Ksawery Pruszynski
TWO MEN WHO DISAPPEARED
In the early fall of
1939,
shortly after the Soviet invasion of Eastern
Poland, two internationally known Jewish Socialist leaders, Henryk Erlich
and Victor Alter, were arrested by the NKVD. Both were accused
of
connections
with the "international bourgeoisie" and of collaboration with the Polish
counterintelligence. In both instances the original death sentences were com–
muted to ten years of hard labor. Erlich and A Iter were released in September
1941
on the basis of an agreement which, after the Nazi invasion, Stalin con–
cluded with the Polish government in exile and which calledfor the release ofall
Polish citizens arrested or interned in the Soviet Union. For over two months
they were treated as
personae gratae
by the Soviet authorities, and drawn into
talks about their possible participation in the about-to-bejormed Jewish Anti–
Fascist Committee. On December
4
they were summoned to what appeared to be
another meeting and never returned. The inquiries on the part of the Polish
ambassador as well as
of
various American publicfigures were met with stalling
and evasion until February
1943,
when the Soviet ambassador to the
U.
s. ,
Maxim Litvinov, conveyed to William Green Molotov's message that
E.
and
A. were executed for conducting defeatist propaganda among the Soviet troops.
Translator's Note*
It must have happened sometime during the first ten days
of September 1941 in Moscow: one late afternoon Wladyslaw
Broniewski
**
and I found ourselves in the Metropole Hotel restaur–
ant right after the regular guests had left. We had just started dinner
when two men entered the room.
It
was obvious that they were not
Russians but they did not look like foreigners, either. At first glance
'What follows is a slightly abridged English version of an article which appeared on
April 25, 1943, in a London-based Polish emigre journal ,
Nowa Polska
(New
Poland). Its author was a prominent publicist and essayist of a moderately
conservative persuasion , who at the time of writing was a press attache
to
the Polish
embassy in the Soviet Union. The article was translated by Iza and Victor Erlich.
• 'The leading Polish left-wing poet, who like Pruszynski was associated with the
Polish embassy in Russia in the fall of 1941.
