So Many Fallen
H., I.
THE JEWISH LABOR BUND, A PICTORIAL HISTOR. FARLAG UNSER TSAIT. 1958. 198 pp. $5.00 The first picture in this book shows the house in Wilno where the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement...
...Later come the pictures of the Bund leaders, Ehrlich and Alter, whom the Stalin government deceived and destroyed...
...5.00 The first picture in this book shows the house in Wilno where the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement of Poland, held its secret founding convention in 1897...
...Hard to believe that from such devotion there will not yet issue, in ways we cannot tell, something more than memories of martyrdom...
...and many more, unknown to all but the Bund militants, who were also tortured and shot by the German and Russian police...
...Anyone who cares to learn something about the quality of modern history should look into it—or the quality of socialism at its best...
...For if ever there was a socialist movement of ethical humaneness which transformed the lives of its adherents, it was the Bund...
...It is a heart-rending book...
...the faces of those who went off to Siberia, those who were murdered by the Polish police, and those who survived long enough to be murdered by the Gestapo and GPU...
...What happened in the intervening years is the tragic burden of this book...
...Looking at these strong sweet and innocent faces—so many fallen...
...so many victims!—one finds it hard to believe that all this human effort was mere waste and failure...
...Here are the pictures of the earliest group of Jewish radical workers in Poland, posing stiffly in their hope...
...At the end a tiny remnant survived, a scattering of Bundists who now live in almost every country but the one of their birth...
...The last picture shows a handful of Jewish children who were saved from the Nazis in 1945...
...FARLAG UNSER TSAIT...
Vol. 7 • January 1960 • No. 1
