Glance at a moment in history

RENE GOLDMAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

As I browsed recently through the papers of my late aunt Sophie Schwartz-Micnik, a leader of the Jewish underground resistance movement in Paris and Lyon during the war, I came across a copy of the Polish newspaper Republika, published in Lodz, the great industrial centre known as "the Manchester of Poland." Imagine my surprise upon seeing that it was issued on July 8, 1934, exactly 70 years ago!

The front page of the newspaper is entirely devoted to developments in Germany. Only a week before, Hitler had staged a second coup: this time against the ultra-radicals of his National Socialist party, the Storm Troopers (SA), who were butchered during the "Night of Long Knives" June 30. Hitler found the price of murdering so many of his minions well worth paying, since it secured him the two pillars he needed to prop up his dictatorship: the allegiance of the German army, whose aristocratic officers loathed the SA thugs, and the collaboration of Germany's big corporations, including Krupp, IG Farben, etc. Republika, however, curiously interpreted these dramatic developments as a break-up of the Hitler-Goering-Goebbels triumvirate, with Goering succesfully manoeuvring Hitler in having all of Goering's rivals destroyed: not only SA leaders, but some prominent Catholic politicians and also Gen. Schleicher, close collaborator of old marshal von Hindenburg, the outgoing president, who foolishly let Hitler assume the chancellorship of the Reich.

Another article is devoted to the pastoral letter of protest against the perverseness of the Nazi regime and its persecution of the Catholic Church, delivered by Cardinal Faulhaber, archbishop of Munich, at the conference of Bavarian bishops in Fulda the month before. Further on, we find a small column, which reports that the "revolutionary committee" of the Nazi party issued an appeal to Hitler, complaining that the murdered chieftains of the SA were not the only ones guilty of sexual depravity; and threatening to publish the list of the dignitaries of the regime who engage in homosexual activity and "other unnatural sexual practices." There is also a small item on the protest raised by the leaders of the Jewish community of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) against the ban decreed by its senate against the kosher slaughtering of animals and against other indignities suffered by the Jews of the city. The president of the senate is reported as promising to examine the complaints and solve the problems wherever possible.... We know what happened four years later: when the synagogues of Germany were devastated on Kristallnacht, the Jews of Danzig were asked in a "civil" manner to dismantle their two-spired great synagogue, which was such a striking landmark of that beautiful city.

Turning to domestic developments in Poland, Republika features on page 3 an article announcing the arrival from Warsaw and Krakow of the first transport of "political subversives" at the "isolation camp" newly opened at Bereza Kartuska, in the marshes of eastern Poland (present-day Bielarus). This was, along with Dachau, one of the first camps for the politically "undesirable" established in Europe, outside the Soviet Union. The "sanacja" (sanitation) regime of Marshal Pilsudski consigned to Bereza Kartuska persons who were seen as a threat to the national security of Poland, notably communists, Ukrainian, Bielarussian and Lithuanian nationalists. The article lists by name the seven most important prisoners. One of them is, curiously enough, Boleslaw Piasecki, a Catholic activist, whose organization Pax was to collaborate with Poland's post-war communist regime in its attacks on the leaders of the Catholic church. Of greater interest to us, however, is Aron Skrobek, the young Jewish communist secretary of the textile workers union in Warsaw. After more than a year of the labor camp's punishing regime, Skrobek's family obtained for him a leave on health grounds. Skrobek then fled with his wife and son to Paris, where he published a grim memoir on conditions at Bereza Kartuska, as well as a series of articles about that camp in the Yiddish communist daily Di Naie Presse, of which he became an editor under the pseudonym David Kutner. He and his wife, Sarah, became close friends with Sophie Schwartz and her husband, Leizer Micnik, who was a fellow trade-unionist and collaborated with him at the Naei Presse. At the outbreak of the war in 1939, Skrobek, like so many other Jewish immigrants, volunteered to fight in the defence of France. In 1940, he became, along with Schwartz, one of the leaders of the Jewish underground resistance organization Solidarité in Paris. Like Micnik, he was arrested by the French police, handed over to the Germans, and perished during the Shoah.

Rene Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

^TOP