Erlich and Alter

...It is the last document he is known to have written: SPRING • 1993 • 239 Notebook I am a Polish citizen, born in 1882...

...and Great Britain, and most notably, the Jewish community and the democratic segment of the Polish population, in Nazi-occupied Poland...

...A day later my comrade Victor Alter, who had undergone the same ordeal, was also released...

...On August 2, 1941 the Military Tribunal of the Sazatov region, on the basis of utterly fantastic testimony of persons incarcerated in 1937 and 1938, sentenced me to death...

...That did not save them, when they fell into Soviet hands, from ludicrous charges of being agents of, variously, the Polish secret police, the "international bourgeoisie," and (after the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin Pact), the Nazis...

...They were never again seen or heard from by anyone but their jailers...

...All this was thoroughly discussed and fully approved, as was the structure of the Committee...

...Freed briefly in the autumn months of 1941 as Nazi armies approached the gates of Moscow, Erlich and Alter were re-arrested in December...

...In February 1943, the Soviet government announced the execution of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter...

...It is hardly necessary to add that after what I had gone through during the last years I was profoundly shocked by this new and totally inexplicable arrest...

...Alter threatened to do the same...

...Since then Erlich's niece, Viktorya Dubnova (granddaughter of the distinguished Russian-Jewish historian Simon Dubnow), has spent many months copying the files in a room set aside for that purpose in the KGB building in Moscow near Kuznetsky Bridge #22...

...We were separated and placed in the internal prison of the Kuybyshev NKVD, in solitary confinement...

...The prison authorities took care to remove pens, belt buckles, and anything else from Alter's cell that could be used as a suicide weapon...

...In 1991 the Russian chief prosecutor declared Erlich and Alter were, in reality, innocent of all the charges brought against them...

...When the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917, Erlich and Alter left for Poland, where they led the Bund for the next two decades...

...I request an opportunity to make contact with my embassy...

...As you know, a horrible end is better than endless horror...

...I am a Polish citizen...

...The victims of the crime were described as if they were the criminals...

...When the czar was overthrown in the revolution of 1917, Erlich was elected one of the leaders of the Petrograd Soviet and brought a resolution before the Soviet calling for the establishment of an independent Polish state...

...Alter had suffered his first arrest for underground political activities at the age of fifteen...

...On October 4, 1939 I was arrested in Brest-Litovsk, as a member of the Central Committee of the Bund, and transported to Moscow...

...On February 14, 1943, Joseph Stalin personally authorized Ambassador Litvinov to announce to the world that Erlich and Alter had already been executed for their alleged crimes...

...Immediately upon arrival we made contact with the local NKVD, and waited impatiently for the opportunity to begin our activities...

...On December 3 Alter and I were told over the phone that the representative of the People's Commissariat [of Internal Affairs], who had taken part in our Moscow discussions, had arrived and asked us to drop by...

...We proposed the formation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee whose main task would be a vigorous campaign among the Jewish communities of the U.S...

...When death finally came, it would not be by his own hand...

...Henryk's son Victor, who made his way be a circuitous route to the United States in 1942, and who is today Professor Emeritus of Russian literature at Yale University, has been translating Dubnova's transcriptions...

...After a 20-hour wait the above mentioned official told us he had been authorized to arrest us...

...As a leader of the Bund in Poland and prerevolutionary Russia, and as its representative to the Central Committee of the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic party, Erlich had been arrested four times by the czarist police...

...On August 27, 1941 this sentence was commuted to 10 years of forced labor...

...On May 14, 1942 Erlich took his own life in his jail cell in Kuybyshev prison...

...Before the war the two men had been internationally respected leaders of the General Jewish Workers Union, better known as "the Bund," the socialist labor movement based in Poland...

...We were enjoined to forget all that had happened and to engage in a discussion [with the Soviet authorities] on how we could help in the struggle against Nazism...

...Although outspoken opponents of the Bolshevik regime's suppression of democratic rights, in the 1930s, Erlich and Alter advocated cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies in a collective defense against fascism...

...and England and other countries, urging maximum assistance to the USSR, in its struggle against the Nazi invaders...

...At least now it is known when they died and how...

...I am very tired," he declared in a letter to the head of the Kuybyshev NKVD in April 1942...

...In an earlier account of the Erlich-Alter case, which appeared in these pages shortly after the 1981 suppression of the Solidarity trade union movement in Poland (Dissent, Spring 1982), I predicted that in a future democratic Poland "the 240 • DISSENT Notebook names of Solidarity's leaders—and perhaps of Erlich and Alter—will be honored long after those of [Polish Communist leaders] Gomulka, Gierek, and Jaruzelski have been forgotten...

...One more thing...

...Neither Erlich nor Alter was a stranger to the inside of a jail cell when they were picked up by the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB...

...The files provide a final, moving testament to the courageous dignity of two veteran revolutionaries in the last months of their lives...

...Although the politics of postcommunist Poland and Russia are not all that one could hope for, there may still be some consolation in knowing that the children of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter outlived the system that killed their fathers...

...It's now possible, and long past time, to set the record straight...

...We accepted the latter suggestion with alacrity...

...In the months that followed he must have lost all expectation of ever regaining his freedom...

...At the time I wrote those words, to be honest, I expected they would work better as literary device—providing a somewhat upbeat ending to an otherwise bleak account of martyrdom and defeat—than as historical prophecy...

...I was elected to be its Chairman . . . and Alter [its] Secretary" . . . . On October 15, 1941 we were evacuated, together with the Polish Embassy, to Kuybyshev...

...On July 28, 1941, along with many other prisoners, I was evacuated to Sazatov jail...

...Erlich's bold challenge to his jailers went unanswered...

...he added that he was not ruling out the possibility of a misunderstanding...

...On September 11, 1941 I was brought back to Moscow and on the next day released from prison...

...When the Red Army occupied eastern Poland, Erlich and Alter were immediately arrested...

...What follows is an excerpt from a letter that Erlich sent on December 27, 1941, to the praesidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, protesting his arrest...

...When the Nazis invaded western Poland in 1939, the bundist leaders fled eastward...

...And yet today a memorial to Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter stands in the Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw...

...For a man who had no other way to protest the injustice of his arrest, Erlich's suicide may well have been intended as a final act of defiance...

...Finally, in February 1943, Soviet ambassador to the United States Maxim Litvinov released a brief statement declaring that Erlich and Alter had been shot in December 1942, supposedly for attempting to undermine Soviet resistance to the Nazi invasion...

...The bogus report, of course, left a loose end to be tied up...

...Noble sentiments are all too often plastered over forlorn hopes...

...Around the same time the KGB released five volumes of files on the Erlich-Alter case...

...Soviet authorities ignored repeated queries from Western socialist and labor leaders for information about the fate of the two men...

...As we were being set free, we were told that we were released not only in consonance with the Soviet-Polish agreement of July 17, 1941, but also because the NKVD had been in error...

...Like millions of others who fell as victims to the treachery and inhumanity of the Stalinist system, two good men were killed for crimes they did not commit...

...What is happening to us and my comrade is demonstrably illegal...

...Nor do I need to dwell on the effect of the news about our arrest upon the Jewish community in the U.S., upon the labor movements in the U.S...

...Both dates, it turns out, were fabrications...

...Keeping us for 31/2 weeks without either a written or an oral explanation of our arrest is a violation of the principles of the Soviet constitution and of the Soviet code of criminal justice...

...Three days later, the director of the Kuybyshev NKVD prison informed his superiors (in the convoluted syntax and passive voice favored by bureaucrats the world round) that "implementing your oral, personal directive, at 2 a.m., February 17, 1943 the prisoner #41 [Alter], held in the internal prison of the regional NKVD, was shot, which action we are reporting herewith...

...If there are plans afoot in Poland to build statues in memory of Gomulka, Gierek, and Jaruzelski, not to mention Stalin, I haven't heard of them...

...No xeroxing is available, so every file has had to be copied by hand...

...Two months later Litvinov announced that the executions had in fact taken place a year earlier, in December 1941...