Immediately after the Bund was driven underground, we went back to one of the old tried and true battle methods of all underground movements—we made use of illegal presses to publish newspapers and political pamphlets. By then I was working in the Secretariat of the Warsaw Committee of the Bund, along with Emanuel Nowogrodski and Sholem Hertz.1 It fell to me to work primarily on organizing the printing of our illegal literature. We printed the first illegal proclamation at Dovid Hendler’s at Długa 26. After a while I had to find a different printer, because it is never a good idea to stay too long in one place when printing illegal literature.
We had a comrade, a printer, who was imprisoned for his Bundist work back in Czarist times. His name was Shmuel Blumental. He later perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. I approached him and asked him to find us a place to print an illegal proclamation. “No problem,” he said. “I will print the proclamation in my father’s print shop.” I was happy to hear his father owned a print shop. It would now be easier to arrange the printing of our illegal literature, especially since his younger brother, Motl (now in America), was also one of our comrades. In Blumental’s print shop (on Solna Street) we printed a large number of proclamations.
But, of course, after a while we had to move from there as well.
We moved to a small press on Nowolipki 7, belonging to a certain Greenberg. He possessed only a small manual pedal machine. We couldn’t get much done that way. From there we moved to a brother of his who had a bigger press on Nowolipie 17. But we had a lot of trouble with him. He had no great desire to do illegal printing, and we had to expend a lot of effort getting him to agree to do it. But we did have one effective means: to any printer who did the illegal work for us, we would also give our legal work, for example, placards about meetings, material for the trade unions, etc. I often persuaded this Greenberg from Nowolipie 17 by arguing that if he didn’t do the illegal work for us, we wouldn’t give him the legal work. But then, eventually, we had to leave his print shop too.
One time, early in the fall of 1920, we needed to do a really large printing of illegal literature. The Central Committee of the Bund had decided to put out an illegal proclamation against the war between the Poles and the Soviets, and about the critical condition of the country and the necessity for an immediate peace, and to spread it all over the country with the help of couriers, as the proclamations could not be mailed or sent by rail. The proclamation had to be printed in tens of thousands of copies. A small press would not do for such a job; it would take too long, several weeks. But we had no way of getting to the bigger presses.
The well-known Warsaw Yiddish daily, Der Moment, had just purchased a new big rotary press that could print tens of thousands of copies in just a few hours. We decided to print the proclamation on Moment’s press.
Among the typesetters of Moment were the following Bundists: Lozer Klog, Moyshe Szklar, and Pesakh Zuckerman, all three of whom met a heroic death in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. With these Bundist typesetters, and a few others, we carried out the following scheme: The night before, when all the other typesetters had left, our comrades would quietly typeset the text of the proclamation, prepare the printing plates, and then hide them in a safe place.
The next day, late at night, when all the typesetters had finished making things ready for printing the following day’s copy of Moment and had left, we would enter the press.
We were a group of four: Comrade Artur Zygielbojm,2 who had just arrived in Warsaw and was then the secretary of the Metal Workers Union; Comrade Lerner, a metal worker, and an old Bundist who, back in Czarist times, had served time in prison for his Bundist activities together with Viktor Alter; Comrade Abram (I no longer remember his family name), a metal worker active in the administration of the trade unions; and I. We put Abram outside to stand guard.
We quietly took the printing plates that were prepared for us from their hiding place, and went into the press. We approached the expediter—he was also the manager of the press—and told him why we were there. He raised an outcry. We told him to be quiet. To be safe, we led him into his office, locking him in and scaring him with our revolvers to make him understand we were serious. He asked us if we would just let him print the newspaper, because he must deliver it punctually to the train station, but we were afraid to risk it—what if he didn’t let us print our proclamation?—so we kept him locked up.
The operator of the rotary press was also a Bundist—Kalmen was his name. He went right to work. In the course of a few hours, our proclamation was printed.
While the press was fully underway, Comrade Lozer Klog came in. He pretended not to know what was going on. He was the city editor of Moment, and he always arrived at this time to lay out the pages of the newspaper. So that no suspicion should fall on him, we shoved him into the office, locking him in with the expediter.
When the copies of the proclamation were finished, we packaged them into several large bundles, leaving without any difficulty. We, of course, used Moment’s paper stock. To Moment’s credit, they hushed this incident up, and there were no untoward consequences.
Until our legal party press was again being published, more or less regularly, we had to resort to illegal presses for a long time. For proclamations that were published in only a few hundred copies (especially for the Yugnt-Bund—Youth Bund) we often simply used the hectograph.
1.Sholem J. Hertz (1893–1992), journalist and leading historian of the Bund. Since 1929, a member of the Central Committee of the Polish Bund. In 1939, fled to America. From 1941–1948, a member of the Bund’s American representatives in Poland. Since 1941, affiliated with several Bundist and non-Bundist publications. Since 1947, a member of the Bund’s World Coordination Committee, and from May 1977 to October 1985, its Secretary. Published several books, including Di Yidishe Sotsyalistishe Bavegung in Amerike, Di Geshikhte Fun Bund in Lodz, Di Geshikhte Fun a Yugnt, Doyres Bundistn, Der Bund in Bilder, and Di Yidn in Ukrayine. Edited Di Geshikhte Fun Bund.—MZ
2.Artur (Shmuel) Zygielbojm (1895–1943). Bundist leader, labor organizer, and member of Bund’s Central Committee. Joined Warsaw Judenrat in 1940, but refused to carry out Nazi demands, making a speech to Warsaw’s Jews exhorting them to refuse to go into the ghetto. Escaped across occupied Europe to England where he served as the Bund’s representative to the Polish government in exile. Tried desperately but unsuccessfully to arouse Allies and others to halt the annihilation of the remnant of Poland’s 3.3 million Jews. Failing that, he wrote a famous last appeal and, May 12, 1943, committed suicide, hoping thus to draw attention to their plight.—MZ