Selected text
I didn’t have much of a social life during my studies. Those matters connected with politics were very absorbing. I came into contact with the socialist organization OMS Zycie [6] at the Polytechnic. Both Jews and Poles belonged to Zycie; the Poles were usually from proletarian backgrounds, as you used to say. Later on I was also a member of the Communist Union of Polish Youth [KZMP] [6].
Baum and I were given a task for the Zycie organization: we had to make a copier to print the newsletter. We had to make a metal frame, which we cobbled together out of parts from a machine; then we had to add rollers, drive-wheels, cables.
The rollers were coated with this thick, hard gelatin-like substance, and their job was to take up the ink spread on the plate. Of course there was the typeface, the typeface was arranged in a cassette. It was practically done by hand, but you could make a few hundred copies a day.
And we cobbled together that machine, using the facilities that the workshops on Gesia and Pawia Streets offered. That’s where all the Jewish workshops, little manufactories were, you see, that made bags, and metal fittings, and door locks, and cut keys, and they mended wheel spokes and bikes and so on, and there were bakeries there, too.
So we built this machine and set it up on the 5th floor of the house, in a Jewish apartment, and for a few months it was operated by this girl, an 18-year-old, a poet who spoke only Yiddish. I don’t know what she was called. We avoided giving our names because you could ‘sing’ to the police. That girl operated it until the raid, when the police took the apartment, along with the machine and the girl, who got six years. And went down.
There was this factory on Ciepla Street, I remember. We were supposed to be organizing a mass demonstration. That involved getting up on a folding chair or bench as the workers were coming off their shift, and starting shouting:
Comrades!!, and then the speaker would come up and start declaiming that we here are living in a fascist Poland, that there are the Nazis, etc., you know, a short, concise speech about the government being fascist. It lasted five minutes and then you scattered. My thing was probably, so I remember, to attract the people.
But there were others [other activities]. For instance smuggling, if you like, to Czechoslovakia, where the communist party was legal, and we had to smuggle our bosses across, or rather the boss, i.e. the secretary of the KZMP, who was Zambrowski at the time. [Roman Zambrowski, real name Rubin Nusbaum (1909-1977): communist activist, member of the KPP; 1930-1938 one of the leaders of the KZMP; during the war one of the organizers of the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR; up to 1968 in the communist party leadership in Poland, then charged with Zionism and expelled from the Party]. The Zambrowski, whose son Antoni went over to Solidarity [8]. Well, and then we would help him get to Zakopane, find a guide, etc., to help him get over to the other side. He would go across via a pedestrian route, of course. And the guide, who was also from the left, on the whole, would take him over [the border]. So there were various kinds of assignments.
I was arrested before the war. My student rights were suspended. I was in the third year, charged with involvement with a communist organization. They confiscated two Russian books from my lodgings. They were poems by Sergei Yesenin [9]. I liked Yesenin very much, and to this day I remember half of the beautiful poem Pismo k zhenshinye [Russian for ‘Letter to a Woman’], a beautiful poem.
Baum and I were given a task for the Zycie organization: we had to make a copier to print the newsletter. We had to make a metal frame, which we cobbled together out of parts from a machine; then we had to add rollers, drive-wheels, cables.
The rollers were coated with this thick, hard gelatin-like substance, and their job was to take up the ink spread on the plate. Of course there was the typeface, the typeface was arranged in a cassette. It was practically done by hand, but you could make a few hundred copies a day.
And we cobbled together that machine, using the facilities that the workshops on Gesia and Pawia Streets offered. That’s where all the Jewish workshops, little manufactories were, you see, that made bags, and metal fittings, and door locks, and cut keys, and they mended wheel spokes and bikes and so on, and there were bakeries there, too.
So we built this machine and set it up on the 5th floor of the house, in a Jewish apartment, and for a few months it was operated by this girl, an 18-year-old, a poet who spoke only Yiddish. I don’t know what she was called. We avoided giving our names because you could ‘sing’ to the police. That girl operated it until the raid, when the police took the apartment, along with the machine and the girl, who got six years. And went down.
There was this factory on Ciepla Street, I remember. We were supposed to be organizing a mass demonstration. That involved getting up on a folding chair or bench as the workers were coming off their shift, and starting shouting:
Comrades!!, and then the speaker would come up and start declaiming that we here are living in a fascist Poland, that there are the Nazis, etc., you know, a short, concise speech about the government being fascist. It lasted five minutes and then you scattered. My thing was probably, so I remember, to attract the people.
But there were others [other activities]. For instance smuggling, if you like, to Czechoslovakia, where the communist party was legal, and we had to smuggle our bosses across, or rather the boss, i.e. the secretary of the KZMP, who was Zambrowski at the time. [Roman Zambrowski, real name Rubin Nusbaum (1909-1977): communist activist, member of the KPP; 1930-1938 one of the leaders of the KZMP; during the war one of the organizers of the Union of Polish Patriots in the USSR; up to 1968 in the communist party leadership in Poland, then charged with Zionism and expelled from the Party]. The Zambrowski, whose son Antoni went over to Solidarity [8]. Well, and then we would help him get to Zakopane, find a guide, etc., to help him get over to the other side. He would go across via a pedestrian route, of course. And the guide, who was also from the left, on the whole, would take him over [the border]. So there were various kinds of assignments.
I was arrested before the war. My student rights were suspended. I was in the third year, charged with involvement with a communist organization. They confiscated two Russian books from my lodgings. They were poems by Sergei Yesenin [9]. I liked Yesenin very much, and to this day I remember half of the beautiful poem Pismo k zhenshinye [Russian for ‘Letter to a Woman’], a beautiful poem.
Period
Interview
Julian Gringras