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Anyway, they threw him out first. They put him through the mill all day, because apparently he'd said something like this: 'Israel's army has won the Arabs,' or something like that. And that was just humiliating. What, praise Israel like that at that time? You couldn't do that in the army, not only in the army, but above all in the army. Praise Israel - you couldn't. You had to condemn Israel, that Israel was aggressive, that it had attacked the Arab states. That was the theory. And intelligence found out what he'd said. And Koropkow was thrown out of both the party and the army disciplinarily in the end.
Jews were dismissed from the army on disciplinary grounds for being enemies. They became enemies because they spoke approvingly of Israel. I remember, I think there was some talk that they'd returned it to him - I mean not his membership of the party, just his full pension. He'd had an important post, colonel. By then the pension was high. As far as I know, later they changed everyone's disciplinary dismissal to normal dismissal. I mean Jaruzelski [50] did, apparently, but I don't believe it.
And I remember one more, Jolson, his name was. A regular Jew. He was an intelligence officer. Mind you, their intelligence often involved one suspecting another and one informing on another. Yes, so much so that I didn't really want to have much to do with him. My contacts with him were just official. We didn't really see eye to eye. But in general we knew that we were Jews. He and I. I don't know where he ended up after his dismissal, but a few years later we met by chance in Zamosc, where I was working in a clothing factory. He came to our factory from the Silk Industry Union on an inspection, from Lodz, I think.
In workplaces there were these posts for military affairs, and I think he was in one of those posts. They were in charge of civil defense, training, stuff like that. And he told me a bit about how they'd gathered material on me. I found out that I'd wanted to go to Israel. It was only afterwards that he could talk to me about that, because when he'd been in the army he hadn't told me. But he met the same fate as me, because they dismissed him at the same time.
Jews were dismissed from the army on disciplinary grounds for being enemies. They became enemies because they spoke approvingly of Israel. I remember, I think there was some talk that they'd returned it to him - I mean not his membership of the party, just his full pension. He'd had an important post, colonel. By then the pension was high. As far as I know, later they changed everyone's disciplinary dismissal to normal dismissal. I mean Jaruzelski [50] did, apparently, but I don't believe it.
And I remember one more, Jolson, his name was. A regular Jew. He was an intelligence officer. Mind you, their intelligence often involved one suspecting another and one informing on another. Yes, so much so that I didn't really want to have much to do with him. My contacts with him were just official. We didn't really see eye to eye. But in general we knew that we were Jews. He and I. I don't know where he ended up after his dismissal, but a few years later we met by chance in Zamosc, where I was working in a clothing factory. He came to our factory from the Silk Industry Union on an inspection, from Lodz, I think.
In workplaces there were these posts for military affairs, and I think he was in one of those posts. They were in charge of civil defense, training, stuff like that. And he told me a bit about how they'd gathered material on me. I found out that I'd wanted to go to Israel. It was only afterwards that he could talk to me about that, because when he'd been in the army he hadn't told me. But he met the same fate as me, because they dismissed him at the same time.
Period
Interview
Leon Glazer