CHAPTER 3

Praga

Praga was the largest Warsaw suburb. Although it was separated from Warsaw by only the Vistula—with the Kierbedzia Bridge connecting them—it was an entirely different world.

Life in Praga was provincial, less fast-paced. The streets were broader, interrupted here and there with large empty fields, overgrown with grass. There were many narrow streets with little wooden houses. Here and there around the edges of Praga were small peasant yards in which chickens paraded and hogs fed. There were also built-up city streets, with tall brick buildings, as in Warsaw proper. Praga was a mixture of big city, small town, and village.

Praga was poor; no wealthy people lived there. It was also an important industrial center, with a large working class population and a great many large factories.

Praga contained two important economic activities: transport and slaughter. It had two large train stations, where hundreds of porters and teamsters (drivers of horse-drawn wagons) worked, and among them, many Jews.

During the First World War, the German occupiers established the Central Administration of Provisions in Praga for all of Warsaw and its surrounding area. (A better title for this Administration would have been: Administration for Starving the Population.) Several hundred workers labored at this Administration of Provisions facility, a sizeable number of them Jews. This administrative office continued to exist for many years, even in post-World War I, independent Poland.

The central slaughterhouse was also situated in Praga. The Czarist Russians had begun building this slaughterhouse before the war; the Germans finished it during the occupation. It was a very modern installation. All the previous slaughterhouses (on Powązki, Ochota, Sielce, and Wola) were demolished, and the entire meat-mart was now concentrated around this newly completed Praga slaughterhouse.

The markets for cattle and hogs were situated around the slaughterhouse. Special train tracks connected these markets with the Praga train station. Over a thousand people worked in and around the slaughterhouse, among them around 600–700 Jewish meat workers. These were a separate caste. Entire families had been doing this work for generations.

When I took over the Bundist work in Praga, there was already quite a large group of Bundists there. They had their club on Brzeska 17, with a library and a reading room. Among the active Bundists there, these stood out: Mendl Goldman, nicknamed “Mendl Prager”—active since Czarist times—by trade a quilter; Dovid Lichtenstein, also active before the war (for a time a Board member of the “Literary Society”), by trade a tanner; his wife, Zlatke, who had a stand selling fancy goods in the Praga marketplace—she was called “Zlatke the Cossack”—a sobriquet well deserved, as she displayed enormous energy and initiative, very useful to the Bund later, when she became a passionate Bund activist.

Also active in the Praga Bund were: Tsvi Etkes (from a rich merchant family, now living in Israel); Henyek Szwalbe, a student who later became a doctor; Y. Szafran, a student (later left for Belgium, studying there to become an engineer, very active in the Bundist organization in Brussels, now an active Bundist in Chicago,); Comrade Sarah (who later became the wife of Y. Szafran (she died in Chicago in 1954); the two Laska sisters, who worked in the Bund library (one of them is now the wife of Comrade H. Gestel in Buenos Aires); Shmuel Richter, worked for a business firm, today in Australia; Comrade Blumshteyn, a librarian (now in Paris); and many others.

Figure 13. The Presidium of the Gala Assembly at Opening of the Bund Reading Room, 1930. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Figure 14. Recruitng poster for the Youth-Bund Tsukunft, 1930. The Yiddish reads: “Into the ‘Tsukunft.’” From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

There was also a quite lively Tsukunft group in Praga then. This was the Bundist youth organization (the full name for the Tsukunft group—was Yugnt-Bund Tsukunft in Poyln: Youth-Bund Future in Poland). Among the most active young people in the Tsukunft group, one stood out: a student, a youngster of about 15–16 years of age, who distinguished himself with his eloquent rhetorical temperament. This youth was Comrade Y. Falk (today in Montreal, Canada). At that time he was already speaking at general meetings. Also active in the Tsukunft group were the aforementioned H. Y. Szafran and his wife-to-be.

After we had laid the foundation for our political and party work in Praga, I turned my attention to my second function, organizing the unions. In this arena there was nothing solid to lean on. No prior union organizations had existed in Praga. As a first step, we created a special union Secretariat, consisting of Comrades Shmuel Richter, Kalman Richter, Mendl Prager, and several others.

Conflicts arose almost immediately with the Warsaw unions. The Warsaw unions, especially the large Garment Workers Union, demanded that in Praga there should be an office only for collecting dues, and that all other union activities should be conducted by the union in Warsaw. The Praga comrades, on the other hand, demanded autonomy so that they might conduct the work of the union independently and control the factories located in Praga. In the end, the autonomists won. The Warsaw unions consented to allow the Praga unions to exist as affiliates that would not merely collect dues, but also deal with union issues, such as local strikes, putting forward specific demands to Praga factory owners, etc. In broader actions, however, such as trade-wide strikes or general demands of all factory owners, the Praga affiliated unions would have to submit to the Warsaw office. In other words, every decision made in Warsaw regarding a general action would also have to apply to Praga.

After a short time, such affiliated unions were formed in Praga of garment workers, leather workers, bakers, and later also of transport workers (porters and teamsters). In the course of forming these local unions, I encountered various problems and difficulties.

The first problem came in organizing the Food Workers Union. The problem centered around the Jewish workers who worked in the Central Provisions Administration Office, by then, under the governance of the Warsaw City Council. There were about 200 Jewish workers, mostly former tailors, shoemakers, tanners, carpenters, and others, who couldn’t find work in their trade during the war, and so took on this unskilled labor (portering and horse-drawn wagon driving) in order to earn a living.

When we started to organize the local union we encountered workers who were knowledgeable, aware, and who joined the union immediately, even becoming active in it. Others, however, didn’t want to hear about a union. It was difficult to even find a common language with them. Their obstinacy soon softened, however, an indirect result of the antisemitic politics of the Warsaw City Council.

When the City Council officially took over the Central Administration of Provisions Office, it immediately began to dismiss the Jewish workers. This was done, not openly, but with the excuse that the Provisions Office was gradually being liquidated. But every insider knew what the truth was. When this became clear to everyone, all the Jewish workers joined the union, which then immediately began fighting against the dismissal of only Jewish workers.

Figure 15. Executive Committee of the Bundist Garment Workers Union, Warsaw, 1917. Seated, far right, Benyomin Taytlboym, Yiddish novelist (pen name: Demblin). Seated second from right, translator’s father, Rubin Zuckerman.

An important part of this fight was winning the support of the Polish workers. In this we received real help from several activists, from both the PPS (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna—Polish Socialist Party) and the SDKPiL—by then already Communist—who were active among the workers of the Provisions Office.¹

Most prominent in this effort was Stanisław Leszczyński. He was the representative of the workers of the Provisions Office to the City Council. Many others supported us in this work: Jan Rutkiewicz, a worker at the Provisions Office, later a representative of the Warsaw Fund for the Sick. My acquaintance with him stretched all the way back to Czarist times when, in 1911–1912, we were both imprisoned in the jail on Daniłowiczowska Street. Another was Cechnowski, the leader of the Praga division of the earlier SDKPiL, with responsibility for their party’s work among the workers in the Provisions Office. I also knew him from an earlier time. When the First World War broke out and soup kitchens for the workers were being organized in Warsaw, I met him at the joint Labor Committee that the Polish Socialists and the Bund then created for the purpose of distributing material help among the workers and coordinating agitation against the war.

All of this work helped to weaken the tempo of eliminating Jewish workers. Reductions could not be carried out without coming to some mutual understanding with the union and the workers. When the officers of the Provisions Office posted a list to reduce the labor force, and the union representatives saw that it consisted almost entirely of Jews, they protested and demanded that the list be changed. Having the moral support of the representatives of the Poles, we were better able to wage an open, successful battle against the reduction in force of the Jewish workers.

At the same time, we started organizing local unions for the garment workers, leather workers, bakers, as well as a union for unskilled workers. For every trade a special commission was formed, and then a Central Secretariat was created, covering the entire organizational effort for all the various local unions.

Things got lively in the Praga Bund. Every evening the Bund club—it was also the center of our organizing effort—was full of people. Meetings of the trade-union commissions, meetings of the Secretariat, conferences with the workers of individual factories, and conferences of delegates from several different factories were constantly going on. Party and cultural work also took place at the club. People came to exchange books in the library. The reading room was full. There were often readings, lectures, and discussion evenings. It was like an anthill, seething with life.

We also expanded our Bund work to the outskirts of the great Praga suburb. Connections were made with Grochów, Pelcowizna, and Szumolewizna. In Szumolewizna we organized the workers in the pasharnyes (farms where chickens were raised and sent to Warsaw).

The largest of these pasharnyes belonged to a certain Jew named Gotthelf, who supplied half of Warsaw with his chickens. Gotthelf employed about 40 workers, Jews, and Poles alike. The Poles also belonged to our union. The workers were divided according to various “specialties”: those who fed the chickens, the guards, and the clean-up men, and the teamsters who distributed the chickens to the wholesalers in Warsaw. It did not take long for a strike to develop at Gotthelf’s place. When Gotthelf refused to yield to the demands for a wage hike and better working conditions, we turned to the transport workers in Janusza’s yard, a famous marketplace at the ends of Krochmalna and Gnojna, the center of the chicken market and the chicken slaughterhouse. We asked them to prevent the unloading of the chickens by the strikebreakers. The transport workers of Janusza’s yard did just that and helped us win the strike.

Note

1.SDKPiL: Socialdemokracja Krolestwa Polskiego i Litwy (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania), a Marxist political party founded in 1893. In 1918 it merged with the PPS-Left to form the Polish Communist Workers Party. Its most famous member: Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919).—MZ