YIZKOR. TSUM YORTOG FUNM OYFSHTAND IN VARSHEVER GETO APRIL-MAY 1943 יזכור. צום יארטאג פונם אויפשטאנד אין ווארשעווער געטא אַפּריל-מײַ 1943
Shvayts [Switzerland]: Undzer Vort [Poale Tziyon Left], 1944. Item #43395
May, 1944. 1st edition. Original stapled printed paper cover, 4to, [2] + 25 pages.
In Yiddish. Title translates as, “In Memoriam. On the Anniversary of the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, April-May 1943.
First Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, published in Europe during the Holocaust by Jewish “Poale Tziyon Left” members in Switzerland. The organization’s name, which means “Workers of Zion,” is sometimes also romanized as “Poale Zion” or “Poaley Syjon.”
The imprint, “Undzer Vort” (“Our Word”), was a Left Poale Tziyon publisher in Switzerland which also published a mimeograph newspaper titled “Undzer Vort” (OCLC: 232675203) during this same period. A fully underground version of the paper was also published in Nazi-Occupied Belgium (see below).
Indeed Poale Tsiyon Left was an important part of Jewish resistance throughout Europe, most notably during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which this publication commemorates.
“The Holocaust-era Jewish resistance group ZOB was formed from a coalition including Hashomer Hatzair, Dror, Bnei Akiva, the Jewish Bund, various Jewish Communist groups, and both factions of Poale Zion. Poale Zion was also active in the Anti-Fascist Bloc.
Several notable Jewish resistance fighters during the Holocaust, particularly those involved in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, were members of Poale Zion. They include:
Adolf Berman, Warsaw ZOB fighter; Secretary of Zegota (Poale Zion Left)
Hersz Berlinski, member of Warsaw ZOB Command (Poale Zion Left)
Yochanan Morgenstern, member of Warsaw ZOB Command (Poale Zion Right)
Emanuel Ringelblum, member of Warsaw ZOB; chronicler of the Warsaw Ghetto (Poale Zion Left)” (Wikipedia).
The booklet opens with the moving story of the start of the uprising:
“It has been a year since the glorious uprising of the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
April 19, 1943 - barely a few tens of thousands of Jews left in Warsaw, after about half a million of their brothers and sisters were exterminated in the most gruesome way, they rose up with organized resistance against the renewed attempts…that they too, like the previous ones, would be led out like sheep to the slaughter.
Forty thousand Jews, weapons in hand, opposed an enemy tenfold, a hundred hundred times outnumbered….Women, men and children, the high class and the humble….
From the beginning, they all knew without exception, that they would be defeated, that the outcome was not in doubt and that the enemy intended nothing but destruction for all of them….
But no Nazi expected to fall on such a battlefield.
And his was the biggest slap in the face, which the proud Nazis…so hated when it was received from these, these trampled down, these unrefined, these scorned, these despised Jewish ‘untermenchen’" (Translated from the opening paragraphs on page 1).
The publication later continues with a damnation of the “democracies” who did so little and a holding up of the comrades of Poale Tziyon who are doing so much, fighting on all fronts:
“The 'world democracies' didn't do anything...to save the Jewish victims and to stop the misery train, they issued platonic statements about punishing the 'crimes' after the massacre. The warnings have so far helped little.
The…Sacrifices keep growing….The world that is fighting 'for justice' and that is busy with courts after the massacre has not found any means to rescue the few escaped heroes in the ghetto for a whole year….
This long eulogy is for dozens and hundreds of comrades, who fell as loyal children of the nation and fighters for its working class on the fronts, in the distant…north, in the camps of France and Belgium… who went from one end of the world to the other - at their wounds, and from hundreds of thousands of others - comrades of the Poale-Tziyon movement….” (page 24).
Poale Zion…was a movement of Marxist–Zionist Jewish workers founded in various cities of Poland, Europe and the Russian Empire at about the turn of the 20th century after the Bund rejected Zionism in 1901….
Poale Zion was torn between left-wing and right-wing factions in 1919–1920; the organization formally split at the Poale Zion fifth world congress in Vienna in 1920, following a similar division that occurred in the Second International.
The right wing was less Marxist and more nationalist, and favoured a more moderate socialist program and supported the International Working Union of Socialist Parties to continue the work of the Second International, essentially becoming a social democratic party. The left-wing faction did not consider the Second International radical enough, and some accused its members of betraying Borochov's revolutionary principles (although Borochov had begun to modify his ideology as early as 1914, and publicly identified as a social democrat the year before his death).
Poale Zion Left, which supported the Bolshevik revolution, continued to be sympathetic to Marxism and Communism, and attended the second and third congresses of the Communist International in a consultative capacity. They lobbied for membership, but their attempts were unsuccessful, as the internationalist communist movement under Lenin and Trotsky was opposed to Zionist nationalism. The Comintern advised individual members of Left Poale Zion to join their national Communist parties as individuals; at their 1922 Danzig conference, these terms were rejected by the party. The Comintern declared it an enemy of the workers' movement.
Poale Zion Left opposed the decision by Poale Zion to rejoin the World Zionist Organization, viewing it as essentially bourgeois in character, and viewed the Histadrut as reformist and non-socialist. Aside from differing attitudes towards Zionism and Stalinism, the two wings of Poale Zion parted ways over Yiddish and Yiddish culture.
The Left was more supportive of the latter, similar to the members of the Jewish Bund, while the Right bloc identified strongly with the emerging modern Hebrew movement in the early 20th century....
In Poland, for a brief period following World War I, both factions of Poale Zion were reported as legal and functioning political parties. The Polish Left party was the largest Left Poale Zion party in the world. It worked closely with the Bund in developing Yiddish schools in Poland and supporting secular Yiddish culture, although they had political differences (e.g., the Bund was more supportive of the Polish Socialist Party than LPZ).
As part of the large-scale ban on Jewish political parties in post-World War II Poland by the Communist leadership, both Poale Zion groups were disbanded in February 1950” (Wikipedia).
Interestingly, the image on the front cover, this distinctive gravestone with “Yizkor” in a specific, heavy font, was a frequent image for memorials to the victims of pogroms as well as the Shoah, in particular for memorials to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. A few examples include:
• Hashin & Ben Gurion, Yizkor tsum ondenken di gefalene vekhter un arbeiter in Erets Yisroel (New York, Poale Zion Palestine Committee, 1917. Internal illustrated title page)
• Hurbn Proskurov (New York: Proskurover Relief Organization, 1924. See image on JHU’s online Yizkor Book Exhibit at www.library.jhu.edu/news/2025/06/yizkor-books-traveling-homelands-and-portable-memorials) And, from another memorial to the first anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising:
• Tsum Yortog Funm Oyfshtand in Varshever Geto, April-May 1943. [Ramat Gan]: Defus “liga”, 1944. (OCLC: 63647084. See Nr. 35 in our catalog 215 at danwymanbooks.cdn.bibliopolis.com/images/upload/catalog-215.pdf)
“Undzer Vort” also published similar underground Poale Tziyon Left newspapers and other materials in Nazi-occupied countries such as Belgium:
"’Linke Poale Zion’ (Left-wing Workers of Zion), [was] a Zionist-Socialist party in Belgium, and one of the initiators of the Jewish Defense Committee of Belgium. This committee managed to save about 3,000 children and several thousand Jewish adults from the clutches of the Nazis.
With his party comrades, Abusz Werber ensured the editing, publication and distribution of 28 issues of a secret (underground) newspaper in Yiddish,"Unzer Wort" [Undzer Vort] (Our Word), which appeared until the Liberation in September 1944 (and even after)” (Werber, The Word of Abusz Werber, 2017. Note how the Yiddish documents on the cover of the book are similar to our Undzer Vort publication from Switzerland: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71sWHrhxgoL._SL1360_.jpg).
SUBJECT(S): Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Poland -- Warsaw -- Illustrations.
OCLC: 233365664. OCLC locates only 1 copy worldwide (NLI).
Final leaf in facsimile. Paper toning as expected, but strong. About Very Good Condition thus. Rare and important. (B) (Holo2-163-28-XX).
Price: $750.00