The Warsaw Commune: Betrayed by Stalin, Massacred by Hitler. Zygmunt Zaremba 1947
Zygmunt Zaremba, one of the main leaders of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), was born in Piotrków in 1895. From 1911 onwards he was active in the Socialist youth organisations. He joined the (illegal) Socialist Party in 1912 (during the time of the Tsar), and organised the workers of the Warsaw suburbs. His fervour and dedication were enough to get him arrested and imprisoned by the Russian police in 1914. After managing to get away illegally to Russia in 1915, he took part in the revolution there in 1917; he led the Polish Socialist movement in the Ukraine, where he was a delegate to the Kharkov Soviet.
Zygmunt Zaremba returned to Poland in 1918, and was elected on to the Central Committee of the Polish Socialist Party as representative of the Polish Socialist section in Russia, a post he occupied permanently until the Second World War. His activities within the Polish working-class movement were many and fruitful. He edited The Union, the official journal of the Polish trade-union federation. In 1921 he became head of the Polish cooperative workers’ union. From 1921 to 1939 he edited Socialist journals, founding, among others, The Workers Week, the most widely-read Polish weekly.
He was a deputy in the Polish Sejm (parliament) from 1921 until 1935, the date at which the left parties refused to take any further part in the parliamentary farce of the Beck dictatorship. [1] In 1939 he organised workers’ detachments to defend Warsaw as it was being surrounded by the Germans. These detachments, turned into workers’ brigades, played a most important part in the struggle against the Hitlerite invader. In October 1939 he was one of the first four members of the Resistance, along with Mieczysław Niedziałkowski, shortly afterwards shot by the Germans (he was soon to mourn the deaths of two other old friends, the magnificent Bund militants Alter and Erlich, murdered by the Stalinists). [2]
When the clandestine Polish state was organised, Zygmunt Zaremba became a member of the Council of National Unity, [3] and in this capacity was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Uprising. He was Editor-in-Chief of the clandestine Socialist press throughout the five years of the Polish Resistance, and from 1944 onwards was editor of The Worker (Robotnik), the main organ of the Socialist Party.
Today [1947] he is living in France, for there is no possibility of any political activity in a country enslaved by Moscow. We are happy to give him a fraternal welcome as one of our collaborators.
René Lefeuvre[4]
1. Józef Beck (1894-1944), an old associate of Marshal Józef Piłsudski, headed the War Ministry during 1926-30, and was Minister of Foreign Affairs during 1932-39. He fled to Romania with other government officials in September 1939, was interned, and died of tuberculosis. Parliamentary democracy in Poland was effectively nullified after Piłsudski’s coup in 1926. Democratic rights were increasingly whittled away, and anti-Semitic and anti-Ukrainian policies were implemented by the dictatorial Sanacja regime of the Colonels during the 1930s. [Editor’s note]
2. Mieczysław Niedziałkowski (1893-1940) was a leading member of the Polish Socialist Party. He became active in the Socialist youth movement in Vilna and St Petersburg, joined the PPS during the First World War, and was a member of the Sejm (Polish parliament) during 1919-35. He helped to coordinate workers’ detachments for the defence of Warsaw in September 1939, organised anti-Nazi activities, was arrested by the Gestapo, and was executed. Wiktor Alter (1890-1941) and Henryk Erlich (1882-1941) were journalists and Central Committee members of the Bund in Poland, and served on Warsaw City Council. They were both arrested after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland, were given death sentences commuted to 10 years in labour camps, were freed in September 1941, and formed the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Arrested again in December 1941, they were executed on the obviously false grounds of ‘helping the Nazi enemy’ (see Revolutionary History, Volume 1, no 4, Winter 1988-89, pp 40-41). [Editor’s note]
3. The Council of National Unity (RJN) was formed at the beginning of 1944, and represented in Poland the four parties that made up the London Government-in-Exile, namely the Polish Socialist Party, the Peasant Party, the Labour Party and the National Democrats, plus a few minor organisations and the clergy. It had originally been formed as the Chief Political Council (GRP) in December 1939, and then became the Political Advisory Committee (PKP) in February 1940, and the National Political Representation (KRP) in March 1943. [Editor’s note]
4. To this we might add that he left Poland in February 1946 after he and several other PPS leaders had been advised by the Stalinist regime to refrain from engaging in political activity. He was subsequently the Chairman of the PPS-in-Exile and the Chairman and Secretary of the Socialist Union of Central-Eastern Europe, published the Socialist weekly Światlo (Light), wrote several books, including a 350-page work on Poland during the Second World War, Wojna i Konspiracja (London, 1957) and a study of Jan Wacław Machajski, the Polish radical who prophesied a future state as a dictatorship of intellectuals using Socialist phraseology (Słowo o Wacławie Machajskim, Paris, 1968), and died in France in 1967. (Thanks to Feliks Gross of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America for providing details.) [Editor’s note]