Zionist Activities in the Liberated Regions of Poland Began As Early As the End of 1944
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The Zionists 151 6 THE ZIONISTS Zionist activities in the liberated regions of Poland began as early as the end of 1944. Most of the surviving leaders of prewar Zionist parties and youth movements arrived in Lublin in late 1944 and early 1945. Among them were Dr. Emil Sommerstein of the General Zionists, Dr. Adolf Berman of the Poalei Zion-Left, Rabbi David Kahane of Mizrachi, Abba Kovner of Hashomer Hatzair and Antek Zuckerman of Dror. Various Zionist ideologies and stands were voiced and discussed. All agreed that postwar Zionist activities in Poland should focus on emigration to Palestine. There were, however, varying opinions on organizational and structural matters. Zuckerman maintained that a unifi ed Zionist structure was needed in the wake of the Holocaust. He also strongly urged the merger of the Dror and Hashomer Hatzair youth movements. In a letter written shortly after the end of the war, Zuckerman expressed his preference for a united Socialist-Zionist movement: “We are all very worried about the schism in Eretz Israel and want to see a united Socialist force.” The letter spoke of “the unifi cation of the Labor Movement.” The fi rst efforts to establish a joint Dror/Hashomer Hatzair youth movement took place in Warsaw, in a deserted building at 38 Poznanski Street, in February 1945, a few weeks after the city’s liberation. Then, in March, Zuckerman settled a group of young Jewish survivors from Czestochowa in that building. This was actually the fi rst Zionist collective in postwar Poland. A second such collective was founded by Dror and Hashomer Hatzair in Lodz in April 1945. These collectives served as early models for the numerous Zionist collectives, the kibbutzim, that would be organized in Poland in the following years. The fi rst Zionist seminar, in postwar Poland, a sort of teach-in, took place in Lodz in the summer of 1945. The attempt to merge Dror with Hashomer Hatzair was short-lived. Meir Yaari and Yaakov Chazan, the two powerful leaders of Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine, were unequivocal in their opposition. Thus, instead of fostering a common and unifi ed effort by two powerful youth movements in post-Holocaust Poland, they started competing for potential members among the survivors and the returnees from the Soviet Union.1 152 Chapter Six The Zionists in postwar Poland, despite ideological differences and fi erce competition, had one goal in common: to gain popularity with the Jewish masses and to affect their decisions in respect to the future. There was a tendency among Polish Jews, both those returning to their prewar locales and those settling in other towns and cities, to try to rebuild their lives in Poland. In time, however, economic diffi culties and widespread anti-Semitism convinced the majority that they needed to look elsewhere for a solution. The Zionists, with their ever-widening organizational structures, their fi nancial resources, and the semi-legal approval of the Polish authorities for the crossing of borders, gained massive support. It was not so much pure ideology as the specifi c confl uence of Zionist aims and the practical interests of the Jewish population that made the Zionists more attractive and infl uential than the Jewish Communists, who were opposed to emigration. The ever-growing infrastructure of Zionist collectives, schools and children’s homes was far superior to the alternatives offered by the Communist-run Jewish committees. Jewish returnees from the Soviet Union, most of whom arrived in Poland in 1946, when anti-Semitism was at its peak, were particularly likely to accept Zionist assistance.2 Zionist organizations and youth movements were highly effective in their attempts to infl uence young survivors and returnees. Sara Zyskind, a survivor of the camps who returned to her native Lodz after liberation, recalled how she and her traumatized, depressed roommates were approached by a woman who somehow got their address and urged them to leave Poland. The woman, apparently a Zionist activist, told the young women that they should “cross out their past, leave this place, and begin a new life” in Eretz Israel. Zionist activists used their infl uence with Jewish youth to reach their families and convince them to emigrate to Palestine/ Israel. The Zionists remained in close proximity to the Jewish committees and other non-Zionist Jewish institutions. A Lodz survivor recalled that “it suffi ced to step into a Jewish restaurant or to move around the Jewish Committee in order to fi nd a way to the Zionists.”3 In spite of the efforts for unifi cation of so prominent a figure as Antek Zuckerman, the Zionist movement in postwar Poland, though a tiny fraction of its prewar size, was marked by divisiveness and fragmentation. There was constant competition among the collectives and youth organizations. People representing various collectives and youth movements were sent to the destination sites of returnee transport trains, and sometimes as far as the Soviet-Polish border, to “recruit” new arrivals. Zuckerman wrote in his memoirs: “Our people would stand at the railroad stations and, when they saw young people coming, would take them along. That was The Zionists 153 very important for the young people who arrived, since they immediately had a house, a bed, and food. In Lodz you found apartments, organized groups, clubs. You could come in, get warm, have a drink.” The person in charge of a Hashomer Hatzair collective in Krakow complained in a letter to his superiors in Lodz that “there is wild and ugly competition among the kibbutzim.” Zionist “recruitment” tactics among returnees from Russia had an impressive effect on the number and size of the kibbutzim. Whereas in early April 1946 Dror collectives throughout Poland could boast of only one thousand members, by late June membership reached 4,000. There were close to three thousand people in the collectives of Hashomer Hatzair at that time, and the total number of members in all Zionist collectives in Poland reached 15,000.4 At the core of the Zionist movement in postwar Poland were the collectives, the kibbutzim. They were modeled on the prewar kibbutzei hachshara — training collectives of young Zionists who groomed themselves for aliya, settlement and communal life in Palestine. There was, however, a basic difference between the prewar hachsharot and the postwar kibbutzim. Whereas before the war, the members of the training collectives went through a gradual process of learning and preparation, the postwar situation forced the kibbutzim to deal primarily in matters of daily life and border crossing. There was also a severe lack of trained personnel. People acquired necessary skills on the run. Instructors and youth leaders in the various Zionist movements were either people who had some prewar Zionist experience or those who had joined the movements shortly after liberation. As far as wartime fates were concerned, there were those Zionists who survived under German occupation and those who returned from the Soviet Union. It seems that the leading fi gures of the Zionist organizations were people who had been active in Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland and ex-partisans, such as Antek Zuckerman, Zivia Lubetkin and Abba Kovner. Zuckerman recalled in his memoirs the formative period of the postwar kibbutzim. “We brought all those who knocked at our gates into the Movement and we built collectives. We called every collective, which in fact was nothing but a soup kitchen, a kibbutz; but in that framework, people preserved a sense of self-respect.”5 Why did young people join those postwar kibbutzei aliya — immigration kibbutzim — by the thousands? Their motivation was both practical and psychological. A Zionist collective offered not only a roof, a bed and a meal. It was a substitute for lost families and friends and gave a new meaning and purpose to life. A young man who lost his whole family in the Holocaust and joined a Hashomer Hatzair collective wrote in the collective’s broadsheet “Why did I join the kibbutz? I became aware of the 154 Chapter Six fact that my life is worthless. I’m alone, without a family, homeless. The kibbutz impressed me from the fi rst day. I looked at those happy young faces. They were singing and dancing. I envied them. Their enthusiasm seized me. I was no longer helpless and estranged.” Even youngsters who had families joined Zionist collectives. A fi fteen-year old girl who lived with her family in Lodz joined a local kibbutz almost by chance. “While walking we encountered Jewish youngsters dancing the Hora near one of the houses. It turned out that a kibbutz was being established there. I got all excited. I returned home and told them, ‘I’m joining the kibbutz.’ They said, ‘No!’ Still, I joined.”6 By one estimate, close to two hundred Zionist collectives formed in Poland between 1945 and 1946. Forty-three kibbutzim of the Dror Borokhov Youth Movement alone, with 4,000 members, were established during the fi rst six months following liberation. Close to 11,000 members lived in various collectives in mid-1946.7 The most effective ideological and cultural work was conducted by the various Zionist youth movements in a series of seminars. These seminars would be held either in Poland or in Germany, and were led mostly by emissaries from Palestine. Seven seminars were conducted by Hashomer Hatzair between November 1945 and October 1946. One of the most outstanding and infl uential emissaries who arrived from Palestine in 1947 to head an international Dror seminar in Indersdorf, Bavaria, was Yitshak Tabenkin, the charismatic leader of Hakibbutz Hameuhad in Palestine. This and similar seminars organized by the various youth movements shaped the young postwar Zionist leadership.8 Lodz was the most signifi cant Zionist center in postwar Poland.