The Rise and Fall of the Bund in Poland. 1944-1949

The aim of the monograph is to shed light on the little-known and often overlooked activities of the Bund in post-war reality, in which the pre-war party leaders at all levels of its organisational structures were missing, as well as the interest in the party’s programme among the surviving Jewish proletariat, which had helped shape it before the war. Contrary to Marek Edelman’s statements – repeated many times in his numerous speeches – that the Bund almost ceased to exist and meant nothing after World War II, that it was exclusively a social movement born out of nostalgia for the past,⁸ I will show the activity of the Bund as a political party – decimated, but still alive, which, in the new reality, tried to modify its political programme and make its presence felt on the so-called ‘Jewish Street’, i.e. within the Presidium of the CKŻP, and in Jewish committees as well as on the broader Polish political scene. I will show the evolution of the party’s programme, which occurred as a result of the tragic consequences of the war, and present a new interpretation of the three main ideological pillars of the Bund, on which it was founded from the beginning of its existence, and their significance for Bundists in the post-war era:

• doykeyt (hereness);
• mishpokhedikeyt (familiariness);
• yidishkeyt (Jewishness, whatever is related to the Yiddish language and ­culture).

Over the past half-century, a number of monographs and articles have been published on various aspects of Jewish community life in Poland between 1944 and 1949.⁹ Only a few contain information about the Bund, and most address only selected issues, such as Natalia Aleksiun’s book,¹⁰ which describes the relations between the representatives of various Zionist factions, Bundists and communists, shown mainly by the Presidium of the CKŻP. Similarly, August Grabski also explores, in his books, the Jewish communist milieu within the CKŻP. He examines the attitude toward the Bund, among other things, and evaluates the process of the Bund’s self-dissolution from the perspective of a Jewish communists.¹¹ Many works concerning this period contain only select pieces of information about the Bund. An example of this is the album published in 2012 by the Katowice branch of the Institute of National Remembrance, which is a follow-up to the exhibition of the same title. It presents the life of the Jewish community in Upper Silesia until 1949, including the political activities of the various Jewish political parties, mainly the Zionists.¹² The existence of the Bund is mentioned in three sentences, one of which downplays the importance of the party (stating that the Bund did not enjoy support in the Silesian Province).¹³ Among the rich iconographic material, there were also no photographs or documents regarding the activities of the Bund’s Provincial Committee in Katowice. This is different in the case of the Polish-English album by Anna Grużlewska, which illustrates the life of the Jewish community in the post-war Dzierżoniów County. Thanks to the photographs and their captions, we can learn not only facts about the activities of the Bund and Tsukunft but also the names of the key activists of Bund organisations in Lower Silesia.¹⁴

Until the late 1990s, few researchers focused on the history of the Bund in post-war Poland. The issue was first raised in a collective work published on the occasion of the party’s 100th anniversary¹⁵ (The Polish version was edited by Jürgen Hensel and Feliks Tych, the English version by Jack Jacobs).¹⁶ The Polish volume includes articles by David Engel, Bożena Szaynok and Natalia Aleksiun, and covers selected aspects of the Bund’s activities between 1944 and 1949. The main issues addressed are the party’s political programme and its relationships with other political groups on the ‘Jewish Street’. They do, however, omit the Bund’s social, cultural, and material activities, as well as the party’s post-war operations, the structure of its committees and affiliated organisations.¹⁷ The earlier period of the Bund’s history was presented in more detail. The research was filled with information, which was incredibly useful especially for historians and political scientists from Poland and abroad. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the history and historiography of Jewish socialists. Most of the works focus on the period before 1939.¹⁸ The history of the Bund, from its founding until 1944, has also been documented by the Bundists themselves.¹⁹

Only parts of Daniel Blatman²⁰ and David Slucki’s books have been devoted to the history of the Bund in post-war Poland.²¹ These studies deal with the narrowly presented history of the party leadership, focusing on issues related to the political programme and the contacts between the Bund’s representatives in Poland and Bundist organisations abroad. However, these studies lack a characterisation of the entire political environment. Furthermore, the image of the Bund in Poland presented in both publications is that of the Bund operating outside of Poland. It perceived the ‘Polish’ Bund as a defeated organisation unable to adapt to the new reality and some of its activists who joined the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) and later to the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), as traitors to the party’s ideals.

In both studies, the authors relied primarily on documents from the ‘Western’ Bund.²² In the case of Daniel Blatman, also those in the Archives of Modern Records (AAN) in Warsaw. The publications did not previously use unknown documents concerning the party’s activities, which are held in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute and in the Institute of National Remembrance. Also, not all Bund press titles and its affiliated organisations were used in the previously mentioned studies. David Slucki did not use a single document or press title in Polish in his work due to his lack of knowledge of the language. He considered the main goal of his work to be the description of Bund organisations after the war, who were scattered all over the world.²³

When I began working on my thesis, I felt obliged to show the entire political environment of the Bund in post-war Poland in order to portray the final stage of the Jewish socialist movement in Poland – which is also one of the last chapters in the history of Jews in our lands. To this end, in addition to reading newspapers, literature and conducting archival research, I made use of the accounts of several of the last participants in the political events of 1944–1949, who lived and were active within the Jewish community.

One of the problems faced in this research was the attempt to reconstruct the least known final period of the Bund’s activity. To achieve this involves analysing the party’s activities, presenting its scope and structure, membership, programme and its implementation, and evaluating its achievements, significance and position within the Jewish community, from its revival in 1944 (since the founding of the party’s Lublin Committee) until the Bund’s self-dissolution in January 1949. This is a portrayal of the Bund seen from within the Jewish community, mainly including the party members themselves. Presenting an assessment of the Bund’s environment by Polish political groups requires extensive press and archival research and a different approach to the question, which is not the subject of my research and would not change the image of the Bund’s activities after 1945.

By revealing the ‘final chapter’ of the history of Jewish socialists in Poland, I intend to show, above all, how the party’s ideology evolved among the Bundists, how the values that were fundamental to the movement before the war were re-evaluated, for example regarding national and cultural autonomy, and how the party, which dominated the ‘Jewish Street’, before the war, dealt with its actual marginalisation in the new post-war reality. Marginalisation was caused by the decimation of the Jewish community during the Holocaust and, at the same time, the increased importance of Zionist ideology and national sentiment in the context of rebuilding their own Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The traditional, pre-war Bund’s programme had to face a new approach to the foundations of its ideology. More and more Jews in Poland and abroad thought that if they were dying as a nation, they could live as a nation. For this, it is necessary to create their own Jewish state, where Jews would feel at home and not as strangers scattered across the diaspora. On the other hand, Bund activists recognised that the Polish government was drifting towards the Soviet model and moving away from democratic principles. This was the reason for the different decisions of Bund members, who either accepted the monopolistic position of the PZPR or remained loyal to tradition and the social democratic model. After the self-dissolution of the party, they could choose to emigrate or decide to suspend their political activity.

In my book, I not only analyse the political programme and describe the political contacts within the Jewish community in post-war Poland but also focus on the relationship with the Bundist environment abroad. It seems important to demonstrate the shift in the attitude of Bundists’ towards emigration, as well as towards the creation of a unified Bundist organisation, bringing together organisations scattered all over the world through the establishment of the Coordinating Committee of Bundist and Affiliated Jewish Socialist Organizations in Various Countries. Before the war, this was impossible due to the pursuit of national and cultural autonomy in their country of residence.