In the thirties, at the time of the unending antisemitic assaults on the Jews in Poland, a certain priest named Trzeciak, an ideologue of the Hitlerite, Polish antisemites, was especially virulent.
Father Trzeciak was one of the most well-known Catholic priests in Poland. A raging antisemite, after Hitler came to power, he adopted Hitlerite tactics to incite the mob against the Jews. When he preached in the churches on Sundays, he would so inflame the crowd that after each of his sermons there was the fear of a pogrom. Several times he came to preach in the church on Bródno, and the surrounding Jewish population was in fear that on some Sunday, one of his inflammatory sermons would end in a pogrom.
Bródno was a small suburb of the larger Warsaw suburb of Praga. Located in Bródno, but serving Warsaw, was a large Catholic cemetery. There was also a Jewish cemetery there belonging to the Warsaw Jewish Community Council in which the Council buried paupers without any family, or whose family could not afford to pay for a plot in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
The population of Bródno was for the most part Polish. But next to Bródno was a small suburb named Pelcowizna that was almost entirely Jewish. Between these two small suburbs was a piece of land called Annopol that had always been empty of people. There in Annopol, the city of Warsaw erected wooden barracks for homeless people—and after not too long a time, Annopol became its own little town, a town of “official” paupers, with its own character and its own kind of local patriotism.
The barracks were erected by the municipal Department for Social Welfare for homeless families, for people that had been evicted from their apartments and who couldn’t afford to rent another. Also, the unemployed lived there, or unemployed workers who were employed by the city to perform public works, or unskilled workers—in short, the poverty-stricken population of Warsaw. The barracks themselves were long, large wooden boxes, divided into small rooms. In every little room lived a family. Around the barracks, in the small alleyways, were many small children in rags and tatters. Hunger reigned. Every day in the winter, the city would send hot kettles of soup to warm the hungry barrack residents. About eighty percent of the barrack residents were Poles; the rest, Jews.
The Bund had a party group there. At first we had wanted our comrades of the barracks to join the Bund group in neighboring Pelcowizna, but here their local patriotism came into play: “We are our own town, Annopol,” the comrades argued, “and it is very important to us Jews of the Annapol barracks to have our own Bund group.” The representative from the Bund to this group was Abrasza Blum, the later hero of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Also our Tsukunft had a circle there, and their representative from the Bund was Yankele Mendelson, one of the most interesting folk types of our Warsaw youth movement. The PPS also had a group in the barracks with its own meeting place. They gave our Bund group the use of it.
On Sundays the Annopol Poles would go to the Bródno church, where the priest Father Trzeciak sometimes preached. One time our Annopol comrades and our Peltcowizna comrades came to us with the alarming news that on a certain Sunday, the priest Trzeciak would be coming once again to the Bródno church to preach, and that the mob, which had already been on previous occasions sufficiently inflamed by him, was preparing, after his sermon, to go into the street and beat up Jews.
The Presidium of the Warsaw Bund’s Central Committee held a session at which it was decided to organize a resistance. I went off to the PPS locals in Praga and in Bródno and requested that their local Militia groups there help us raise a resistance to the hooligans preparing to assault Jews. They agreed. I also went over to the slaughterhouse and organized a group of Polish workers there who would, whenever I would ask, come and help us fight off the assaults on the Jews by antisemitic hooligans. The largest proportion of the resistance fighters, however, were our own comrades: Bundists from the Annopol barracks and from Pelcowizna (with Chaim Zucker, the meatworker, at their head) and members of our party militia.
That Sunday at eight o’clock in the morning, I was with the unit of militiamen in the offices of the PPS in Bródno, which had been set aside especially for us. In about half an hour we were all assembled. We wanted to be there early, because we weren’t sure whether the hooligans might not begin their harassing and beating of Jews in the morning, when people went to church.
I divided our entire militia into three groups. One group, consisting only of Poles, I sent into the church to mingle with the crowd, sense their mood, and listen to what people were saying. We placed another group hard by the entrance to the church—this group also consisted only of Poles (if there had been among them any Jews, it would have been obvious and noticed, and would have aroused suspicion). The third group, the largest, was mixed, consisting of our comrades and some PPSers, gathered at a distance and hidden, so as not to be too obvious.
During the whole time of the service inside the church, reports were sent out to us that things in the church were quiet, but at around twelve o’clock, they let us know that the priest had already delivered his inflammatory sermon against the Jews and that groups were gathering at the doors of the church, preparing to go out into the streets and assault Jews. I had come to an agreement with the commandant of our brother PPS militia, who was with me the whole time, that we shouldn’t wait till the hooligans began to harass the Jews, but that as soon as they emerged from the church with the cry, “Beat the Jews,” we should stop them and engage them in a fight right by the doors of the church, so they wouldn’t have the chance to harass and beat up any Jews in the street.
We sent instructions to our group in the church to stay close to the hooligans, get behind them, and come out together with them. As soon as they saw us attack the hooligans from the front, they should do the same from behind, so that the hooligans would suddenly be caught between two fires.
And that is what happened. When the hooligans ran out the doors of the church with their cry, we leapt at them and began teaching them a lesson. Our group behind them did the same. There was a fight and an uproar, shouting. Right away our third group also threw itself into the battle. For about a half hour, heavy fighting went on, until the police arrived. More of the hooligans than our people were beaten up, because we had surprised them.
The police began to disperse the crowd and make arrests. People from both their side and our side were arrested. But the hooligans were immediately let go. Those from our side were detained. Charges were brought against two of our Polish comrades, in addition to one of our comrades, a woman, a Tsukunftist. They were put on trial. Several of the hooligans were witnesses for the prosecution. All three of our comrades were sentenced to a year in prison.