So Many Fallen

THE JEWISH LABOR BUND, A PICTORIAL HISTOR. FARLAG UNSER TSAIT. 1958.

The first picture in this book shows the house in Wilno where the Bund, the Jewish Socialist movement of Poland, held its secret founding convention in 1897. The last picture shows a handful of Jewish children who were saved from the Nazis in 1945.

What happened in the intervening years is the tragic burden of this book. Here are the pictures of the earliest group of Jewish radical workers in Poland, posing stiffly in their hope; the faces of those who went off to Siberia, those who were murdered by the Polish police, and those who survived long enough to be murdered by the Gestapo and GPU. Later come the pictures of the Bund leaders, Ehrlich and Alter, whom the Stalin government deceived and destroyed; and many more, unknown to all but the Bund militants, who were also tortured and shot by the German and Russian police. At the end a tiny remnant survived, a scattering of Bundists who now live in alm...