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3 Poland, Lancicia, District Prison, 1929 2 Lancicia (Łęczyca in Polish) is a district capital in Łódź Province in central Poland, about eighty miles north of Warsaw. It lies at the crossing of two important roads, one a north–south route that runs through the Pinsk Marshes and the other an east–west route through the Bzura River valley. The prison there, formerly a Dominican monastery, is located on Pocztowej Street at the city’s northwestern end, not far from a fire station and brewery and next to the King’s Garden, one of the most beautiful parks in Poland. The man who would later, as a soldier in Israel’s War of Independence , wait by the café to go into battle, was incarcerated in this prison in 1929. Eliezer Gruenbaum was then a member of a Communist cell in Warsaw, and, along with four comrades—Daniel Michael Warszawski, Szulim Krengel , Izrael Frydberg, and Janow Gutner, all in their mid-twenties—had been convicted of membership in the illegal Communist Youth Union. According to the indictment, their participation in an illegal gathering sponsored by the cyu in Łódź was tantamount to an intention “to carry out a crime of attacking the foundations of the Polish regime.” It related that the interrogators had learned by covert means that “the Communist Central Committee in Warsaw has sent its loyalists to establish close connections with the Communists of Łódź,” the first signs of a plot that had to be uprooted while still embryonic.1 The judge sentenced the five men to four and a half years in prison. Perhaps Gruenbaum’s family name and his father’s position helped him. Perhaps not. His father, Yitzhak, was a leader of Poland’s Jews, the organizer and head of the Bloc of National Minorities in the Sejm, the Polish parliament. Even some of his political foes praised his courage, candor, honesty, and integrity. Others intimated that he was pedantic, tightfisted, and unable to acknowledge the limits of his power—failings that his son shared. Some suggested that, were the father prepared to rein in his criticism of the government, it might be possible to mitigate his son’s sentence and that the president might Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 3 4/11/2014 2:48:55 PM 4 ||| A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz view favorably a petition for a pardon. The father rejected the idea categorically . It was an attempt at political blackmail, he declared.2 Eliezer Gruenbaum was almost twenty-one at the time of his arrest. According to one version of the story, two uniformed policemen and two plainclothesmen forcibly entered his parents’ home on Tłomackie Street in Warsaw. Yitzhak protested the violation of his privacy and of his parliamentary immunity, but to no avail. The policemen discovered a mimeograph machine and piles of placards in the son’s room, proof of the young man’s involvement in the outlawed Communist Party. They arrested Eliezer.According to another version, he was arrested far from home, at an illegal party meeting in Łódź.3 The regime of Józef Piłsudski used whatever means it thought fit to fight against those it viewed as its enemies. Eliezer was interrogated, tortured , and brought to trial. The authorities were determined to prevent the Communist leadership from staging attention-grabbing demonstrations and disturbances that could produce martyrs. They had learned their lesson from the case of Naftali Botwin, a young Jewish Communist executed in 1925 for shooting a police informer. Botwin had become an icon of bravery and sacrifice , and an inspiration for other revolutionaries. Parents even named their children after him.4 The trials were summary. The prisoners—Gruenbaum and his four comrades were but part of a much larger group—were brought into the courtroom in groups of five to ten, or even twenty to thirty, seated on a bench, and told to give their versions of the story. Without listening to their answers, the judges convicted and sentenced them en masse, in assembly-line fashion. The trial was over even before his parents had decided which lawyer to retain. A member of the family who held a top post in the Polish Ministry of the Interior told Eliezer’s parents that their son had been turned in by someone inside the party. The young Gruenbaum, who already had a reputation for bucking authority, had acquired enemies who feared his independence of thought, his critical bent, and his sharp tongue.5 Eliezer was born in...

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