For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland 1939-1949

Before World War II the Jewish Labour party, the Bund, was one of the most important Jewish parties in Poland. As a socialist party, the Bund believed that the Jewish community could build on, and consolidate, its roots in Poland; develop its Jewish culture on the basis of its national language, Yiddish; and exert an influence in the Polish socialist camp towards the creation of a regime of social justice and civic equality for all. As a socialist party, the Bund - from its very inception in the late-19th century - fought the efforts of the Zionist movement to establish a separate national territory in Palestine for the Jewish people. The Bund considered Zionism a movement that encouraged Jewish separatism, fanned the flames of anti-Jewish hostility, and legitimized the urgings of Polish anti-Semitic parties to banish the Jews to Palestine. Only social and economic integration predicated on full civic equality, coupled with the maintenance of Jewish cultural singularity - the Bund argued - would assure the Jews a just existence among the surrounding peoples. The Nazi occupation of Poland put this ideology to a severe test. The attitude of Polish society to the Jewish tragedy, the alienated response of the Polish underground to the Jews’ armed resistance efforts, and the Jewish policies of the Polish-Government-in-Exile in London drove the Bund - now an underground party - into a crisis. This book explores Bund members’ attempts to chart a course through this tragic morass and to survive as a movement with a unique ideology offering its own path for Jewish existence in Eastern Europe.