Jonathan P. Baird

Winston Churchill once wrote, “History will be kind to me because I intend to write it”. Who writes history often determines what is remembered about historical events. Some history gets excised because the victors are the writers and the voices of the defeated are silenced or ignored. Such is the case of the Jewish Bund, a political party that came out of the Tsarist empire.

The story of the Bund has never been well told until the writer and artist Molly Crabapple wrote Here Where We Live Is Our Country, a new book that encompasses history, politics, biography and memoir. Crabapple comes from a Jewish family of artists and she drew inspiration from her great grandfather Sam Rothbort, who also was an artist and a Bund activist.

The Bund fought for the overthrow of the tsar and for democratic socialism. They were internationalists and they recognized the need to organize the whole working class but their focus was organization of the Jewish, Yiddish-speaking proletariat. They participated in the 1905 and 1917 Russian revolutions.

In the early 20th century, the Bund was the most popular socialist movement in Russia. They were part of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party but they split from that party in 1903. The Bund went into further opposition from Lenin and the Bolsheviks after 1917 and they were effectively banished from the Soviet Union in 1921. The Bund reconstituted in Poland.

From the early 20th century to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the Bund played a prominent role in Eastern Europe fighting for their liberation both as Jews and as socialists. Crabapple recreates that historical era and shows the Bund competing against other political currents, especially the Zionists. This was long before there was a Jewish state. She shows the conflict between those who favored fighting for democratic socialism in home countries and those who favored building a Jewish ethnostate. The Bund fiercely criticized Zionism. Crabapple quotes the Bund leader, Henryk Erlich, who in 1938 wrote:

“If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine, its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs)…Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow? Indeed is it not the climate in which reaction and chauvinism ordinarily flourish.”

In the aftermath of the Gaza genocide and the Israeli state’s criminal behavior in the West Bank, many Jews and others, horrified by the moral collapse of Zionism, can appreciate Erlich’s prophetic words. The Bund may have been later destroyed by the Nazis but it anticipated the trajectory of Zionism.

Crabapple’s book is important in combatting the stereotype that Jews meekly marched into the gas chambers. The Bund fought back. They formed defense squads against pogroms. They organized a general strike in Poland against the murder of Jews and against fascism. They consistently fought antisemitism which was rampant in Eastern Europe. Around 200,000 Jews were murdered in the pogroms between 1918-1921 alone. They worked collaboratively with the Polish Socialist Party to fight for Polish liberation.

The Bund played a critical role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis. They co-founded the Jewish Combat Organization. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was one of the first and largest acts of armed resistance against the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In April 1943 when the Nazis sought to deport the remaining Jewish population to certain death, they were met by bullets, grenades and mines. Even with the ghetto reduced to ashes, they fought relentlessly. The Jewish fighters held out for weeks.

One of my favorite parts of Crabapple’s book is her vignettes of the lives of the Bund leaders. I would mention her stories about the life of Bernard Goldstein. Goldstein was head of the Bund’s self-defense militia in Warsaw. She describes him:

“Born in an impoverished shtetl in Eastern Europe, Bernard joined the party at age 13. By sixteen, he had already survived one prison term; for a keepsake a guard left a saber scar across his face. A quiet bruiser who spoke in a mangled mixture of three languages, Bernard spent the next decade escaping jails and organizing unions.”

Living an entirely underground existence, Bernard organized the opposition to the Nazis around the time of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. He desperately sought arms while evading capture. The Bund dug tunnels through the sewer system of Warsaw and Bernard expertly navigated escape routes. He somehow survived unbelievable carnage and managed to get to New York City after the war. He wrote two volumes and died in 1959.

Reading the story of the Bund, it is hard not to compare that time to our present. While it was going on, the United States ignored the fact that Jews were the victims of a campaign of mass extermination. Now our government again ignores the cries of asylum seekers and refugees blaming those trying to escape persecution.

A big part of the reason we don’t know the Bund story is because the Nazis killed so many. There were relatively few Jewish survivors. Importantly, Molly Crabapple recognizes that the Bund did not fail. They were defeated by an overwhelming nihilistic force. Nothing erases their honorable example.