in Łódź. Suddenly he is summoned by the NKVD and told: “Listen, you little smart aleck, we know who you are, so you’d better behave yourself”. In Łódźhe was no great activist and worked in the youth section of the trade union, but if the NKVD is keeping its eye on someone, it means only one thing.
Łozowski, the director of the Medem87 school in Łódź, fled to Białystok because the Germans were looking for him. He was a socialist who belonged to the most radical wing of the [20] labour movement. He did not join the Communist Party because of its organisational forms and tactics. He worked with the Bund in the school movement.88 He was an independent-thinking person. At the time of the trials in the Soviet Union he published a small book in Łódź entitled 18th Thermidor, a scholarly discussion (thesis and anti-thesis) of the issue of “revolution and counter-revolution”. For that crime, he
was removed from his post as headmaster of a school in a small town near Białystok and arrested. (I spoke to him before the arrest and he was very downhearted.) He had managed to avoid arrest in Łódź, and it happened to him here in Białystok.
The Jewish writers’ club was set up in the warehouse building of the Sokół factory (formerly Feniksztejn’s) at 42 Sienkiewicza Street.89 It can be said that the Yiddish writers who fled from the German side found a good place to rest and sleep there. Large halls in which everyone had his own bed, a pillow,and a blanket, all requisitioned from wealthy people. And, in addition, special lunches for journalists, writers, artists, etc., with everyone receiving a meat lunch on a plate, sitting at a table like a human being, and not standing up in the stench in the communal kitchen at 7 Sosnowa Street. There, anyone whodidn’t have a mug got his lunch in a tin can, and you had to queue for hours before you got it – or didn’t get it, because every few minutes they shut the
