CHAPTER 66

The FRACs Try to Take Over the Newspaper Deliverers Union

The FRACs tried to capture the Newspaper Deliverers Union, a hard fight for us.

The Newspaper Deliverers Union numbered several hundred members. Its offices were on Nalewki 17. The Secretary was Pesakh Albert (now in Australia), a former Fareynikter (member of the Uniteds; see chapter 1, footnote 7), who, together with a group of leaders and activists from that party (S. Zusman, Isser Goldberg, S. Gilinsky,¹ and others) went over to the Bund in 1920. He was a calm, relaxed person, but a very effective activist.

A certain Mannes Marmurek was on the Executive Board of the union. A wounded World War I veteran, an invalid, he worked for a newspaper on Pańska Street. When the FRACs were at their peak, he joined up with them and took with him a small group of newspaper delivery workers. He then started up a new, smaller union under the FRACs, becoming the only one in charge. Like the other FRACs, he began to employ their well-known tactics of terror to force the other newspaper deliverers into his union. With the help of FRACist thugs, he began to terrorize the administrators of the newspapers to force them to favor his union members (i.e., give them more newspapers to deliver; give them the newspapers earlier than the others for distribution). The civil authorities favored his people when giving out the required newsstand concessions. He placed his newspaper vendors next to the activists of the old union or next to those who opposed his rule. In addition, he threatened to shoot and kill Pesakh Albert.

He also began to terrorize and beat up those who delivered the newspapers by special delivery to subscribers. For the most part, the people making these deliveries had other full-time jobs that didn’t make them enough money, so to make a little extra cash, in the early hours of the day before they went to work, they delivered newspapers. They would get up around five in the morning, in summer and winter, and from around six to eight in the morning, deliver the newspapers. The union even accepted them as members, but Marmurek decided to chase them off. With his band of thugs he terrorized them, falling upon and beating them. He got the Secretary of the FRAC Transport Workers Union in Praga, Kelbasa, to help with this terrorizing. Kelbasa lent him one of his gangs of thugs for this work.

With all these workers falling into the hands of the FRAC syndicate, it got to the point that our union was in danger of disintegrating. The members of our Newspaper Delivery/Vendor Union were mostly older people, many among them women. They couldn’t defend themselves against Marmurek and his thugs. When things got really bad, the union finally turned to our Militia for help. The Bund saw that the union was confronted by a real and immediate threat to its existence and was too weak to defend itself against the FRAC thugs. We decided to protect the union.

Figure 115. Samples of the Bundist national press in Poland, including daily newspapers and periodicals. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

Characteristic of Marmurek’s heartlessness is the following instance. In the Metal Workers Union there was a member by the name of Lerner. He had been an active Bundist since Czarist times. He was now quite old, and also rather sickly. He no longer had the strength to work with metal, so we were able to get him a spot as a newspaper vendor so he’d have enough to live on. Manes Marmurek deliberately set himself to deprive him of this living. He would come to his newsstand, berate him, and threaten to take his concession away, which he could easily get the police to do.

Several times we approached Marmurek through our militiamen in the Pańska neighborhood, who knew him, to stop his terror tactics. We tried to get him to desist by talking calmly with him, but it didn’t help. On a certain morning, therefore, he found his newsstand totally wrecked.

It became clear to all that no one was afraid of him. His power among the newspaper deliverers and vendors began to diminish. It must be added, however, that this was also a result of Marmurek’s dark dealings. The treasury of his little union lay in his pocket, and it became known that he didn’t know the difference between his own money and the union’s. In addition to this, he founded a cooperative with his members, and people began to talk that there was also disarray in that treasury. Even his own followers began to distance themselves from him. As a result of all this, his little union soon fell apart. The attempt by the FRACs to take over another one of our unions was defeated.

Note

1.Shloyme Gilinsky (1888–1961): Educator and founder of secular Yiddish schools, author of textbooks in Yiddish; later, Director of the Medem Sanitarium; Bundist Warsaw city councilman.—MZ