Summary 569
The decision to put together the press published by Communists and Anti-Fascist Block was motivated by the prominent role Communists played in the creation of the Block and their influence on the Block’s journal.
The volume is complemented by a page of a journal of unknown title, published after 18 April 1942, and mistakenly included in the item ARG I 1318. The journal was published after the massacre in the ghetto, carried out on the night 17–18 April, when the underground press ceased to appear. Emanuel Ringelblum mentions the bulletins containing false, optimistic news that were published by unknown authors at the time. The content and form of the document presented as a separate document (no. 9) implies it is one of such publications.
One may observe that the Trotskyists and Polish Socialists published their press in Polish, while the newspapers of Communists and Anti-Fascist Block appeared in Yiddish.
Trotskyist underground press published in the Warsaw ghetto comprises two titles: “Czerwony Sztandar” (“Red Banner”) and “Przegląd Marksistowski” (“Marxist Review”). Five issues of the former (nos 2-6) are preserved in the Ringelblum Archive, together with three issues of the latter (nos 6-8). The present edition has been complemented by a copy of one issue of “Przegląd Marksistowski” (no 4), preserved in the National Archives in Cracow.
The clandestine Trotskyist press was edited by Salomon (Shlomo) Ehrlich. Ehrlich, born in Będzin, as a child moved with his parents to Palestine, later he undertook his studies in Zurich only to come back to Poland in 1931. Ehrlich, who joined the Trotskyist movement in Switzerland, played a crucial role in promoting Trotskyism among the anti-Stalinist opposition that seceded from the Communist Party of Poland. In 1933, together with Isaac Deutscher, he edited the Trotskyist journal “Unzer Gedank” in Yiddish. The letters from Ehrlich to the International Secretariat of the International Left Opposition, identified in the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, allowed for the detailed reconstruction of his hitherto unknown political career in the 1930s, presented in the introduction to the present volume.
Of the two titles published by Ehrlich “Czerwony Sztandar” was addressed to the wider public. Its publication started most probably in November 1940, after the Warsaw ghetto had been closed. The journal focused on the information and analysis of the political and military situation. The extensive accounts of problems of the Balkans and Middle East contrast with the limited attention devoted to the ghetto itself. The paper printed however a fierce condemnation the policy of Warsaw Judenrat. A large part of the information was reproduced from the press of Bund and PPS, two parties which Trotskyists entered in 1935 but criticised severely during the war.
The first issue of “Przegląd Marksistowski” probably appeared as early as the spring of 1940. The issues preserved in the Ringelblum Archive date to the period after the ghetto had been closed. The journal was oriented towards theoretical and ideological questions. It discussed the character of the war and distanced itself from the politics of “revolutionary defeatism” advocated by Lenin in 1915–1917. Trotskyists in the Warsaw ghetto opposed the interpretation of the war in terms of imperialist conflict where socialism should have no ally, and forged the concept of “Jacobin war”, both revolutionary and directed unconditionally against Nazi Germany.
