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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 14, 4 April 1949, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The following is excerpted from the March issue of the Jewish Labor Bund Bulletin:
“The Bund in Poland no longer exists. A party convention held on January 16, 1949, decided to bow to the will of the Communist regime sponsored by the Kremlin bosses, and dissolved the Bund movement in Poland. As we have already stated in our resolution on this tragic matter published in a former issue of our Bulletin, ‘the very forces which seven years ago, in December 1941, murdered in the Soviet Union the leaders of the Polish Bund, Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, committed this political and moral act of murder of a movement.’
“More than half a century of glorious activities of the Jewish labor movement under the banner of the Bund came to an end in Communist Poland. A movement which withstood successfully severe persecution on the part of the Russian czars, a movement which the reactionary government of pre-war Poland was unable to extinguish, which, during the bleak years of the Second World War, the Nazi hangmen could not eliminate, which went underground to wage war against the Nazi subjugators of Poland and gained immortal glory as a leading exponent of armed uprisings in the ghetto of Warsaw and other cities, was liquidated by the evil power of the Communist usurpers who, unable to confront an independent socialist movement, exterminate it wherever their power of coercion and terror is established.
“... it must be noted, first, that it was the prior liquidation of the Polish Socialist Party which made the Polish Bund’s position wholly untenable; and, second, that the liquidation of the Polish Bund by the Communist regime of Poland came at a time when the Jewish community in that country numbered but a small fraction of its former strength. Out of a quarter of a million Jews who survived the wholesale annihilation of Polish Jewry accomplished by the Germans under Hitler’s direct orders, only 50 to 60 thousand Jews now remain in Poland. 200,000 remnants of the pre-war Jewish community of 3½ million escaped from Poland driven, on the one hand, by anti-Semitic sentiments lingering in Poland even after the end of the war, and on the other hand by their abhorrence of the Communist regime forced upon their country.”
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