves onto the boxcars. With honied words and unctuous posters, Toebbens described a bucolic labor camp near Lublin, where workers and their families could live peacefully till the war's end. Thanks to a poster campaign by the zob, no one believed him. When the Germans tried to "evacuate" the brush factory, the Bund's stronghold, not a single worker had showed up. That night, the zob's battle squads torched German warehouses. When the Germans asked the Judenrat for help, the chairman told them he was powerless against the fighters.

It was a gorgeous spring in the Warsaw ghetto. The chestnut trees were blooming. Girls in flimsy pink blouses sunbathed on Muranow Square. Everyone who could was buying guns.

The ghetto was alive with the sound of digging as its inmates hurried to build bunkers. Entire tenements chipped in to hire engineers to create these hiding spots. The best bunkers had radios, water wells, hookups to the city's power grid, dried food supplies, and weapons caches. When the Germans entered, Jews would retreat into their underground city.

In their barracks, fighters disassembled and reassembled their precious guns. They aimed, then pretended to shoot. They were very young. Most were under twenty. The youngest was only thirteen. They knew that they would die, so they tried to suck the last drops of sweetness out of life. They had vodka, and they had each other. Marek Edelman remembered a beautiful Tsukunft girl he would not name, “who knew how to make scrambled eggs with ham, and also how to caress…to give herself to one boy at nine o'clock in the evening. And another at midnight.” Fighters longed for the battle that would crown their lives.

The zob built fortifications, lay mines, and dug tunnels into the sewer system. They cut passageways between attics and between courtyards, so their couriers could move invisibly. They filled lightbulbs with corrosive acid. They set up observation posts and patrols. Tailors at Roerich's garment factory smuggled out extra German uniforms. In one of her trips into the ghetto, Vladka Peltel tried on an S.S cap for her friend. The two girls dissolved into giggles.

The zob coordinated with the Home Army. When the Germans invaded, Polish fighters agreed to blow up part of the ghetto wall at Bonifraterska Street, allowing for a mass escape.

In February, the Bundist underground sent a final radio message to Arthur Zygielbojm, telling him that the Nazis planned to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto. “Alert the whole world. Appeal to the pope for official intervention and to the allies to declare German war prisoners as hostages.... Only you can save us. The responsibility with regards to history will rest on you.”

Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter

While fighters prepared ersatz hand grenades inside the Warsaw ghetto, the rest of the world was riveted by the Battle of Stalingrad. After six months of combat, the Red Army had turned the destroyed city into a death trap for the German invaders. At the start of February, the Soviets retook the ruins, at the cost of a million lives. It was the first blow to Nazi invincibility.

The New York Bund had not forgotten about Henryk Erlich and Viktor Alter, but it seemed like everyone else had given up. The Polish government-in-exile wrote them off as a lost cause. No matter how many telegrams American Federation of Labor chairman William Green sent the Soviet ambassador, Maxim Litvinov, he received only noncommittal non-answers.

Amidst mass sympathy for the Soviet Union, Ambassador Litvinov finally saw fit to answer Green's queries about Alter and Erlich. In a letter dated February 23, 1943, he informed Green that the two leaders had been shot as Nazi collaborators that past December. A few weeks later, the Soviets sent the Polish embassy a bill for Alter and Erlich's stay at the Metropole Hotel in Moscow.

Sophia Dubnova would never learn what really happened to her husband. Secret policemen entombed his story in envelopes stamped with the words preserve forever, which languished until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The next year, Sophia's niece, a retired Moscow editor named Victoria Dubnova, fought through K.G.B bureaucracy to discover the truth about Alter and Erlich's deaths.

After their arrests, the N.K.V.D locked Alter and Erlich in solitary confinement in the Kuybyshev prison, where they were known only by their numbers, 41 and 42. They were charged with no crimes and received no interrogations. Stalin had no more use for them. After he signed their arrest warrants, they simply disappeared. The N.K.V.D shot Viktor Alter in February 1943, a week before Litvinov's letter. After his death, they burned his possessions.

The N.K.V.D did not execute Henryk Erlich. He was sixty years old. His health was broken from multiple imprisonments. He knew he would never see the sky again. On May 15, 1942, Sophia Dubnova's husband, an intellectual, musically gifted, and affectionate father from Lublin, hung himself from the bars of his cell.

Afterlives

The Bund protested the executions, of course. They published an open letter in The New York Times and an editorial in The New Republic. Jewish workers smashed the Soviet embassy's windows in Manhattan. In Mexico City, communists and Bundists brawled at a memorial for Erlich and Alter. But their outrage had little effect. The Soviets were the heroes of Stalingrad, and the realities of wartime geopolitics muted the Bund's supporters. Former Bundist Sidney Hillman refused to attend a rally at New York's Mecca Temple to condemn Alter and Erlich's executions. Even in the Vilna ghetto, when Pati Kremer chaired a memorial meeting for Alter and Erlich, she didn't condemn the Soviet Union. She couldn't. In nearby forests, Red Army partisans had begun to set up bases, and they gave guns to Jewish fighters. “Martyrs never die.” I've never believed this phrase, which sounds like the sort of sentence one might embroider on a throw pillow. Martyrs die just like everyone else. Viktor Alter was dead, and so was Henryk Erlich. Martyrs survive in the memories of the living. After their deaths, the names of the Bund's two leaders floated around the camps and ghettos of occupied Poland, where they combined into a code word used to tell imprisoned comrades that help was on the way. Shaindel Kirsch was a skinny girl with a crippled arm who once belonged to the Bundist tailors' union. Then the war came, and the Germans killed her family. In 1943, they shipped her to Blizyn concentration camp to work as a sewing slave. One autumn day, a trash man sidled up and told her to wait that night by the barbed wire fence for a secret message. She waited for hours in the frigid darkness, until she saw a slip of paper flutter downward. Who threw it she didn't know. She snatched the paper without looking and hurried back to her barracks. When she read its contents, she began to shake. Put down what members of our family are held in Camp Blizyn. Money is forthcoming. You shall be well supplied—Henryk Viktorovich Only later would she recognize the names as those of her party's murdered leaders, but she understood the instructions well enough. One night by the fence a few weeks later, unknown hands tossed her a package filled with cash. With it, Shaindel and four comrades bribed their way out of the camp, bought guns, and fled into the forest.

Passover

When operatives on the Aryan side called the zob central command in the first hours of April 19 to say that thousands of men were massing outside the ghetto walls for the long-awaited liquidation, they were ready. Michal Klepfisz and Zalman freed-rick had just smuggled a last shipment of explosives over the ghetto wall.

At two A.M., the zob's battle squads mobilized. Z.Z.W fighters and unaffiliated “wildcat” groups took their positions. Sentries ran from house to house alerting the civilians, who gathered their valuables and retreated to their bunkers. The ghetto fell silent.

From balconies and windows, the fighters watched the Nazis goose-step down Nalewki Street, singing a cheerful march. Edelman had taken care to dress well that night, in a red angora sweater and two leather bandoliers, crossed like Pancho Villa. As he saw the convoy enter the ghetto, he imagined the Germans' thoughts. With the ghetto quiet, it must have seemed like the rebel Jews had lost their spirit, “as if those few immature boys had at last realized that there was no point in attempting the unfeasible, that they understood that the Germans had more rifles than there were rounds for all their pistols,” he later wrote.

Fighters showered the Germans with Molotov cocktails.

While one group of Germans scattered on Nalewki Street, fighters barricaded another group into the intersection of Zamenhof and Mila. The fighters were Bundists, Zionists, and communists, but that didn't matter. What mattered were their pistols, and the little explosives they had been manufacturing all spring. They threw bombs. They fired. Their sole machine gun let out sporadic shots. A German tank rolled toward the intersection. A girl tossed her Molotov cocktail. Flame spread on the chassis. The crew screamed as they burned. The girl laughed. Her face was rosy from the fire.

More battles raged at Nalewki and Gesia, and in Muranow Square. The result was the same. Flabbergasted and unprepared, Germans fled from Jewish guerrillas. By afternoon, they had retreated entirely from the ghetto.

The fighters walked through the blood-slick streets. Aryan supermen lay with their guts out, their bones broken, their eyes still open in disbelief. The fighters kissed one another, then whooped with joy, in voices they could not recognize. They stripped the bodies of weapons.

Comrades

The Polish underground press covered the uprising with admiration, even as they chided other Jews for having allowed themselves to be “dragged to their deaths without putting on a fight.” They didn't mention the Home Army's unwillingness to give them guns until it was too late. Many papers urged Varsovians to do their “Christian” duty and help ghetto escapees. Even the fascist Polska admitted that the Germans “stood helpless before a small group of revolting Jews.”

The Polish underground might have praised the ghetto fighters, but did they help them when it mattered?

Despite their Soviet backing, the People's Guard militia was tiny and poorly armed, but they were the only partisan group where Poles and Jews fought as equals, and they followed Moscow's order to encourage anti-Nazi revolts. The People's Guard gave the ghetto a few more guns from their meager arsenal and made several attacks on the wall. The ghetto fighters thought they tried their best.

The fighters felt differently about the Home Army. In memoirs written decades after the events, their words burn with anguished disappointment. Before the uprising, the Home Army had given the zob fifty guns, most of them pistols that the Polish officers knew were lousy for street fighting. More guns might have come if the Gestapo had not caught the zob's liaison Aryeh Wilner in March. As per protocol, the Home Army cut off Wilner's comrades. The flow of arms stalled, until Antek Zuckerman managed to make contact a week before the uprising. Once the revolt began, Home Army fighters kept their promise and tried to blow up the ghetto wall, but Polish police tipped off the Germans. Two teenage Home Army fighters died in the ensuing shootout. Similar attempts ended in failure.

Yet, even as they provided aid, the Home Army never committed to the Jewish fighters. Rowecki and Warsaw general Antoni Chrusciel both refused to meet Antek at the height of the uprising. Another Home Army leader told Antek that the ghetto was a nest of communists.

The truth was this: the government-in-exile didn't judge April 1943 to be an opportune moment for rebellion. The Americans had not yet landed in Europe. The Red Army was hundreds of miles away. If Warsaw rose up, no one would help them, and Nazis would destroy the city. Prime Minister Sikorski said as much to Rowecki in an April 27 telegram. It was fine to aid Jews, but the uprising must not be allowed to spread to Aryan Warsaw.

The Bund's friends in the Polish Socialist Party sympathized with their fighters but came to similar conclusions. Sociologist Emanuel Ringelblum quoted an unnamed Polish socialist: “[The ghetto fighters] ought to be supplied with arms, but active cooperation is impossible.... The Party must choose the right moment for the struggle, and not let itself be deflected by sentiment, however noble.”

On the first day of the uprising, Bundists on the Aryan side decided to grab their guns and throw grenades at the Nazis marching toward the ghetto gates. Jacob Celemenski hurried to a safe house on Slowackiego Street to coordinate with the Polish Socialist Party. After he tapped out the code, two activists opened the door. He knew them to be brave, compassionate people, but that afternoon, they only offered him excuses. Unfortunately, their party's battle squads weren't ready. Unfortunately, they had no guns. Unfortunately, the Nazis would retaliate. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Unfortunately. Bernard Goldstein's Polish comrades similarly refused to organize street protests or go on strike in solidarity.

The Polish Socialist Party and the Bund were comrades. They had gone to jail together, marched together, struck together, punched fascists together, and manned the barricades together during the siege of Warsaw. When the Germans occupied their country, Polish socialists forged documents for Bundists, rescued their kids, hid their fighters, even went to Auschwitz for distributing their party press. After the great deportation had ended, Polish socialists helped found Zegota, the only official council to aid Jews that would ever exist in occupied Europe. As the ghetto burned, Zegota's Polish socialist chairman, Julian Grobelny, searched its perimeter for fugitives to help, all while weeping for his valiant friends who fought inside.

I once thought that the Polish Socialist Party betrayed the Bund. The truth was sadder than that. The ghetto revolt revealed the hard limits of even the strongest solidarity. Polish socialists were willing to die for their Bundist friends. They did die for their Bundist friends. They would not sacrifice the Poles of Warsaw.

Jurgen Stroop

The ghetto uprising humiliated Nazi military command in Warsaw, especially the aristocratic obergruppenführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, who had already been disgraced by January's resistance. His bosses quickly demoted him. His replacement, the monocle-sporting Jurgen Stroop, had already proven his ruthlessness by exterminating the Jews of Lviv. In Warsaw, Stroop ensconced himself in the luxurious Hotel Bristol. To unwind after a long day of liquidation, he sipped burgundy, puffed Egyptian cigarettes, and ordered the bloodiest of steaks.

On the second day of the uprising, Stroop sent three hundred S.S men to the gate of the brush factory area, territory of the Bundist battle squads. When they passed Swietojerska Street, a zob fighter pressed two wires together, detonating a land mine. The ground exploded. Nazis flew upward in fragments, Übermenschen reduced to a cascade of severed limbs.

Two S.S men with white rags limped forward to request a fifteen-minute truce to collect their wounded. The fighters answered them with bullets. Criminals, Stroop sniffed. This was against the rules.

Imperial armies have a hard time invading urban enclaves. Architecture undoes their advantages. I.E.D's explode beneath their armored vehicles. They lose themselves in dark tenements and unmapped alleyways. Guerrillas spring from rooftops and tunnel networks and shoot, only to disappear. Invaders fight an enemy that is nowhere and everywhere.

“The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea,” said the general Efrán Ríos Montt, who committed a genocide against the indigenous Maya people of Guatemala. “If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.” The ghetto was not Guatemala, nor was it the casbah of Algiers, nor Vietnam. Long before the battle started, Nazis doomed both sea and fish. Yet General Stroop came to conclusions that prefigured those of Ríos Montt. At Hotel Bristol, he laid out a strategy. He would not fight rebels head-on. Instead, he would exterminate them with fire.

On the third day of the uprising, the Nazis began to burn the Warsaw ghetto. Their flamethrowers started on Mila, Zamenhof, Nalewki, and the brushworks, then went house to house. Howitzers thundered. German planes dropped incendiary bombs.

In revenge, the zob torched the German workshops. They destroyed the furniture factory, the mattress factory. The tailors' workshops went up in smoke. Fire rose in pillars, in a massive auto-da-fé. Black smoke filled the air of northern Warsaw. The sky glowed a demonic red.

Glass shattered. Beams broke. The pavement melted into tarry sludge. With the streets impassable, Bundist courier Tobcia Dawidowicz ran messages between factories, balanced like a tightrope walker on the burning joists.

The bunkers were fuller than anyone intended. The air boiled, its oxygen depleted by too many lungs. Above ground, the Germans hunted Jews' hiding spots with bloodhounds, then pumped them full of chlorine gas. If survivors emerged, Nazis forced them to strip, then dragged them to the Umschlagplatz.

On the fourth day of the uprising, the Nazi propaganda department brought a press junket to view subdued sections of the ghetto. After showing the embedded journalists the charred corpses of the rebels, the jolly German comms officer took them out for beers. They had to “burn out this nest of revolt completely,” the comms officer declared. He banged his fist on the table for emphasis.

Michal Klepfisz

Eyes burning, wet handkerchiefs wrapped over their mouths, the zob fought house by house, stairwell by stairwell, sometimes hand to hand. Women fought alongside men. “They were not human—perhaps devils or goddesses,” said Jurgen Stroop. They feigned defeat, then pulled grenades from their underwear when S.S officers got too close.

Nazis cornered Michal Klepfisz's battalion in an attic near the brush factory. It was dark. A German machine gun peeking out behind a chimney kept his fighters pinned. Grenade in hand, Klepfisz charged the machine gun. It went quiet. His comrades escaped. A few days later, Marek Edelman returned to bury his body. It had two rows of bullet holes across the stomach.

Inferno

Fighters moved by night, dressed in stolen German uniforms, their feet wrapped in rags to muffle their footsteps. They laid land mines and tried to pick off isolated patrols. Bunkers caved in. The ground collapsed beneath their feet. They pulled desperate civilians from the earth and led them to temporary safety.

They had dreamed of facing their enemy in battle. Instead, they burned like ants beneath the magnifying glass of a sadistic child.

For Your Freedom and Ours

On April 23, the Bundist writer Ignacy Samsonowicz appealed to Warsaw's Polish population in the name of the Jewish Combat Organization.

Poles, Citizens, Soldiers of Freedom,

...Amidst the smoke of fires, dust and blood of the murdered Warsaw ghetto—we, prisoners of the ghetto, send you sincere fraternal greetings. We know that with heartfelt pain and tears of sympathy...you are looking on at this war, which for many days we are carrying out with a vicious invader.

Know that every threshold of the ghetto has been and continues to be a fortress, that we may perish in this struggle but never surrender. Like you, we breathe with desire for revenge for all the crimes of our common foe.

The battle is being waged for your freedom, and ours!

A Beautiful Warsaw Sunday

“The workers of Paris built the Bastille at the kings' command, and those same workers smashed it into dust,” wrote Samsonowicz in 1941, in his love letter to proletarian solidarity. Where were the workers of Warsaw as their neighbors burned alive?

On the eve of the uprising, Polish sentiments toward Jews had reached a low point. The Nazis had just revealed to them a Soviet massacre of three thousand Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1939. Of course, Nazi newspapers blamed it on the Jews. Despite this, many Poles admired the ghetto's defiance. A few said it was a good thing that Warsaw was rid of its Jewish problem, but most were sympathetic, even the racists. They shed a tear, then went about their day.

There was a merry-go-round outside the ghetto walls. The Jews burned while the Polish children whirled beneath the flaming sky. Two years later, in his work “Campo dei Fiori,” the poet Czeslaw Milosz would describe the smell of smoke, and how the ghetto's ash floated over the wall to coat the Aryan city.

This wind from the burning houses

blew open the girls' skirts On May Day, the Bundist fighters buried their dead, then lined up to sing "The Internationale." There was no more food. The wells were clogged with rubble. They had little ammo with which to fight. Germans set fire to their hideouts, broke into their bunkers with pneumatic drills, and pumped their breathing vents with chlorine gas. Most of the ghetto's Bundists were dead. Germans pushed Tsukunft leader Henoch Russ into a boxcar bound for Majdanek. Anna Braude Heller, the indomitable head doctor of Bersohn and Bauman Children's Hospital, burned alive in a bunker, as did the printer Lazar Klug. Wounded by a grenade, Berek Sznajdmil waved his pistol at his comrades. "Keep fighting!" he shouted, then shot himself in the head. With the ghetto reduced to ashes, the zob decided to flee. Zalman freed-rick and a daring teenage Zionist named Kazik Rotem crawled through the Z.Z.W's tunnel on Bonifraterska Street to find help on the Aryan side. Vladka Peltel brought the pair to Leon Feiner and Antek Zuckerman, to figure out how to rescue the surviving fighters. There was only one way to escape: the sewers. But they offered only the slimmest chance of salvation. In those labyrinthine death traps, fugitives slogged through fermented shit up to their collarbones, only to get lost, collapse of thirst, and drown. Antek knew the Home Army had maps of the sewer system, but they refused to share them with the ghetto fighters. Such maps had military uses and the Home Army didn't trust the Jews.

Sewer

Mila 18

On May 8, bloodhounds discovered the zob's command post at 18 Mila Street. It was a vast bunker, owned by a mob boss named Shmuel Asher. supplied with power, water, even vodka from the Aryan side. It was meant for 30 gangsters, but Shmuel Asher had invited 120 zob fighters to stay, among them commander Mordechai Anielewicz and their liaison to the Home Army, Aryeh Wilner, whom friends had just bribed out of Gestapo torture chambers. When the Germans found the bunker, they sealed the exits and pumped in chlorine gas. A few fighters managed to escape, but most stayed trapped in the bunker, amidst the poison and the heat. They wouldn't surrender. Aryeh Wilner told them what would happen if they did. Some took cyanide tablets. The rest used their guns. Anielewicz shot his beloved, Mira Fuchrer, then turned his pistol on himself. Two weeks before his death, he had sent a final letter out of the ghetto, asking for weapons. He described the uprising as “the dream of my life.”

That night, Marek Edelman and Celina Lubetkin left their bunker at 30 Franciszkanska Street to check on Anielewicz. They picked through an apocalyptic wasteland. With every step, the ground threatened to collapse beneath their feet. Near the ruined bunker at 18 Mila Street, the pair discovered fifteen wounded survivors huddled underneath a building's hatchway. They told Edelman and Lubetkin about the bunker's end. Edelman was furious. Anielewicz had no right to kill himself. "You have to fight to the end," he later wrote. "Maybe suicide is a fine symbol, but you don't sacrifice your life for symbols."

Lubetkin and Edelman led the surviving fighters to a bunker at 22 Franciszkanska Street, which had a tunnel to the sewer system. Giving up hope for Kazik and Zalman's return from the Aryan side, Edelman ordered Abrasha Blum to find an escape route through the sewers.

The rest waited in the stifling dark. They lay mostly naked on the wooden planks, breathing in each other's breaths. All the phone lines had been burned, so they could not communicate with the outside world. Sometimes they bickered. Yiddish or Hebrew? Socialism or Zionism? Sometimes they reminisced about the battle they had fought. These starving youth, armed only with pistols and homemade bombs, had launched the first urban revolt in occupied Europe. Sometimes, they just waited to die.

Kazik Rotem

Kazik refused to give up efforts to rescue his comrades, even after the Home Army declined to help. Through some communist contacts, he arranged for a truck to pick up survivors at a predetermined time on a street corner a few miles outside the ghetto. Then he and a communist fighter cooked up a plan to get back in. For guides, Kazik and the communist found a gullible pair of sewer workers. Pretending to be a Polish criminal, Kazik fed them tall tales of treasures hidden within the ghetto, promising the workers a share of the loot if they led them through the sewers. As soon as they went underground, Kazik pressed his gun to a worker's head. They crawled through slime for hours, Kazik goading the workers forward with threats and swigs from a bottle of vodka. Once past the ghetto walls, the communist kept his gun trained on the workers while Kazik climbed out to look for their comrades. It was dark when Kazik pulled himself out of the sewer. He staggered through the rubble, past piles of corpses, until he reached the ruined bunker at 30 Franciszkanska Street. All the fighters were dead, he thought. He sat in the rubble and contemplated his weapon. A great relief filled him. His job was done. He could join his beloveds. The Germans would come at sunrise. He could shoot a few before he went. Then something intervened. Call it God, or chance, or the dialectical forces of history, but somehow, in the interlocking hellscape of the Warsaw sewer system, Abrasha Blum's group ran into Kazik's communist comrade and told him about the zob's improbable survival. After finding Kazik, the group hurried to the bunker at 22 Franciszkanska Street. The bunker inhabitants prepared for their exit. All except for two teenage sex workers, who had joined the fighters a few days before. Edelman refused to take them along. It was nothing personal, he later said. He just didn't know them well enough. Sixty-two fugitives lowered themselves into the intestinal tract of Warsaw.

While Michal Klepfisz threw himself against a machine gun, while teenage girls pulled the grenades from their underwear and hurled them at S.S officers, while Anielewicz smothered in a bunker alongside his girlfriend and mobsters and poets, while the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw ghetto prepared to escape through miles of human shit...British and Americans dignitaries were hobnobbing in Bermuda at a lavish conference, pretending to care about refugees. Though the United States and the United Kingdom had resentfully organized this Caribbean convening in response to mass Jewish protests, it explicitly didn't focus on Jewish refugees. The two powers preferred to ignore the fact that Jews (never mind Roma) were targeted for extermination. Instead, delegates mulled over the problem of refugees, Jewish and not, who were lucky enough to be in neutral countries. In the lead-up to the conference, the Bund's New York committee called for all democratic countries to open their borders to refugees, and to rescue Jews still trapped under Nazi occupation. America and Britain had no such intentions. The Bermuda conference had one goal. The two powers wanted to look like they were doing something, while continuing to do nothing. Dignitaries sipped cocktails, posed on the white sand beaches, smoked cigars, and, mostly, said no. No, they would not approach Hitler to release death camp prisoners. No, Britain would not accept more Jews, nor let them into the countries it colonized—especially not Palestine. No, the United States would not lift its immigration quotas; its resources were quite exhausted from "caring" for Japanese Americans in internment camps. The two powers resolved to organize an impotent bureaucratic body and issue a declaration on the postwar repatriation of refugees. This was a theoretical concern. It was by no means assured that any Jews would be left in Europe to repatriate by the time the war was done. The Bermuda conference was the final blow for Arthur Zygielbojm. Nothing he tried had worked. The Polish government-in-exile didn't listen to him. The British government did nothing. He detected the Zigielbojm views he characterized as “another 100,000 Jews murdered. Give more money for Palestine,” but he still tried to coordinate with them to protest the genocide. His Bundist comrades in New York were absorbed in ideological bickering and wanted to replace him with someone else. All the while, desperate messages arrived from his comrades in Warsaw.

On May 11, Zygielbojm listened to the Polish underground radio declare the murders of the last Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. He probably guessed his wife and his son were among them. The next night, in his Paddington apartment, he swallowed poison. Before he did, he wrote three letters.

The first, to Prime Minister Sikorski, contains these words:

I wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people. I know how little human life is worth, especially today. But as I was unable to do anything with my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.... My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto have fallen with guns in their hands.... I wasn't given the chance to die like them, together with them. But I belong with them, in their mass graves.

A second was to his brother in South Africa. “I cry into the dead of night: Oh, deaf world, save them save them! The sky is cold and silent like the people down below.”

In his final letter, to his comrades in New York, he said goodbye.

I have a debt to pay to all I left behind.... I thank you all for all the happiness you gave me during the long years we lived, worked, and fought together.

I love you all. Long live the Bund.

Chapter 26 Ashes

(May 1943–January 1945)

Warsaw

hile Zygielbojm's corpse lay in his Paddington apartment, forty ghetto fighters pulled themselves up from the sewers into Aryan Warsaw. Crowds goggled at the shit-smeared skeletons, but the weapons they carried persuaded onlookers to stay quiet.

The truck Kazik arranged idled at the intersection. The fighters ran into the back. They had no time to wait. They could already smell the cool Lomianki woods, just outside the city. The truck filled. There was no more space for the comrades who remained in the sewer. “We have to get them,” Celina screamed, pointing her gun at Kazik. “Another truck's coming,” he swore.

The truck sped off with the ghetto fighters. They left the others behind.

Legend

On May 16, Stroop declared the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto complete. To celebrate, he ordered his men to dynamite the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street. As he pressed the charge, he saw the “rainbow burst of colors, the fiery explosion [that] soared above the clouds, an unforgettable tribute to our triumph over the Jews.”

No one knows how many Nazis died in the doomed uprising. Stroop claimed sixteen, but that number contradicts the carnage he described in his report and in later testimony. The hundreds claimed by Marek Edelman seem equally unlikely. No one knows how many Jews died either, as the Nazi numbers don't add up, and they never excavated the bunkers where they murdered most of their victims. For months afterward, survivors hid in the ghetto's ruins, kept alive by Polish helpers.

The Nazis tried to minimize the revolt. In Germany, they painted it as the work of Poles, and in Poland, as the work of Soviets. Meanwhile, across the world, the uprising resonated as a symbol, though no one agreed on what it represented. For some, it was a cry of the human spirit. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in a telegram to the Bund's New York committee: "It is trite perhaps, to say what is true, that [the ghetto fighters] died for all of us, that we must live for them." When W.E.B. Du Bois visited the ghetto's ruins in 1949, he described the fighters' "deliberate sacrifice in life for a great ideal in the face of the fact that the sacrifice might be completely in vain" as something that reinforced his commitment to universalist socialism. For others, it had a more exclusive meaning. Communists claimed the revolt as communist, and Polish socialists saw it as part of "the legend of Fighting Poland." In Palestine, Zionist leadership rebranded the ghetto fighters as proto-Israelis, ignoring their eastern European birth and political diversity. Palestinians too have found the uprising to be a powerful example of armed resistance, though Arabic media generally airbrushes out the Zionist politics of many of the fighters. In Arabic, it is called the Warsaw Ghetto Intifada.

The revolt's most important audience was Jews trapped inside the charnel house of occupied Poland. Afterward, Jews rose up at Sosnowiec, in Trawniki labor camp, even in Treblinka and Sobibor. In Bialystok, near my great-grandmother's Lunna Wola, the resistance burned the ghetto themselves. When the liquidation came, young women set fire to the factories of their enslavement. Fighters attacked the ghetto walls with homemade benzene bombs, in a few-tul attempt to break through into freedom.

In the Vilna ghetto, Warsaw's revolt inspired the poet Hirsch Glick to write an anthem for the resistance:

Never say this is the final road for you.

Though leadened skies may cover over days of blue.

As the hour that we longed for is so near,

Our step beats out the message—we are here!

When the Nazis liquidated the Vilna ghetto a few months later, Glick and hundreds of other partisans fled through the sewers. Their guide was the Bundist engineer Shmuel Kaplinski, who had worked on the sewer system before the war. They brought their song with them into the forest. Not everyone made it out. Nazis set up three gallows at the ghetto gates, from which they hung three fighters. Bundist courier Asya Big dangled between her boyfriend and a communist. The poet Avrom Sutzkever described the way her body swayed, slim and graceful as a cornstalk.

The Germans shipped the stronger Jews to labor camps in Estonia. The Lithuanians rounded up the rest and marched them to the Ponar forest.

Pati Kremer

Pati Kremer waits in a Ponar trench with her comrades. Her fey beauty has long since vanished, first from the rigors of her impoverished exile, then from age, and finally from starvation. Her hair is sparse. Furrows run down her cheeks. Pati Kremer was born in 1867 in Vilna. She has fought for the workers since she was fifteen, when she tried to teach ungrateful seamstresses how to read in Novgorod. In Vilna, she helped found the Bund. She translated Marx into Yiddish. She tapped out codes in prison. She crossed borders without a passport, harangued strikers, smuggled pamphlets, wandered continents. After her husband's death, she had lived the quiet life of an editor, until the Soviets arrested the Bund's best activists, and the Nazis came, and it fell on her to resurrect her movement.

When the Lithuanians forced them into the ghetto, Pati Kremer saw the streets strewn with discarded books. This could not stand. Straight as a queen, she collected her treasures. The kids followed her. They knew who she was.

In the ghetto, she wrote poetry of great romance, about a life of questionably useful sacrifice. When the Bundists celebrated May Day, they hung her husband's photo on the wall. Her comrades saved her life, and she saved their souls in turn. When the Tsukunft kids defied the Bund's leaders and joined the Zionist Abba Kovner's partisans, she helped them hide their weapons. She slept soundly through the night.

The ghetto grew smaller. The Jerusalem of Lithuania disappeared into the trenches of Ponar.

Death is not glorious. It is pain, then nothing. There was no grand moral, just the dissolution of an irreplaceable self. Survivors tell me how much they hate sentimental portrayals of the Holocaust. They can't stand the dishonesty. They'll pardon me. This story is true.

The Ponar forest. The freezing women. The drunk Lithuanians. The pit, deep and wet like a wound. Here where I live is my country. It may have spit me out and offered me to demons, but it is mine all the same.

“Let's sing 'The Oath,'” says Pati Kremer. “Then death will not seem so terrible.”

The women sing.

Eighty years later, I walk to the Ponar death site. It is a lonely hike from the train station. Lithuanians take their dogs there sometimes, but otherwise, only the occasional tour group visits. On the way, I pick flowers for Pati Kremer. I walk by the trenches where they forced Jews to wait, and to the pits where the dead bodies fell. Which pit was Pati Kremer's? Any and all. I choose one and climb to the bottom. The forest echoes around me. I say Pati Kremer's name and play a song on my phone. The Yiddish lyrics are old and dark like the pines.

Heaven and earth will hear us,

the bright stars will bear witness.

an oath of blood, an oath of tears—

We swear, we swear, we swear!

Despite their international renown, the ghetto fighters found no respite in occupied Poland. The first betrayals came while they were still in the Lomianki forest. Bundist Zalman freed-rick escorted four ill comrades to a nearby village, where a peasant agreed to rent them a room. Once paid, the peasant immediately ratted them out to the authorities. Before their executions, Polish police paraded the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto through neighboring villages on a horse cart, with insulting placards hung around their necks. The remaining fighters tried to join with local partisans, but even socialist Home Army units refused to accept them. Partisans needed to melt into the peasant population, and most peasants refused to shelter Jews.

They found few melinas in Aryan Warsaw. Germans imposed the death penalty on anyone who failed to report hidden Jews, and few Poles wanted to take the risk. The battered ghetto fighters found themselves at the mercy of thousands of blackmailers. A few weeks after the revolt, the Gestapo caught Bundist fighter Velvel Rozowski while he scrambled to raise money to pay off blackmailers. Other blackmailers tipped off the Gestapo about the whereabouts of Tsukunft leader Abrasha Blum. Blum tried to escape through a window using tied-together bedsheets as a rope. The rope snapped. His legs shattered. The Gestapo murdered him in their basement on Szucha Avenue.

Two Deaths

Two deaths worsened the fortunes of the Jewish resistance. At the end of June, the Gestapo captured the Home Army's General Stefan Rowecki. For all his flaws, Rowecki was competent and fair-minded, and he armed the ghetto fighters in the end. His replacement, the aristocratic Endek Bronislaw Bor-Komorowski, more closely resembled the ozon leaders who led interwar Poland off a cliff. In defiance of the government-in-exile, Bor-Komorowski refused to aid ghetto fighters, and he would not accept a single Jewish partisan unit into the Home Army. To the good general, Jewish partisans were merely commie criminals. In September, he ordered his commanders to execute them on sight. The next March, Bor-Komorowski welcomed a Nazi-collaborationist paramilitary called the National Armed Forces into the Home Army.

Shortly after Rowecki's arrest, Prime Minister Sikorski's plane crashed on his way back from the Middle East. After Sikorski's death, the government-in-exile lurched further to the right. Indicative of this shift is a memo, written that July by Endek politician Roman Knoll, the director of foreign affairs. "In the Homeland...the feeling is such that the return of the Jews to their jobs and workshops is completely out of the question." Since Poles had taken Jewish property, they would regard the return of Jews "as an invasion, to be resisted by physical force." To avoid any unpleasantness, Jews should be sent to a "closed area" in the east before being deported. In other words, a ghetto.

Adina Blady

In Warsaw, the surviving Bundists scrambled from one precarious hideout to another, from tenement to closet to stinking bunker, always aware that the city would just as soon have them dead.

“Our tasks now come down to this: to keep alive the remnants who have survived…so there will be some reserve for the future and witnesses to this crime,” wrote Leon Feiner in his November report to the government-in-exile. The Bundists organized help for three thousand Jews hidden in Aryan Warsaw. Their couriers, Adina Blady and Marisha Feinmesser, created their operations center. The two women painted their lips, undid extra buttons on their sundresses, and flirted audaciously until they scored an apartment in a former courthouse at 24 Miodowa Street. It was the only place where people locked in claustrophobic melinas could freely meet their friends. The Bund stored their fake passports, their illicit party newspapers, and sacks of cash parachuted in by the Home Army. They shared this money with Zionist ghetto fighters, whose comrades in Palestine gave them nothing until the last months of the war.

Once a month, Adina refreshed the cash pile. She dressed carefully for her mission. One pair of panties beneath her garter belt, another pair on top. Two blouses, the one underneath bound with a belt. A false-bottomed shopping basket, de rigueur for women smugglers. Smile. Always Smile.

At a Zegota safe house on Senatorska Street, Adina shoved bills between her layers of lingerie. She walked carefully back to her apartment. If they stopped her, she was done. Once home, Adina spread the money on her bed. She divided it into piles. Each pile was for a courier, who would then pay rent for between fifty and a hundred hidden humans.

Over the next few days, Adina would distribute money to the people on her list, running to beat the curfew. “In one flat after another I saw the same thing: pale faces, sad eyes, hands stretched out for those few zlotys, a signature on a small card, and on my way,” she wrote. She reassured the isolated, brought books for the smart kids, told the desperate that the war would end. She kept her people sane. She carried out her duties numbly. A few weeks after the ghetto fell, the Germans took her lover, Stefan, and since then, she had not felt anything at all.

When she returned to 24 Miodowa Street, she lay out a bottle of vodka and two glasses. When Marisha returned from her rounds, the two women drank and drank.

The couriers' greatest achievement was to set up the zob headquarters at 18 Lezno Street. Marisha Feinmesser dressed up as a bougie bride, eager to make her dream home. Maria Sawicka played her sister-in-law. The two sweet-talked the landlord, promising to pay an astronomical rent if he permitted them to renovate. Fancy ladies like them deserved the best. Their “workers,” a Bundist and a Polish socialist, built a fake wall in the back room, with a small door hidden behind a laundry basket. At various times, Bernard Goldstein, Celina Lubetkin, Antek Zuckerman, and Marek Edelman lived behind that wall, squeezed between guns, gold bars, and the Bund's archives.

In their melinas, young people drank, starved, celebrated the rare chicken dinner, fucked, and fell in love. They had little else to do. Bernard got drunk one night, tried to dance, and broke his leg. Six weeks in a cast, in a claustrophobic underground hideout. Adina Blady became his lover around this time. She admired the old fighter but didn't love him—that part of her had died with her boyfriend's arrest. She saw their affair as something akin to charity. Bernard was miserable, and he wanted her so much.

When the fighter men impregnated fighter women, Adina found them unanesthetized abortions, and held their hands so they didn't scream. She does not mention anyone holding her hand during her own abortion, only Bernard's fury that she wouldn't give birth to his child.

The War

Despite everything, Bundists still imagined themselves part of a mighty socialist movement. In September, they used an illegal radio to send greetings from their Warsaw safe house to the Swiss Social Democratic Party's annual congress. "Those of us who will remain alive after the present bloody deluge will continue...together with you, organized workers of democratic Switzerland, our mutual struggle for a new world devoid of class distinction and race hatred." They held surreptitious May Day celebrations. On the Bund's forty-sixth anniversary, they gathered at 24 Miodowa Street to mark their party's birthday. "Little by little, almost in whispers, we recalled the days when such celebrations had been held in vast halls before huge audiences of workers with appropriate songs, music, speeches, and fluttering flags," wrote Vladka Peltel.

With secret radios and smuggled microfilm, Bundists followed the progress of the war. By the summer of 1944, they could finally imagine an end. Allied bombers pounded Berlin. Mussolini had been deposed. Americans, Brits, and Charles de Gaulle's Free French forces fought their way up the Italian peninsula. Most of these Free French were not Frenchmen at all but troops from North Africa, among them a young Algerian football player named Ahmed Ben Bella.

After the largest tank battle in history, at Kursk, the Soviets rolled through Ukraine and into Poland. The Red Army liberated Volkovysk in July 1944. There was little left to liberate. The Nazis had murdered twenty-nine thousand people in the town's vicinity, including prisoners of war, communists, Polish intellectuals, and almost all the area's Jews. Bombs had erased Sam's old neighborhood. Germans had desecrated the cemetery where his mother was buried, using its headstones to reinforce a bridge. In 2008, the sights recorded in Sam's memory paintings, only the chalk cliffs remain. Except for the old shoemaker Zeleviansky, who disappeared with the Red Army, none of Volkovysk's Bundists survived. Nazis shot the Bundist councilman Shepsel Ravitzky in an early massacre. Berel Falkovitch, the bridle maker, was killed in Treblinka, as was Tsukunft member Tzipa Pashinker, and activist Chana Irmess. Chana's husband, Yaakov Rubinstein, who proudly posed with his students beneath the banner We are the Future, was murdered in Auschwitz. Only one person connected to Volkovysk's Bund managed to evade the Nazis: the communist son of Bundist newspaper editor Avram Markus. In spring 1942, Shlomo Markus escaped the Zhetl ghetto to join the partisans. Five months later, while he was on a food procurement run in a nearby village, Germans surrounded his group. He saved his last bullet for himself. As far as I can tell, every member of Sam's extended family who remained in Volkovysk was murdered in the Holocaust. Only one received the dignity of an individual story. A talented musician in his thirties, Gershon Beckenstein played in the Auschwitz orchestra with the number 942670 tattooed on his arm. A cellblock friend testified that Gershon died just before the camp's evacuation, but the musician's name appears in the Buchenwald archives, in January 1945. Buchenwald rebelled that April. Perhaps. As for Rose, Sam's self-sacrificing wife, the mother of his four children—she had left her whole family in Lunna Wola. I have a picture sent by her niece, curly-haired Golda. "May it be an eternal memento," Golda wrote on the back. Where did Golda go? Unknown. The only information I found about Rose's family comes from testimonies collected by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem. In 1942, five Kravitzes from Lunna Wola arrived at Auschwitz via the Kelbasin transit camp. All of them ended up in the gas chambers. Rose was not a religious woman, but for the rest of her life, she lit one candle on Friday night, as her own heterodox sort of Kaddish.

The Red Army

A few days after they freed Volkovysk, the Red Army liberated Vilna, with the help of Jewish partisans. After the battle, Zionists, Bundists, and communists posed together for photos, as if they had never been enemies. The guys wore leather jackets like Bolshevik commissars. The girls paired jackboots with summer blouses. Their smiles could dazzle diamonds. Nine months before, the Bundist engineer Shmuel Kaplinski had led many of these kids through the sewers to a perilous life in the forest. They returned to their hometown as conquerors.

At the end of July, the Soviets set up a provisional government in Lublin, which included Polish socialists and three Bundists: Leo Finkelstein, Grisza Jaszunski, and Michael Schuldenfrei. Stalin might have killed Alter and Erlich, but some Bundists were willing to let bygones be bygones. Here where they lived was their country, and its future would be decided by the Soviets.

Warsaw

Varsovians could hear the Russian guns. Illicit Soviet radio dispatches urged them to rebellion, but even more convincing were the lines of vehicles filled with Germans fleeing west. On July 31, Red Army tanks entered Praga.

The Bund's central committee met at Ignacy Samsonowicz's apartment to discuss the Soviet arrival. The meeting had barely started when Samsonowicz's lover burst in with news from her Home Army friends. The Warsaw uprising had begun.

The Bundists had no question about what to do next. They would fight alongside their fellow Polish citizens. The twenty-two surviving zob fighters thought the same and immediately issued a proclamation. “Join the Insurrection. On the Battlefield We Will Achieve Victory for a Free, Independent, Strong and Just Poland.” Under gunfire, Leon Feiner made his way to the Polish Socialist Party's field headquarters on Zurawia Street, to meet Zygmunt Zaremba and insist the Polish underground publish their call to battle.

The fighting began in the working-class Zoliborz district and spread throughout the city. Everyone took part, from socialist workers' militias to the fascist National Armed Forces, to the Soviet-backed People's Guard. In the courtyard of Ignacy Samsonowicz's building, Bernard Goldstein and Jacob Celemenski tore up the cobblestones to build barricades. It could have been the siege of Warsaw. No, the Revolution of 1905. The next morning Celemenski and Samsonowicz crawled through a tunnel to 20 Wspolna Street, where the Polish Socialist Party was raising a militia. They enlisted under fake Polish names and didn't tell anyone that they were Jews.

This was wise. During the uprising, dozens of Jews emerged from hiding only to be murdered by their Polish fellow citizens. The ghetto fighter Jerek Grasberg left his bunker to join the rebellion, only to be shot by the Home Army. Bundists Marek Edelman and Julek Fiszgrund narrowly escaped the same fate. Some Poles robbed survivors and threw them out of their hiding places on the ludicrous charge that they were German spies. The Home Army rejected Jews, forcing zob fighters to join the pro-Soviet People's Guard.

Warsaw fought on the assumption that the Russians would save them. The Russians had no such plans. The Red Army set up camp in Praga but didn't cross the river. Instead, they waited, as close as Brooklyn is to Manhattan, and let the Nazis bring in reinforcements to crush the rebellion. Stalin didn't like the Home Army and was happy to see them and the Germans kill each other off, saving him the trouble. The Red Army watched while the Paris of the East burned like last year's ghetto. I imagine that sometimes they smelled the smoke, and that pieces of ash floated across the Vistula. Over their vodka, perhaps, the Red Army soldiers laughed on those beautiful Warsaw Sundays.

France

Paris was liberated in August 1944. The men who had fought their way through the South of France were largely colonial troops—Senegalese, Maghrebi, or Martinican, like the young Frantz Fanon—but this would not do for Free French commander Charles de Gaulle's self-image. He wanted it to seem like the French had freed themselves, so he shipped the Black African soldiers home before they could reach the capital. When there were not enough white Free Frenchmen to fill the brigade that would take Paris, he added Algerians, Syrians, and Spaniards. In blown-out photographs, they would look pale enough.

Some Bundists had fought in the French resistance, run relief for Comité de la rue Amelot, and died in Gestapo prisons. Others survived precariously in the South of France. When these activists returned to Paris, they discovered their party's archives had been abandoned in a warehouse with other unwanted loot.

Later that year, in the city of lights, Vera Dobrinksy posed for her painter husband. She had met Isaac when she was a sculpture student at the Colarossi Academy, and the pair had immediately hit it off. Perhaps it was because they both traced their roots to Vilna. The two artists had shacked up in a studio on Rue d'Odessa, close to their friend the famous painter Chaïm Soutine, and plunged into Montparnasse bohemia. Vera could have drunk the world like an apéritif at Café du Dome. Then the Nazis came and sent them fleeing for the South of France. When they returned, most of their artwork had been destroyed, Soutine was dead from a botched ulcer operation, and many of their friends had been gassed.

For her portrait, Vera wore a red kimono and tied her hair into a chignon. She had a lovely fairy face, if one marred by sadness. I recognized it instantly. It was the face of her mother, Pati Kremer, when she stepped out of a Vilna train station at the end of the nineteenth century, ready to remake the world.

Nazi planes pounded Warsaw, engulfing whole neighborhoods in fire. the Archcathedral of Saint John crumbled. The exquisite Old Town Square burned. Flames devoured the zob headquarters at 18 Lezno Street, with their sacks of cash, gold bars, and party archives. In their apartment at 24 Miodowa Street, the Bundist couriers Adina Blady and Marisha Feinmesser set up a field hospital for wounded fighters. As the fire grew closer, they evacuated patients through tunnels beneath the building. They had to leave behind anyone they couldn't move. One was the Polish socialist Janek Kulikowski, who had hidden Bundist fugitives and bought grenades for the ghetto uprising. He burned alive in the flames.

As the uprising dragged on, the Polish mood turned bitter. Old whispers started again. “Jews made the war.” “Jews made the rebellion.” “Jews brought this on our heads.” As hunger spread, Poles refused Jews ration cards and threw them out of soup kitchens. When the Bund appealed to the Polish Socialist Party and the Home Army to denounce the racism, they got nowhere. When Monitor Polski, the official newspaper of the government-inexile, printed a communiqué overturning Nazi laws, they conveniently forgot to retract the laws concerning Jews. After the Bund barraged them with complaints, they corrected this oversight, but only in the finest print.

When Bundist leaders met at Ignacy Samsonowicz's apartment on Zurawia Street, their mood was bleak. They could no longer communicate with the three thousand Jews under their care. Leon Feiner was gravely ill with pneumonia. The partisan Hannah Fryshdorf, widow of a ghetto fighter, was nine months pregnant when she escaped from a Gestapo raid and found her people. Bernard Goldstein delivered her son in a filthy basement, “while all around her the world flamed and crackled and paid no heed.”

After two months, General Bor-Komorowski surrendered. Warsaw lay in rubble, and two hundred thousand Poles were dead. The Nazis gave survivors three days to “evacuate” to a transit camp in Pruszkow.

Most Polish fighters took off their armbands and mingled with the civilians. Few Jews could do the same. If their faces didn't betray them, a blackmailer might. Many of the Bund's activists prepared to hide. On Vladka Peltel's last visit to Samsonowicz's apartment, she found Leon Feiner and Salo Fishgrund counting out stacks of American dollars, the only currency accepted on the black market. Jews in their network would need money to buy food and guns. But the party didn't know their people's whereabouts. Were they even alive? Or had they died on the barricades, been buried alive in their bunkers, or been shot by their brothers in the Polish Home Army?

Bundists with good faces, like Vladka Peltel and Jacob Celemenski, tried to sneak through German lines and disappear into the countryside. Others like Bernard Goldstein joined the thousands of Jews who hid in basements to wait for liberation. They endured months of disease, starvation, and madness below ground, while above, the Germans blew up their city block by block. Bernard and his comrades moved from place to place, leaving by night to forage food. They caught dysentery and were slowly starving to death. One night, in December, when he was almost too weak to move, Bernard heard voices outside his cellar. He pointed his revolver at the door.

“Who's there?” asked a Polish voice. A gun barrel pushed through the doorway.

“Friends,” he answered.

“Amtcho?” the voice asked. It was a shibboleth, its meaning clear to both parties. Are you a Jew?

“Yes,” Bernard answered.

The door burst open. The stranger threw his arms around Bernard's neck and hugged him furiously, then kissed his filthy cheeks. It was Yulek, son of a Praga teamster. Bernard had organized his dad's union, back when the Bund were kings.

Yulek brought Bernard and his friends to a bunker full of a cross-section of the sort of Warsaw Jews whom he might have known in another lifetime. The bunker inhabitants burned his lice-infested clothes, fed him, and returned him slowly back to life. Three weeks later, one of the bunker's patrols reported an extraordinary sound. They heard Russian voices in central Warsaw. A few days later, another patrol confirmed the news. The Red Army was marching through the center of the city. Bernard began to weep. He embraced the thug next to him. The group wriggled from their burrow. They were free.

At first Bernard could not see. He was unaccustomed to the sunlight. He blinked. His eyes focused. The landscape resembled the surface of the moon. On Marszalkowska Street, he watched the Red Army parade their tanks through the sepulcher that once had been his city. He could barely recognize a thing. Even the Jewish cemetery on Gesia Street had been pillaged, the graves dug up, the ground littered with skulls missing their gold teeth.

Living skeletons walked uneasily amidst the rubble. Later, he heard a Pole whisper, “Still so many Jews?”

Chapter 27

Scatter

(1945 to 1948)

He bundists emerged into A postwar world that had little room for them. Some of their comrades had barely survived Auschwitz. Others were prisoners in work camps in Soviet Central Asia, or refugees scattered from Buenos Aires to Shanghai. The war had left the Bund's leadership split between America and Poland, just as the iron curtain was about to fall. The anti-Soviet Bundists in New York would soon find themselves on a collision course with the Lublin Bundists, whose country's future lay with the Soviet Union.

The world that they came from was gone. Once, thousands of Jewish communities had lain like lace across the map of eastern Europe. They had made the “here” in the party's concept of Hereness. These places had burned, along with their inhabitants. The Nazis murdered 90 percent of Polish Jews—and one-third of the Jews on earth.

Another chapter was about to close. After the Soviets took Warsaw, Leon Feiner's friends could see he was facing the end. The elegant lawyer had spent the uprising nearly paralyzed with pneumonia. Friends took him to Lublin, where hospitals still functioned. Doctors diagnosed him with terminal blood cancer. The Polish Bund's first postliberation conference took place around Feiner's deathbed. In the statement they published afterward, they gave their support to the Soviet-backed government. The only dissenter was Bernard Goldstein.

“Still alive?”

Bernard Goldstein

This was the question that greeted many Jews who made their way back from the death camps. It was often followed by an exasperated sigh, as if to say, I thought they'd finished you off.

The Endek politician Roman Knoll had been correct in 1943 when he said that many Poles would view the return of Jews as an invasion. “There is no place for a Jew in the countryside and towns today,” since Poles had taken over their businesses, said the Polish underground leader Jerzy Braun in July 1945. “What they take for anti-Semitism is only economic law.” Jews who tried to reclaim their property faced hostility, if not violence. Many were killed for the crime of having survived.

“The returning Jews were made to feel that they were superfluous, that every piece of bread they ate was food taken from the mouths of their betters,” Bernard Goldstein wrote. Even Yiddish became dangerous. When Bernard chatted with a friend in their native language, a passerby insulted them, then reported him to the police. At the station, the cop warned the two men that it was “inadvisable” to provoke Poles. Bernard's Polish communist friends were sympathetic but did nothing. They had bigger fish to fry.

Like all occupiers, Soviets quickly made themselves hated in Poland. They looted homes, stripped the factories of Lodz and hauled them back to Russia, and hunted down members of the Home Army. A nationalist insurgency rose against them. Called cursed soldiers, these partisans combined anticommunism with a genocidal loathing of the country's few remaining Jews. It was the same thing, after all. A Jew was a commie. A commie was a Jew. Nationalists murdered over a thousand Jews in the war's aftermath. When Marek Edelman traveled by train, he saw dead Jews at many stations, their bodies covered with newspapers. Sometimes their pants had been pulled down; nationalists had checked to see if men were circumcised before killing them.

Within months of liberation, tens of thousands of Jews fled for American-occupied Europe. One of them was Bernard Goldstein. The racism had disgusted him, but political repression was the final straw. The Left has a long memory, and the communists had passed a death sentence against him in prewar Warsaw. The walls closed in. Acquaintances transformed into snitches. When the N.K.V.D brought Bernard in for a chat, the interrogator lay a gun on the table to intimidate him. At Bundist meetings, Bernard denounced his party's acceptance of the Soviet occupiers, only to see his "comrades" taking notes for the police. After the war, he had expected to rebuild his party in a country purified by shared suffering. Instead, he found bigots, morons, and stool pigeons. He felt like he was suffocating. Anyone he met with risked arrest. To avoid incriminating others, he locked himself in his room.

“This was not the liberation for which...I had degraded myself to the level of the meanest animal in order to remain alive,” he later wrote. With a fake passport, he made his way to a Czech displaced persons' camp, and from there to New York City. He spent the rest of his life in the Bronx, as an honorary grandfather to his comrades' children. There, he at last fulfilled the dream he shared with his best friend, Shloyme Mendelson, back in Warsaw, and became a writer, penning two volumes of memoirs that survive as thrilling testaments to his party's heyday. As Naguib Mahfouz wrote, “Home is not where you are born. It is where all your attempts at escape cease.”

Bernard Goldstein died in 1959. He is buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, on the honor walk of Yiddish socialists, not far from his onetime cellmate Vladimir Medem. Someone has paid for the perpetual care of his grave. Whenever I visit, I take a teaspoon of dirt for a small act of necromancy. I go home, light a candle in front of his portrait, and ask the old hooligan for permission to tell his story.

Jacob Pat

In Poland's ruins, Bundists did what they had always done and threw themselves into activity. They joined the Central Committee of Polish Jews, an umbrella organization of the country's surviving Jewish groups, and pledged loyalty to the Soviet-backed government, the only defense Jews had against attacks by the nationalist paramilitaries. They set up workers' cooperatives and encouraged Jews to go into heavy industry. They resurrected their institutions: Tsukunft, skif, Folkstsaytung, the Morgenstern sport club, the orphanages, libraries, soup kitchens, old age homes, summer camps, and drama clubs that made up their prewar world. They even opened up a summer resort called the El Dorado.

Bundists scoured the country for their comrades' hidden children. It was not easy to get them back. After three years together, Polish protectors often loved these children like their own, and it was a grave trauma to split them apart. Bundists brought Zalman freed-rick's daughter Elzunia to America, where she was raised by affluent party comrades. At twenty-six, she died of an overdose.

In their public proclamations, the Bund's leaders thundered against emigration, but they had a hard time convincing Jews to stay in their families' graveyard. "Most of the members want to emigrate to America and join the comrades who are already there," Tsukunft's Warsaw secretary, Avraham Zilberstein, wrote to a Bundist in New York. Hereness felt like resignation.

The Bundist Jacob Pat realized the same when he returned to Poland in 1946 to distribute aid for the Jewish Labor Committee. In his hometown, Bialystok, where the Bund won fifteen thousand votes in the prewar municipal elections, the party had only twenty-three members left. He met stubborn, traumatized people who eked out livings in threadbare cooperative workshops, under constant threat from their Polish fellow citizens. Almost everyone wanted to leave. “You can smell the ships here,” one of Pat's interlocutors told him. It didn't matter to them whether they sailed for America or for Palestine.

Pat's memoir gives a single glimpse of the bonds that once tied Bundists to the Here of Poland. At a newly opened Jewish community center in the Silesian town of Dzierzoniow, Pat heard the melody of “The Blue Danube.” Inside, hundreds of young people waltzed. They were Poles and Jews. The dancers demanded one song after the next. They whirled, their feet light, and girls clung to their partners' shoulders. Pat stared at the numbers on their arms.

At the Polish Socialist Party's clubhouse next door, the young secretary poured Pat a whisky. He spoke of solidarity, of the brotherhood of peoples. He rolled up his sleeve to show the number on his arm.

The secretary raised a glass. He toasted his friends, socialist resistance fighters who had been shot by the Gestapo. “Bolek, Antek, Zdzisław—let's drink to their memory! Let's drink to the memory of our Jewish comrades! Let's drink to our brave dead!” Then he looked at Pat as if to seek forgiveness. “Brother, believe me. We socialists are not guilty in all this. I mean…the Jews and the other things. Believe me, I am ashamed of what is happening in our country.”

The secretary spoke across a chasm carved by genocide, and when I first read his words in 2018, I could not imagine myself in his place. He was a Pole. I am a Jew. My tribalism precluded understanding. But two years into the annihilation of Gaza, I feel only empathy for him, along with my own inadequacy. What had I done to stop this genocide, still live-streamed on our smartphone screens? Not enough. The secretary had also tried to stop mass slaughter. His sacrifices were far graver than anything I could comprehend. Yet it didn't work. If we also fail, what chasm will we look across to seek forgiveness?

The secretary's sentences trailed off, until all that was left was a supplication. “Comrade...Brother...We socialists...Believe me...”

Kielce

The final blow fell in July 1946, in the southeastern city of Kielce, when a Polish boy came home late. He blamed the Jews, as one did, saying that they had locked him in the basement of a communal apartment building, where they planned to make matzoh from his blood. It didn't matter that this building had no basement. Polish mobs slaughtered forty-two young Jewish residents. Cops and soldiers joined in. When Marek Edelman traveled to Kielce on an ambulance train, feathers from torn duvets still floated in the air, like they did after pogroms in my great-grandfather's day. Everything smelled like burning meat.

After Kielce, the Bund demanded that Polish government “eradicate antisemitism and arrest its disseminators.” At the same time, they tried to persuade Jews that the pogrom was just a speed bump, that this country was still their home. Few believed them. Hundreds of Bundists asked the Jewish Labor Committee to get them visas to America.

They joined the flood out of Poland. Zionist smuggling networks crisscrossed the country, helping Jews flee to American-occupied Germany and, from there, to Palestine. One of their most charismatic representatives was Antek Zuckerman, founder of the Jewish Combat Organization. After everything he'd seen, Antek had even less respect for the Bund's ideology of Hereness, which he damned as a self-destructive delusion. Anyone could see that Jews had no future without a state. Antek's wife, Celina, had already left for Palestine, where she gave birth to their child. He joined her there in 1948. The two heroes of the uprising spent the rest of their lives on a kibbutz for ghetto fighters like them, built on the ruins of a Palestinian village, ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias that became the I.D.F.

Displaced Persons

The collapse of the Third Reich created a new category of human, the displaced person, or D.P. When the war ended, there were eighty thousand concentration camp inmates and nine million forced laborers inside Germany, the vast majority of them not Jews. Americans hastily threw up camps to accommodate them. Most were shit-encrusted hellholes, where Jews bunked next to Nazi collaborators on the principle that people with the same passport ought to get along.

The first Bundists in these camps were survivors of the death factories, like the courier Jacob Celemenski, whom Nazis arrested as a Pole after the Warsaw Uprising. After a joyful encounter with a cellblock full of Bundists in the Bergen-Belsen D.P camp, Celemenski rode the rails through ruined Germany in search of his surviving comrades. He eventually discovered that 1,200 Bundists had made their homes in the archipelago of waiting. Some of them imagined that they'd go home to help rebuild their communities in Poland. Others deduced the impossibility of return.

The barbed wire that circled the first camps came down in 1946. At the request of Jewish groups, Americans allowed Jews to live in separate camps, away from the Nazi collaborators. Conditions remained grim. There was no work and barely enough food. People lived in flimsy shacks, eleven to a room. It was limbo, if not hell.

On June 1, 1946, 150 of those Bundists who had been “dispersed and shoved aside all over Germany” gathered in the Feldafing D.P camp in Bavaria for a three-day conference to figure out what came next. They decided to run for the survivors' committees that constituted camp self-governance. It seemed like a natural step. After all, a mere six years back, they had dominated the kehillahs and city councils in Poland.

Times had changed. Immediately after the armistice, Zionist youth leaders, teachers, doctors, soldiers of Britain's Jewish Legion, and fighters from the Haganah and Irgun paramilitaries had all arrived from Palestine to win over the survivors, and they quickly converted the camps into their territory. When the Bund's old enemy, Jewish Agency head David Bengurion, visited the camps, many D.P's greeted him as a hero. Zionist emissaries were organized, well funded, and had friends in the U.S. military, who didn't want a mass influx of Jews into America. They quickly seized control of camp administrations, which gave out travel passes, jobs, and extra rations.

While most of these emissaries cared deeply about survivors, their arrival had a more self-interested motive. For the Jewish Agency, the 360,000 Jewish D.P's were not traumatized individuals hoping to rebuild their lives. They were “human material,” in Ben-Gurion's words, to fight for a Jewish state. With World War 2 over, the war for Palestine was about to begin anew. Jewish D.P's formed an invaluable demographic resource, while their suffering increased sympathy for the Zionist cause.

“Along came the missionaries from the Holy Land, to gather the flock onto the path of righteousness,” wrote the Bundist D.P Moshe Ajzenbud, a machinist and aspiring fiction writer, in one of his fiery dispatches to the party press. “They act as lords of the camp. The Zionists have convinced the world that survivors form one united front.”

Zionists thwarted efforts to settle Jewish refugees anywhere other than Palestine and branded Jews as deserters if they signed up for immigration to other countries. They even resorted to sabotage. Bundists in the Bindermichl camp claimed that Zionists smashed a school built to train furriers for jobs in Canada, leaving behind graffiti denouncing deserters.

In this atmosphere, Bundists were marginalized, intimidated, or simply erased. The Central Committee of Liberated Jews, which represented survivors in the D.P camps, even denied that Bundists still existed. In the words of one survivor, his comrades lived like hidden Jews in the days of the Spanish Inquisition.

The Zionist press mocked Bundists for their stubbornness. As one article incredulously put it, “Bundists who were strung up on the same pine that grew in the soil they wished to hold on to forever...who saw their theory of exilic existence refuted in the most horrible way...pop up again and publicly declare 'Follow us.'”

In displaced persons camps, Bundist survivors tried to keep their spirits up. They organized libraries, theater troupes, and field trips to nearby palaces. They released a calligraphed bulletin of their activities. They set up cooperatives and posed with red flags in the woods. None of it worked. The Bundists had no jobs, no way to get money except the black market. They lived surrounded by the Germans who had murdered their families. “Can you call it living, the physical act of breathing? Or by medical examination the beating of a pulse?” asked the Bundist Anke Zilberstein. “Can we today as an uprooted people, who don't take any active part in society, call our state anything else but vegetative?” The movement they built had been decimated, as had the Polish world of their birth. They had lost the context that gave meaning to their lives.

In November 1947, the Bund's flag went up in German D.P camps, in a Shanghai social club, and at a Roman union hall. It was their fiftieth anniversary. In New York's Manhattan Center, five thousand people watched the young courier Vladka Peltel hand the party's banner to seventy-eight-year-old John Mill, the last surviving Bundist pioneer. At Warsaw's Gesia Street cemetery, Bundists unveiled a memorial for the ghetto fighters. Carved from red stone, a man who resembled Michal Klepfisz emerged from fire, a homemade grenade in his fist.

Despite this celebration, the Polish Bund was in its final days. Only a fragment remained of what had once been the largest Jewish community in Europe. Cold War geopolitics had already forced the Polish Bund to formally separate from the Bund run by their comrades in New York, but this renunciation would not be enough to save them. After rigged elections that year, the Soviet-backed government decided it was done with democratic charades. The government forced the Polish Socialist Party to merge with the communists and arrested its recalcitrant leaders. Kazimierz Puzak, who had warned Alter and Erlich to flee Warsaw, died in Rawicz prison. Antoni Zdanowski, Alter's travel buddy on the Madrid front line, was tortured to death by the secret police. The Bund was next. Under extreme pressure, the party voted to dissolve itself in 1949. Some members disappeared into private life. Others, including most of Tsukunft's leadership, smuggled themselves out of Poland.

Marek Edelman stayed, despite harassment by the secret police. Someone had to look after the dead. He became a prominent heart surgeon. As an older man, he took part in the Solidarity movement that, in 1989, would lead to the dissolution of his country's dictatorship. "To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors," Edelman wrote. For this reason, he never became a Zionist. Though he was fêted across the world, Israel never forgave him. When Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin traveled to Poland to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the ghetto uprising, the uprising's commander was not permitted to speak. Edelman died in 2009. At his funeral, mourners sang the Bund's anthem over his coffin. He received no honors from the Jewish state.

Conscription

“The future of the Jewish community in Palestine...cannot be built upon latent or open war against the Arab majority of the country as well as against the Arab countries surrounding Palestine,” warned the Bund Bulletin in 1947. “However, such a state of affairs would be the inevitable result of the creation of a Jewish state.” At the end of 1947, the United Nations approved a partition plan for Palestine, which granted Jews, who were a only a third of the population, 56 percent of the land. Palestinian leadership understandably rejected this offer. The next day, the Haganah sent out mobilization notices to all military-aged men and women, and community leaders in Arab countries similarly began to recruit fighters. As the Jewish Agency's leader, David Bengurion, wrote at the time, the future borders of a Jewish state would be “determined by force.” Secretly, Ben-Gurion and his generals began to plan for the realization of their long-held dream—the mass expulsion of the Arab population of Palestine.

The Haganah had money from American Jews and would soon get weapons from Soviet-backed Czechoslovakia, but still worried about their numerical disadvantage; Palestinians outnumbered them three to two. In March 1948, David Ben-Gurion approved a draft for Jewish refugees in Europe. They were not Israeli citizens, as Israel didn't exist, nor were they all Zionists. The Haganah claimed them as fighters merely because they were Jews, “citizens of Israel who are prevented from reaching Israel, but citizens of Israel nonetheless,” in the words of the Haganah officer Nahum Shadmi, who led the effort.

The draft was not a popular success. Most Zionist true believers were already in Palestine, and the Jews who remained in the camps were more interested in building homes somewhere stable than signing up as cannon fodder for a place they'd never been. “Most Jewish refugees, who had been through the hell of the ghetto, slavery, and death camps under the Nazis, Soviet forced-labor camps, and other disasters yearn for some quiet place,” wrote the Bundist correspondent Moshe Ajzenbud. A report from the Zionist youth movement Gordonia put it in harsher terms. “The corruption of these [Polish] Jews is so great that they are totally uninterested” in going to fight in Palestine. Instead, hundreds had registered for American visas.

When appeals to patriotism failed, Zionists turned to stronger inducements. On March 30, the Congress of Survivors in the American occupation zone of Germany resolved that “draft dodgers” would be “removed from all social and political life.”

This enforcement went into immediate effect. Camp administrations fired non-Zionist employees, levied fines, threw people out of apartments, and denied them their meager supplemental rations. They published blacklists to publicly shame draft dodgers, targeting Bundists with a special cruelty. In the Eschwege camp, Bundists complained that they were fired from jobs and denied medical treatment. In Neu Freimann, Bundist art teacher Jacob Celnik lost his job after he refused to register for the draft. And in Grugliasco, near Turin, Bundists claimed that after a Zionist-led smear campaign, the camp committee's Bundist chairman, Jacob Freidman, was stripped of his position, then his housing and rations, and finally reported to the Italian police as a criminal. Unable to catch him, police instead locked his brother in a concentration camp.

In the end, Zionists imposed the draft by force. It was shocking, said the Bundist newspaper Unzer Shtime, “that Jews, the standard victims of Fascism and terrorism, would be capable of the kinds of violence Zionists in the camps exercise toward their Bundist and other non-Zionist political rivals.” Hundreds of affidavits attested to the attacks. Bundists and other non-Zionist Jews told stories of night raids and mob beatings. Bundists in the Bad Reichenhall camp claimed Zionists publicly whipped a draft dodger, then took photos to frighten others into compliance. In a camp near Ulm, Germany, Zionists beat the elderly fathers of sons who avoided the draft. Conscription continued until April 1949, at which point recruits from D.P camps made up a third of the new Israeli army.

In his last article written before his death in 1948, Bernard Goldstein's best friend Shloyme Mendelson condemned the “totalitarian” methods that Zionism used to repress Jewish dissent. “What a bitter irony that after the utter destruction brought upon the Jewish people by Fascism, the latter's methods of terror are now triumphant in Jewish life.... It is as if the slaughter had infected his victims with his germs during the slaughter.”

Bundist camp chapters tried to protect their members. They collected testimonies about abuse, noting names and dates for verification, then shared their reports with the party press and visiting Bundist delegates. In Austria, Bundists appealed for help from the Socialist Party of Austria.

Even as Bundist D.P's tried to resist conscription, they battled to free their members from the camps. Because of the Bund's connections with the American labor movement, hundreds of D.P's applied for membership, hoping to net U.S. visas. The Bund tried to guide their members through the labyrinth of training programs, bureaucratic loopholes, and registration lists. At camp meetings, Bundists demanded free immigration to all countries, despite the rage it inspired in Zionist audiences, who wanted them to focus on Palestine. On the First of May, Bundist D.P's didn't just march for socialism. They marched for their freedom of movement. They screamed for the borders to fall.

When a Bundist dignitary visited from New York, the greatest gift he could bring was a visa.

Refuge

“Had the gates to America opened wide after the war, it may well be that the masses of Jews would have flowed to America and only a minority would have come here,” said Ben-Gurion shortly after the creation of Israel. The Bund agreed. For over a decade, their New York leadership had begged the United States to grant visas to Jewish refugees. In 1947, they excoriated the world that indifferently watched Hitler's victims languish in D.P camps. They petitioned the U.N to accept the displaced.

“Even Hitler's unparalleled massacre of six million of our kin could not eradicate from our souls the faith in true international socialism. Our comrades are unbroken in their spirit and are resolved to do their share in the worldwide fight for our and everybody's freedom.... Unfortunately, we do not meet an adequate response from other peoples,” said the Bundist leader Emanuel Sherer at a convention of the Socialist Party of America in New York. “Again and again, we hear in this country the call for opening the doors of Palestine to the Jewish D.P. But what about the doors of this great country? It is indeed a very painful blow to those directly concerned—but it is to no lesser extent a shame to our civilization—that this elemental demand for opening the gates of all countries to the uprooted and displaced victims of the most horrible Nazi cruelties is still not fulfilled."

That year, the Bund reconstituted itself as an international organization, with its base now in New York City. At their first conference they called for a secular, democratic Palestine, with cultural autonomy and constitutionally protected equal rights, and said that Zionists must “renounce the goal of an independent Jewish state.”

Despite their supplications, despite their connections with the labor movement and with officials in the former Roosevelt administration, the Bundists could only get American visas for a sliver of their membership. After the war, the country wanted nothing to do with Jews like them. When Congress tried to pass a bill to accept two hundred thousand survivors, Georgia Democrat E. E. Cox denounced “the scum of all Europe—an aggregation of loafers [and] revolutionists...[who] will join those who are gnawing away at the foundation of our constitutional government.” When the bill finally passed in 1948, it banned 90 percent of Jewish survivors, because they had taken wartime refuge in the Soviet Union.

The camps closed. The Bundists scattered. The lucky ones got visas for refugee communities in Melbourne and Johannesburg, Paris and Montevideo. Others were not so lucky. In the years after the Holocaust, hundreds of Bundist survivors left for Palestine. Their party had given them fairy tales. Zionists offered a place where they could rebuild their lives.

Solidarity

In 1948, Bundist Leivik Hodes wrote that his party's philosophy depended on their fundamental faith in solidarity.

[This] belief in mankind is not popular today. In these last years we have all seen it become deeply debased, despoiled, and spat on. But if man is at heart a beast, no amount of running away will help.

The Bund had always put its cards on socialism, which means a better future for all humanity...If the dream of socialism becomes true, then there is no one to run from; if the dream dissipates, like so many other of mankind's better dreams, then there is nowhere to run to. The mirage of a little “statelet” surrounded by enemies is no amulet against anti-Semitism and extermination....

...The remnants of the Jewish masses lurch through the camps, wander around homeless, or float like splinters on the foaming waves of the stormy post-war world. But with every day it becomes clearer that the pathway to healing these wounds leads...not through increasing the number of uprooted refugees, but through building and rebuilding....

Such solidaristic principles found fewer adherents after the Holocaust. “Deeply grieved and shaken by the murder of six million of their brethren, the masses of the Jewish people became enveloped by strong nationalist tendencies, which...fanned by skillful Zionist propaganda, caused among the Jews a psychosis of Zionist and Messianic illusions,” the Bund's coordinating committee wrote in 1948. For many Jews, the Holocaust seemed to confirm the Zionist prognosis. Jews couldn't survive as a minority in the diaspora. Existence meant having a state.

Jews were hardly alone in thinking this way. Oppression seldom breeds compassion, and a genocide is not a school for personal growth. History is full of stories of traumatized refugees who were radicalized by movements that promised them redemption through violence. That many survivors became Zionists is not exceptional. It is human and banal.

In social justice circles, it's said that an oppressed group can't be racist, because racism requires power. If a group is powerless, they can be as bigoted as they like. Jews have been powerless for most of our history. The rituals of our religion are those of a powerless people, and we have hated with a powerless hate. On Purim we make noise to celebrate not just Haman's death but the murder of our enemies, the people of Amalek, down to the last man, woman, and child. For a long time, this was just an expression of impotent emotion. Theater, in the Aristotelian sense. Catharsis. We weren't going to do anything about it. It's not like we had an army.

This is fine when a group is powerless, but power is a fluid thing. Jews now have an army, and those once-impotent fantasies about destroying Amalek have transformed into white phosphorus bombs dropped on Gaza, into torture camps and mass graves full of cancer patients, shot with their catheters still in.

Zionism has been many things, but among them, it was once the ideology of some of the most powerless people on earth. In 1942, young Zionists in the Warsaw ghetto founded the Jewish Combat Organization. Exactly five years after the ghetto revolt, on the eve of Passover 1948, Zionist paramilitaries ethnically cleansed fifteen thousand Palestinians from Haifa.

Was it the same Zionism in the Warsaw ghetto as in Haifa? And what does this say about the ideologies of other oppressed people today?

Maybe it's this. An oppressed people's beliefs are not benign just because they lack power. Beliefs are good or bad on their own merits, because nothing stays the same. Demographics change. Empires weaken. Insurgents take charge. Without a clear set of ethics that respects human life, today's victims transform into tomorrow's killers. Oppressed becomes oppressor the moment the power flips.

Palestine

Ben-Gurion announced the state of Israel in May 1948, with the support of the Soviet Union and the United States. In the attacks that preceded the declaration, and in the war that followed, Zionist militias violently expelled over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. The Bund demanded the right of return for these refugees, but Israel had no such intention. For Israel to exist, Palestine could not. The I.D.F tortured Palestinians who tried to return or shot them as “infiltrators.” Their property became booty for the new Israeli state.

“It appears that 2,000 years of suffering and of untold hardships caused by the misery of numerous deportations were entirely forgotten as soon as circumstances caused a fraction of the Jewish population to be placed in a position of self-government," wrote the Bund in the Bulletin in September 1948. "True to its Zionist self, the Jewish Government of the State of Israel appears ready to forfeit the moral rights of the Jewish D.P's in Europe and elsewhere by refusing to permit the Arab refugees to return to their homes in Palestine."

Despite Israel's best efforts, these Palestinians refused to disappear.

“At present, when more than half a million Arab displaced persons are demanding permission to return to their former homes...how the State of Israel could cope with a Jewish immigration of any scope without the 'miracle' of the vanished Arabs is beyond anybody's imagination. Yet the Arab refugee problem remains most urgent,” wrote the Bund in the Bulletin in June 1949. In 1951, the Bund Bulletin ran a story about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in camps in neighboring countries, “prevented from returning to their homesteads and villages and whose property is as good as confiscated by the conqueror.” Themselves veterans of countless exiles, these Bundists saw the Nakba for what it was: the foundational crime of the Zionist endeavor. Born of another people's violent dispossession, Israel had yoked itself into an ever-worsening cycle of repression and resistance. Its own violence would poison it, and the cancer would metastasize, until there was nothing else left.

Chapter 28 Home

(1949-present)

Sophia Dubnova

A woman emerges From the filthy waters of the Hudson. Once copper, she has greened with age. At her base are some verses penned by a Jewish poet over a century ago to welcome pogrom survivors. Time has given these words an ironic lilt.

She was never supposed to be here. Native to France, she had been destined for Egypt, but something brought her to New York. Call it God, or chance, or the dialectical forces of history. Whatever it was, she's here. Here she remains, her torch thrust upward into the smoke-choked sky. "Mother of exiles," as the Jewish poet called her, in a name truer than her official one. She is a fitting symbol for the city where so many exiled Bundists made their homes.

Among these exiles was Sophia Dubnova, who passed the rest of her life in Manhattan's Upper West Side, not far from my mother's apartment. During her New York years, Sophia published prolifically, including a volume of poetry, a biography of her beloved historian father, and a delicious memoir that I relied on to write this book. Though she was Bundist royalty, she refused to confine herself to the role of Henryk Erlich's widow. There were too many battles to be fought, right here in her newfound country. In the 1960s, she threw herself into the civil rights movement, though by then, her vision was so bad that she sometimes picketed the wrong shops. She died in 1986, at age 101, engaged and lucid to the last. Shortly before her death, she told her grandson Henry she had a confession to make. She was no longer a socialist but an anarchist.

Both of Sophia's sons became professors. The eldest, Alexander, taught economics at Columbia University in New York City. There, he became close to another refugee—a brilliant Palestinian critic by the name of Edward Said. Over email, Said's daughter, Najla, recalled a moment in 1981, when she was only seven. She and her father ran into Erlich in front of his building. Erlich wore a pin for Solidarity, the Polish trade-union movement that would help bring down the country's dictatorship. “My dad explained to me right then and there what solidarity meant,” Najla told me. “I learned that big important word because of [Alexander Erlich].” She had occasion to remember this story in 2024, when students protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza set up a solidarity encampment on the lawn of Columbia University, right below her father's former office.

The Bund

Alexander Erlich was one of the people who tried to steward the Bund through the second half of the twentieth century. By 1950, the once mighty movement had been reduced to small communities of Holocaust survivors scattered across the globe. Exhausted, traumatized, and with most of their loved ones dead, these Bundists turned to each other. They were all they had. They moved into the same apartment buildings, got jobs at the same garment factories, intermarried, and became family. They worked together to compile histories of their party—fat Yiddish volumes that I used to write this book.

But they would never again hold political power. There would be no more grand marches for May Day, no fiery election campaigns. Those days were gone. When the tiny Bund branch in Tel Aviv tried to run for the Knesset, they could not even raise enough money to get on the ballot. In America, Bundists set up socialist Sunday schools and a summer camp for their children, but they fell out of touch with the political and cultural zeitgeist. The Soviet Union's murder of their leaders pushed these Bundists into a reactive anticommunism, even while, during the McCarthy years, they lived in terror of being deported as communists. As the decades wore on, their opposition to Zionism grew tepid, but the mere fact that such opposition continued was enough to relegate them to the margins of Jewish life. In one letter I found, from 1978, the writer Irving Howe complained about an incident at Columbia University, where he debated Edward Said about Israel. When it came time for questions, a little old Bundist with a thick Yiddish accent sprang up. "He let loose an attack upon Zionists, Israelis, etcetera which would have been shocking if it had come from an Arab.... I felt somehow ashamed that a fellow Jew, and a socialist at that, would talk this way," Howe wrote.

Stubbornly, the Bund persisted, but membership shrank each year. This was probably inevitable. For all its notions of transnational Hereness, the Bund's ideology grew from the twisted streets of the former Pale of Settlement. It was a movement for the Jewish masses of eastern Europe. Those masses were gone, and the Bund was lost without them.

One treasure remained from their murdered homeland: Yiddish, the language of the Jewish Street. This the Bundists would not lose. While the postwar period's combination of the Soviet gulag, Western assimilation, and Israeli hegemony squeezed their party into political irrelevance, Bundists nurtured the Yiddish tongue. The composer Gustav Mahler once said that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. Bundists guarded the glowing coals. They were politically spent. By the 1980s, little was left of their party but a dwindling number of old people with faded red banners, ghosts in a legion hall for Veterans of Lost Causes. But their efforts with Yiddish would help launch a linguistic revival, complete with music, poetry, and international festivals. At these defiant celebrations of diasporic creativity, their party's songs would once again be sung. Through art, they planted the seeds of their own rediscovery.

The Bund's Worldwide Organizing Committee dissolved around 2003, but affiliated groups survive in Australia and France. In August 2018, when someone pasted a swastika on an advertisement in Melbourne, it was immediately covered by a sticker for the organization my great-grandfather had joined in 1898.

Though he died before I was born, I grew up surrounded by reminders of my great-grandfather. It was not just the thousands of his paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and mosaics that filled my great-aunt's house in Brooklyn but the very presence of Grandpa Sam himself, as if his personality had been too vivid to allow him to be rendered a ghost. From my great-aunt Ida and my mother, I knew his story. "Without art you're dead!" Sam liked to say. Each day, he got up and made his work. His paintings would never get the grand museum retrospectives or high auction prices of his more socially adept contemporaries, but he remained an artist till his final breath. When times were good, he sold paintings to high society and received newspaper profiles lauding him as the next Cézanne. When times were bad, he foraged his materials from the trash. He shunned the institutions that shunned him, spreading his paintings on his front lawn every morning for his Rothbort Home Museum of Direct Art. He grew sunflowers, ate black bread baked from flour he ground himself, and drank the water from a well he dug in his backyard. (He didn't trust the tap.) He exchanged letters with Isaac Bashevis Singer. He loved his Rose. He made art with his son, the brilliant, tormented Lawrence, who was murdered in 1963. Despite his share of tragedies, Sam was a happy man. While Sam sometimes attended Jewish socialist meetings, he was not an activist. He belonged to no American party I know of, confining his political work to writing letters to President Eisenhower, which he thought hastened the end of the Korean War. He was a long way from the boy who helped shoot two police officers in the Volkovysk market square. But though he had traveled far from his origins, he still kept up with his comrades. In a shoebox of old Yiddish documents sent by a second cousin, I found the program for the fiftieth-anniversary banquet of Workmen's Circle branch 100—formerly the Volkovysk Revolutionary Union, which Sam had seating chart, next to others I recognized as belonging to fellow Volkovysk Bundists.

Like him, they had Americanized their names and traded their black peasant blouses for respectable suits and frocks, but despite these New World disguises, they retained flickers of their rebel pasts. All of them bore memories of strikes and jailbreaks and smuggled pamphlets, of windows smashed in the dead of night, of the idealistic quest for a better and more beautiful world. All of them had raised the red flag in the woods and sang “The Oath,” the Bund's anthem.

Heaven and earth will hear us.

the bright stars will bear witness,

an oath of blood, an oath of tears—

We swear, we swear, we swear!

Perhaps they sang it that night.

Sam Rothbort was a singular man, but he was still formed by the revolutionary commitments of his youth. As I researched this book, I learned to recognize the traces of Bundism he carried within him. His benign lawlessness. His contempt for money. The welcome he gave to my Puerto Rican father. His lack of ties to Israel. The two embracing children he carved in stone, who, he wrote “have not yet been misled by false theories of race creed or color.” His bohemian humanism, big enough to take in the world.

The Bund shaped Sam's life, and then through him, it shaped mine. As I traveled the world, I held these lessons tight. Sam taught me what it meant to live as an artist, in defiance of authority's indifference or repression. He made me the woman who I am.

On traditional Jewish New Year's cards, the old year is represented as an aged man shuffling off into the horizon, before the arrival of the fat New Year's baby. Sam always rejected this metaphor. “I prefer the human idea of history repeating,” he wrote. “Years are not loaves of bread; we can't slice them: they roll together in Time's rolling wheel.” From a marble block, he sculpted the old year hugging the New Year's baby to his cheek. The past is not dead, Sam knew. It holds tight to our eternal present, sometimes invisibly, but ready to be reclaimed by those who need it.

I finish this book beneath a portrait of my great-grandfather.

Sam Rothbort in his elder years

Postscript: History Never Ends

1.N 1938, Henrik Erlick wrote, “If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be: eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)...Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy, and progress can grow? Indeed, is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish?”

Erlich killed himself four years later, as Zionists like to remind me on social media. People who met him in prison say that he remained a Bundist till the end. Time after time in party hagiographies, I read the same story. In gulags, in concentration camps, on the execution block, the Bundist would leave his final testimony. “I die knowing that I was right.” The Bundist periodicals kept the same line, even as they faded into irrelevance. I die knowing that I was right.

I was right. Sure, you were. That and $2.90 will get you to Coney Island. What could be stupider than to keep insisting you were right when the whole world says otherwise, when your enemies are triumphant, when even your kids forsake you?

History keeps moving. No victory is final. Neither is any defeat.

In 2023, after a massacre led by Hamas, Israel began a genocide in Gaza. On social media, Palestinians exposed the violence that has continued since the beginning of the Nakba, with every house that settlers steal, every gang rape in an Israeli prison camp, every crater carved by Israeli bombs. Around the world, people organized, marched, fundraised and got dragged off to jail. to denounce Israel's crimes. Many of them were Jews. In March 2025, Jewish Voices for Peace even staged a sit-in inside Trump Tower, right below the gold-plated escalator where Trump announced his first presidential campaign. I was there with them.

Well-heeled representatives of institutional Jewish life condemned those of us who protested the genocide. A good Jew was a Zionist, they claimed. We were self-hating tokens, traitors to our people. We had not learned the lessons of history.

History, though, is never settled. Bodies rot, but ideas remain. They resurface like land mines or buried gold.

Or like pages scribbled by a doomed man for his enemies' archive, in hopes of reaching the future.

In 2018, five years before Israel's war on Gaza, long-dead Bundists' words began to circulate on social media. In part, this was because of my article for The New York Review of Books. The Bund's ideas found an audience. They had a moral clarity and toughness that attracted young Jews seeking a heritage beyond the Israeli state. After 2023, this rediscovery reached a fever pitch. The Bund's anti-Zionism, which had so marginalized them during the long decades of Israeli communal dominance, would lead a new generation to embrace them. In Berlin, in New York, and even in their birthplace, Vilna, young people have raised the Bund's banner in support of Hereness, of democratic socialism, and of Palestinian liberation.

“I was right,” said the man as he went to the gallows. Sometimes, with the distance of years, he looks less like a fool.

Instead, he resembles a prophet.

"okay, they were right," one friend told me after he finished my manuscript. "Right and dead. What's the big lesson you want us to take away from that? After all, the Bund failed." “Failure is what happens to those overcome by their own faults and errors. To lose is to succumb to greater force.”

Here, I confess a secret. I didn't just write this book out of scholarly devotion. I had a hidden hope. By studying the Bund's story, I wanted to find out if there was some way that my people, the Jews of eastern Europe, could have saved themselves.

The more I wrote, the more I realized the wrongness of my premise. Though individuals escaped in various ways, there was no way out for eastern European Jews as a collective. Not as long as they were fighting alone. No small minority could have rescued themselves from the horrors of the twentieth century. Despite astounding feats of heroism, cunning, and creativity, they couldn't hold Hitler back, nor the intractable hatred of so many of their Christian neighbors. This Bund could not change the balance of force. Neither could any other Jewish group in eastern Europe, whether assimilationist or Zionist, capitalist or communist, Hasidic or Christian convert. Six million scattered humans can't defeat vast armies of organized killers.

The accusation of failure isn't one we should level against the Bund, or any other Jewish group of that place and time. It's for the Western world of which they were such a precarious part. It was the West, after all, that hypocritically paid lip service to freedom and humanity while hewing to the crude doctrines of might. The true failures were the democracies who played nice with Hitler in the early years, then shut their doors to Jewish refugees who fled from the hell they helped enable. The failures were the British and American diplomats who hobnobbed in Bermuda while the ghetto burned.

The Western world failed the Jews of Europe when they refused to provide the basic solidarity that the historical moment demanded—the solidarity upon which the Bund's humanism relied. This betrayal allowed Zionism to present itself as the only possible salvation. If the world came down to strong predators and weak victims, Zionism at least offered Jews the possibility of strength.

But Zionism is ethnonationalism. Like all ethnonationalisms, it required mass murder to clear the land to build its dream. On this haunted territory, oppressed became oppressors. Seventy-odd years after they stuck their state upon another people's ruin, the inheritors of Zion would liquidate their very own ghetto in Gaza beside the sea.

For ethnonationalism, this is what winning means.

So why did I write this book about the Bund—who lost, who were failed—and not about victorious killers?

Because I am sick of monsters—whether they belong to my group or any other. Because I know that we all have the capacity to be victims and tormenters, as well as bystanders, staring blankly at a burning wall. Because I want off the samsara wheel of atrocity, and the Bund's demand of solidarity across difference is the only way to get there.

Such solidarity is fragile and frequently betrayed, but it is all we have. It is the only thing that can save us.

There is no other earth, after all. We are trapped together on this one. It belongs to all of us, as inheritance and prison. It is Egypt and the promised land.

I return to do'ikayt—Hereness, a doctrine created by the godless Jews of the diaspora, written with mongrel words in Hebrew letters, then spread by itinerant troublemakers carrying forged passports, whose fundamental demand was the right to stay. What does Hereness mean in our age of blood-soaked mass displacement? An attempt, I believe, to find the self in exile, to square homeland with the freedom to leave.

Sam made another painting, titled Without Passport. It shows two men and a woman in a moonlit forest, dragged off by the tsarist police. They were most likely Jews who lacked the internal passport that would allow them to travel outside the Pale of Settlement. But they had tried anyway. Was this a betrayal of Hereness? Or was the Here within them, in their act of illicit movement? Did their defiance taste like home?

I like to think that, later that night, Sam and his comrades sawed through the bars of the trio's jail cell window. They would have shimmied out, the couple perhaps pausing for a kiss amidst the frigid stillness of the forest, then gone on, past a border blurred by snowfall, going wherever they wanted to go.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

like all books, Here Where We Live is Our Country was a collective endeavor. I am indebted to too many people to list. I apologize for my inevitable elisions.

Thank you to my editor, Chris Jackson, a legend in his field, who stood by me as this book grew into something far bigger than I had imagined, and to the wonderful Greg Mollica and Hiab Debessai. Thank you to my valiant agent, Alice Whitwham, and to the wise, incisive editorial counsel of Miriam Elder. I am grateful to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, for giving me the room and stipend I needed to finish this project. Thank you to the New America Foundation and the Puffin Foundation for their support.

This book involved research in eight languages on four continents. Thank you to translators and researchers Ethan Fraenkel, Sophie Hurwitz, Egina Manachova, and Lesia Prokopenko. Thank you to Lukas Hermsmeier and Arikia Millikan for helping me track down an obscure volume of socialist history in Berlin, and to Zach Smerin for filling me in on the postwar Polish Bund. Thank you to Sasha Slansky for saving me with the endnotes.

My favorite editor, Matt Seaton, commissioned my first article on the Bund for The New York Review of Books. He didn't know he was changing my life.

Archives are how the past speaks to the present, and so I must thank all the archivists I relied on. Thank you to Lyudmila Sholokhova, queen of New York Public Library's Dorot Collection, and to Leo Greenbaum, boss of yivo's Bund archives. Thank you to the keepers of the Melbourne Bund archives and to those of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, to the overlords of the Tamiment Library, to the Yiddish Book Center, and to Hy Wolfe, who despite all odds continues to run the syko Yiddish bookstore in Queens. I must also thank the teachers at yivo who taught me Yiddish and thus opened the linguistic doorway to the Bund's world.

I would never have written this book if not for the descendants of Bundists who shared their stories. Thank you to Fay Rosenfeld, Sheva Zucker, Mark and Henry Erlich, Victor Gilinsky, Brian Gocial, and Mimi Erlich (honor to her memory). Bundist scholar Jack Jacobs was profoundly generous with his knowledge. Thank you to Marvin Zuckerman for translating Bernard Goldstien's story into English and for singing me radical anthems in California parking lots. Above all, I thank my queen Irena Klepfisz. I'm sorry for leaving all those curse words in.

Thank you to Madeleine Atkins Cohen, whose translation of Leivik Hodes would provide a moral touchstone for the book.

Thank you to all of those who were with me during my travels: beautiful Zuzana Hertzberg, Gabi von Seltmann, Paula Sawicka, Anna Grechishkina (a heroic Ukrainian soldier who held my hand at Babi Yar), and to the Yiddish singers of Lviv. I would also like to thank Omar Hamilton and Yasmin El-Rifae, who invited me to speak about the Bund in Ramallah at the Palestine Festival of Literature, and who are the embodiments of the sort of solidarity that I hope to champion in this book.

I am indebted to Najla Said for her memories of Alexander Erlich.

This book was shaped by long, whisky-fueled conversations. Thank you to Mike Dawson, Rozina Ali, May Jeong, Natasha Lennard, Asad Dandia, Nermeen Shaikh, Murtaza Hussain, Azmat Khan, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Morgan Bassichis, Raghu Karnad, Eleanor Saitta, Seth Anziska, Mark Mazower, Mohammed El-Kurd, Ibtisam Azem, Marisa Mazria-Katz, Sinan Antoon, Nikos Boulos, Hazem Jamjoum, Simone Zimmerman, Sarah Leonard, Max Fractal, Budour Hassan, Katia Zagoritou, Mahdi Sabbagh, Tareq Baconi, Sara Yasin, Camille Sojit-Pejcha, Caroline Caldwell, Jason Stanley, V, and my dear Naomi Klein. To everyone who talked with me till dawn about the horrors of the last century while trying to fight against the horrors of our present one, thank you. Thank you to Fred, my love.

To my great-aunt Ida, for preserving Sam's legacy.

To my father, who told me to question authority and be interesting.

To my mother, who taught me to make art. You are this book's co-creator and animating spirit. There is no work without you.

To the people of Palestine.