similar working-class movement, as Poale Zion was a workers’ party, that it was in Palestine that he had become convinced that Jews could be a productive and highly valuable element. That was why he had thought it desirable to promote among the young the idea of maximal development of the revival movement and to support the rightness and justness [12] of the Zionist/socialist movement with photos showing life in Palestine. “Of course back then I was unfamiliar with the political system of Soviet Russia. I didn’t know about the system of the country which has no Jewish issue. Now I can see that the Jewish question can also be solved through communism”.
Actually, that teacher’s admission was also postponed by means of a suitable resolution. The next person subjected to the careful examination was the geography teacher, a former rifleman and Polish Army officer. He too was showered with questions. First he was accused of treason because he had been an officer, while in Poland Jews could not be officers as they had been deprived of rights. Second, what was that Strzelec organisation? (The current headmaster kept pronouncing its name in Ukrainian). The headmaster and the komsorg claimed that the Strzelec was an underground military organisation established by Piłsudski to train youth in the [13] nationalist and military spirit and to fight all manifestations of communism. But the teacher cunningly claimed that he had been just a good sportsman and that as an officer he had belonged to a sports/gymnastics organisation called Strzelec, that there had been no obstacles in the way of Jews becoming officers in the Polish Army and that there had been many, that the intensification of antisemitism in Poland had begun only a couple of years back, and that personally he had regarded himself a Pole despite being a Jew (neither the headmaster, nor the komsorg, nor the delegate could fathom that). During the discussion, when the teacher was explaining that he had been a member of a union of Polish teachers, not Jewish teachers, an argument broke out. For instance, the current headmaster began to argue, those present did not realise at all how many privileges a profspilka ID guaranteed, [14] that it was an organisation entirely different from labour unions in Poland, that Poland could not stand comparison to the USSR at all, that in Poland workers who were taken ill were left without help or medical assistance, and that one could forget about a benefit in case of death. Arguments that social legislation had been well developed in Poland, that there had been the Healthcare Funds and special Labour Courts, that every employee had to have insurance, etc., had no effect. They were very
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