The persecutions by the police, despite how hard they hit the movement, were put on the back burner when a serious, internal party crisis erupted.
After the congress of the Communist International in 1920 when the infamous “21 Conditions”1 arrived—whose purpose it was to split the Socialist parties, to declare all Socialist leaders as “traitors to the working class,” and to simply wipe out the Socialist movement—a pro-Communist group arose within the Polish Bund which called itself Kombundishe FRAKtsye (Kombund Faction), shortened to Kombund. This faction demanded that the Bund immediately accept all 21 Conditions. This would, of course, have meant submitting to the Comintern, splitting, getting rid of all the tried and true Bundist leaders, and, in short order, doing away with the Bund.
The leftist majority in the Bund was ready to accept 19 1/2 of the 21 points, but rejecting the remaining 1 1/2 points was enough to prevent the Bund from becoming a part of the Communist International. The centrist faction was willing to agree to 16 of the 21 points. After the Cracow convention, the rightist (Medem) faction no longer existed as a cohesive group. We didn’t want to complicate matters in the party by creating another faction, so we allied ourselves with the centrist line.
A sharp internal factional struggle began the likes of which had never before been seen in the history of the Bund. This was no longer a struggle between fraternal comrades of one party, but that of a party with its own internal enemy. Among the leaders of the Kombund faction were quite a number of important activists from the trade union movement: for example, Aba Flug from the Textile Union; Kalman Kamashnmakher, Isaiah Zambrovski, Yekhiel Nayman, and Yoysef Lifszytz (Yoysef Basoff) from the Leather Workers Union (the last three later returned to the Bund); Mendl Skrobek from the Paper Workers Union; and others.
In the midst of the heat of this factional battle, Yankl Levine and Moyshe Rafes, important activists in the Communist Party, came to Warsaw from the Russian Bund (both were later liquidated by Stalin). Actually they had come to help the Kombund faction, or to take over the Bund altogether, or to deepen, as far as possible, the split within the party.
I was well acquainted with Yankl Levine, a carpenter by trade. He was a Bundist professional. In 1912 the Bund’s Central Committee had sent him to Warsaw to do some organizational work, and that’s when I met him. Later we were both imprisoned in the Warsaw Arsenal, and in 1915 we were both evacuated to the interior of Russia. After some knocking about here and there for a while, we both traveled to Kiev, and there threw ourselves back into the work of the party. We used to meet at Bund conventions and at other kinds of party functions. Now, when he came to Warsaw, he was my guest and spent a day and a night at my place. We talked about the “the good old days,” asked each other about old friends, and so on. He was easy to talk to, and we talked at great length. He was a happy young man and a good conversationalist; he could sing well too. It was pleasant spending time with him.
When I asked him why he had come to Warsaw, he answered, “No particular reason—just so.” Since he was going to Vilnius to visit a friend, he said, he figured he’d at the same time stop by Warsaw and visit old friends.
I had also known Moyshe Rafes for some years. He had been in Warsaw for a short time, sent by the Bund’s Central Committee to conduct the elections for the delegates to the Bund’s eighth convention that was to take place in Vienna in 1914. Later I met him again in connection with work for the party in Kiev. He was also staying with me as a guest at my place. But I already knew the nature of his mission. He had already caucused with the Kombund activists, and had also attempted to discuss matters with other comrades. When he came to my place I asked him, in a not very friendly tone, why he had come. He answered that he had not come to visit me, but to visit Lucien. I left the house, leaving him there.
Yankl Levine left quickly to go back to Russia, but Rafes stayed in Warsaw for some time.
It wasn’t too long before I succeeded in discovering, by chance and at just the right moment, a key person in the Kombund faction. I was well acquainted with an old activist of the old PPS-Left, Stefan Królikowski.2 He was for many years a personal friend of mine. Before the war I knew his family and was a frequent guest in his home. He would always declare his love for the Jews. He could even talk a little Yiddish. When he was asked why he loved the Jews so much, he would answer, “It is because of a stone.” Why of all things a stone? During the pogrom of 1881 in Warsaw, when he was still a baby, his mother was carrying him, and a stone from a pogromist accidentally hit him and injured him slightly. He therefore thought of himself thereafter as a victim of pogromists.
I was imprisoned in the jail on Daniłowiczowska3 together with him and his brother Kazik (Kazimierz)—a gasworks worker. Later we were both exiled to Siberia. When I was badly beaten in Siberia by the Czarist police and put in a hospital that happened to be in the very village to which he had been exiled, he hung around me like a brother. Once while in Siberia, we were sent into the forest to chop wood. Suddenly a terrible blizzard started up, tearing at branches and uprooting trees. It was impossible to keep one’s footing. We tied ourselves together with a rope and barely made it back to the village. In a word, many shared, harsh experiences had created a strong bond between us. Later in Warsaw, when the PPS-Left became part of the Communist Party and he became a Communist activist, our friendship was nevertheless, not broken off, at least not in the beginning. He would drop by my house, and I at his. After a while he was selected as a delegate to the Polish parliament. Some years later he went to Soviet Russia and was liquidated.
One night during the difficult factionalist struggles with the Kombund, he visited me at my place. We were eating, drinking, talking. Our conversation shifted to the factional fight within our party. A heated discussion flared up between us. He assured me there would be a split in the Bund, and that a part of the Bund would leave the Bund and join them, the Communists. I, on the other hand, argued that no matter how sharp our internal differences, no Bundist would betray his party; there would be no split. In the heat of the discussion, Królikowski let slip that the Communist Party was financing the Kombund faction, and that an important Bund activist was receiving money from them. Hearing this, I began to draw him out, until he revealed that the Bund activist was Alexander in Lodz. Later, in the 1930s, Alexander came back to the Bund and became—and still is—in speech and in print—one of the sharpest opponents of communism. I had to promise Królikowski that I wouldn’t tell this to anyone. But this time I did not keep my word. I immediately went to the leading figures of our party, to Henryk Erlich, to Noyekh, the Chair of the party, and to Emanuel Nowogrodzki, the Secretary of the Central Committee, and told them this news.
Alexander was immediately summoned to appear before the Central Committee. Alexander, who was known for his personal honesty, openly admitted that he received money for the Kombund faction from the Communist Party. He was immediately expelled from the party. This news made a tremendous impression on the party membership and drew quite a number of comrades away from the Kombund faction who were, in principle, in agreement with it, but could not stomach such an open betrayal of the party.
Finally, it was decided to have the second convention of the Bund in Poland. In 1921 it took place in the free city of Danzig, which was economically a part of Poland but was politically autonomous, with its own small parliament, its own president, and its own police force. To get into Danzig you had to have a Polish passport. Even though the Polish police no longer had any power in Danzig, we nevertheless arranged the convention in Danzig illegally, underground. There were a lot of Polish police agents in Danzig, and on the return trip they could have had all of us arrested. The Bund convention took place in the Danzig Transport Workers Union Hall.
This particular convention was perhaps the most fateful in the history of the Bund, one in which the very existence of the Bund hung in the balance. The central question before the convention was “the 21 Conditions.”
All three factions were represented. The left faction, those in favor of 19 1/2 conditions, was in the majority. The Kombund had only six delegates. In addition to the 21 Conditions, the Comintern sent a special letter to the convention demanding that the party expel its “rightist leaders.” When the letter was read to the delegates, it was as if a storm had erupted. Expel Erlich, Alter, Noyekh, and Michalewicz from the party?—the pride and prized ornaments of the party?—such a thing could not be fathomed by even the most leftist among us—except, of course, for the few Kombund delegates, who were already by then in fact slavishly following the dictates of the Communist Party. When it came to a vote, the 21 Conditions were rejected in their entirety.
After the convention, the Kombund faction held a separate meeting at which they decided to leave the party. Not all present, however, were in agreement with this. Several of them did not want to countenance a split and did not leave the party—among them, for example, was Kalmen Kamashnmakher.
The Kombund faction then founded its own party, but after a brief period of independent existence, it merged and disappeared into the Communist Party of Poland. Thereupon the Communists immediately began total warfare against the Bund, a war to annihilate the Bund by any and all means. From that time on, the Bund found itself, out of necessity, at war with them. It had to defend itself against an enemy that recognized absolutely no morality at all and absolutely no decency.
It is worthwhile to tell here about a characteristic fact surrounding the Danzig convention. I was given the job of distributing the money for the train tickets to the delegates. Two delegates from the Kombund, Aba Flug and Yekhiel Nayman, declined to take the money with the excuse that they did not have a passport with which to make the trip. They did not come to the Danzig convention. After the convention they both became very important Communist leaders, although both of them left the Communist camp later. Yekhiel Nayman came back to the Bund, becoming a very prominent activist in the Paris Bund. In the early thirties, Aba Flug became one of the organizers of the rightist opposition within the Communist Party. For that he was shut out of the Communist Party and denounced as a traitor.
Aba Flug was an intelligent, earnest, and responsible labor leader. He was the recognized leader of the Textile Workers Union. But when he was shut out of the Communist Party for “rightist tendencies,” all his former comrades boycotted him and poisoned his life. Not long after, he died. The union to which he had devoted his whole life, refused to arrange his funeral. His wife then came to the Bund and begged to have the Bund arrange it. We did not refuse. We arranged a funeral for Aba Flug.
The new leaders of the Textile Workers Union, they who inherited the mantle of Aba Flug’s leadership, Abram Rosenfeld (Abram the Peasant) at their head, did not attend the funeral. They were seen observing the funeral at a distance. Ironically, Abram Rosenfeld’s end was even bitterer than his predecessor’s. When Hitler attacked Poland, Abram the Peasant fled to the Soviet Union, along with a large flood of refugees. There he saw what kind of a “paradise” his dreamt-of “proletarian fatherland” was. He fell into great doubt and depression. He began displaying signs of mental imbalance. He became pious, grew a beard, began to pray, and after a time went totally insane. He could be seen dragging himself through the streets begging. He died on the street of starvation and exhaustion. This is how the fatherland of the proletariat paid homage to the demise of a person who had served it loyally his entire life.
1.The “21 Conditions,” most of them stipulated by Lenin, had to be agreed to in their entirety by any Socialist parties wanting to join the Communist Third International (Comintern).—MZ
2.Stefan Królikowski (1881–1937), Polish Socialist activist in the PPS and PPS-Left and, later, the Polish Communist Party. Arrested by the NKVD in Moscow in 1937, charged and executed as a member of the Polish Military Organization.—MZ
3.An auxiliary unit of the Tenth Pavilion of the Citadel and Pawiak prison for political prisoners; destroyed in 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising.—MR