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the people of the Left. The fate of the apostate is the worst , and a
Bundist was seen as such. Moscow knew infinitely more about Alter
and Erlich than it did about the Polish counts, Pilsudski's colonels,
or right-wing Polish nationalists. I could even say that from
Moscow's point of view the latter were quite harmless, if not actually
useful. All a Bolshevik who wanted to suggest that Poland was a
feudal country had to do was to say "Radziwill."· If he meant to
imply that Poland was ruled by a military junta, he could simply say
"Slawek."** Ifhe intended to highlight Poland's petit bourgeois char–
acter, he could say "Dmowski."*** No one could expect the political
allies of Prince Radziwill to turn Communist, less still anticipate
such a shift on the part of conservative university students, political
army officers, or right-wing shopkeepers . But the masses of the
Jewish proletariat in Poland and in the world were viewed by
Moscow as their potential property, as reserves from which they
would annually draw recruits. And to draw those recruits away was
a crime. Now that was precisely what Erlich and Alter were doing. If
any Jewish working man was not a Communist, that was because
Erlich and Alter were able to explain to him that the dawn which
rose in the East was not the dawn of real socialism and that people
who came after Lenin would join hands with the fascists. No wonder
that from the Soviet point of view Alter and Erlich would have been
the most dangerous people in Poland, even if, the day after the
Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and on the eve of September 1, 1939, they
had not drawn in the newspapers, read like a Bible by the Jewish
working masses, a magnificent indictment that began with a cry:
betrayal!
Shortly after their release the two men became targets of a whis–
pering campaign which did not originate solely with the Soviets.
Some people visiting the embassy, friendly, amiable, and eager peo–
ple, would make casual inquiries: "Is it really a good thing that Alter
and Erlich talk so much to Englishmen and Americans? Yesterday
somebody saw them with a correspondent X. Is it true that they
were with the diplomat Z?" I don't know how other members of the
'Prince Radziwill was a powerful Eastern Polish magnate.
"One of "Pilsudski's colonels ," Walery Slawek headed the last prewar Polish
government.
"'The founder and ideologist of the National Democratic party whose brand of
nationalism , strongly tinged with anti-Semitism, had a special appeal to the Polish
lower middle class.
