At the same time, they began to recruit volunteers for work in the Russian interior. Salomea’s brother, a qualified metal-worker (a lathe-operator), enrolled and left for Orsha.143
After registering, he received an initial payment of 50 roubles, plus 5 roubles travel expenses as promised. On arrival at his new workplace, hewas given a week off to settle in and [received] good food in the canteen. He was treated in a very friendly fashion, engaged freely in conversation,and they explained everything to him kindly, as if he were a beloved child. He was immediately struck by [4(7)] a certain degree of naivety and a falseassessment of reality outside the Soviet Union. When articles in scarce sup-ply, such as sugar, clothing and the like, were distributed, precedence wasgiven everywhere to refugees and newcomers: it was thought that, havinglived for so long under the capitalist system, they had not seen such arti-cles or had been unable to buy them because of their low wages. Obviously, there was also a propaganda message here for the Russian people. And the average Soviet citizen did naïvely believe that over the last 20 years, Polishworkers had suffered far greater hardship and deprivation of consumergoods than he.
In reality, the opposite was true. In Orsha there was a scarcity of products and items which generally had never been lacking in Poland. The delivery system was poor and supply did not meet demand. This aroused astonish-ment and contempt in the newcomers.
The role of the Jews in the Communist Party was quite considerable because of their numbers. Although Poles were given priority in admission to the party, Jews enjoyed the general trust of the Soviet people. Many Jewish communists treated their party membership as a business matter, and the very high percentage of Jews can actually be explained by the fact that they saw their party card as an income card (which is how the party membership card [4a(8)] was commonly referred to). The trust shown to Jews was the result of official government policy from those at the highest level. Every communist was very familiar with and often cited the position adopted by Stalin and Molotov concerning Jews. Salomea L. remembered an article about Stalin’s
