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11 Paris, Fifth Arrondissement, 5 Rue Linné, 1931 3 Eliezer was taken in by the Polish-Jewish Communist Party cell in Paris. His comrades were members of the Polish Communist Party (Komunistyczna Partia Polski—kpp) who had fled to France either because the Polish authorities were after them or because of economic hardship —and in some cases both. As usual, he had a lover, which made his adjustment a bit easier. He also received help from members of Main d’Oeuvre Immigré, an immigrant workers’ trade union controlled in practice by the French Communists. Committed to the principles of the French Revolution, liberté, égalité, fraternité, France opened its gates to immigrant workers and, in particular, to political exiles in need of asylum. The first wave of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, from Russia, Romania, and Galicia, had arrived there in the 1880s. A second wave arrived in the 1920s, following the end of World War I. But this time the Jews came from a different set of countries—Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, and Romania. A third wave flowed in during the 1930s, this time from Central Europe. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Jews fled Germany, and after the Anschluss many fled Austria as well. More came in the wake of Kristallnacht. The result was that by the end of the 1930s, France was home to about 90,000 French Jewish citizens and another 190,000 Jewish aliens. About half of this latter group arrived during this turbulent decade.1 The Jewish population was quite diverse, ranging from the totally assimilated who exhibited no trace of their Jewish origins to those who took fierce pride in their ethnicity. The Jewish refugees were divided by different languages and cultural practices, by their occupations, their political affiliations, and their attitudes toward their religion and its practices. Those who had been active leftists in Poland were, in Paris, taken in by the socialist-Zionist factions, the Bund, and the French Communist Party (known by its French initials, pcf). On the eve of World War II more than ninety Jewish periodicals Friling - Jewish Kapo.indb 11 4/11/2014 2:48:56 PM 12 ||| A Jewish Kapo in Auschwitz were published in France. Of these, thirty-six were in the Yiddish language, two of which, the Naye Prese and the Parizer Heint, came out daily. Of course, some of these publications appeared for only a short time. The pcf, founded in December 1920, attracted intellectuals, artists, and writers, but its membership and leadership were drawn predominantly from the proletariat. By 1923 the party’s leadership had realized that if it wanted to absorb the Eastern European newcomers it needed a more flexible structure. To make membership easier for the refugees, it supplemented the party’s central nucleus in the capital with larger circles. One was a Jewish cell that is estimated to have had two hundred to three hundred members. Beyond that, there were cells and branches located in the city’s quarters, built around immigrants from different countries of origin, such as Polish and Romanian cells. These latter cells made up the Main d’Oeuvre Immigré, the Foreign Work Force.2 It operated among Paris’s indigent workers, in the neighborhoods in which they lived, incorporating members of different occupations. Among them were leatherworkers, cobblers, tailors, clock repairmen, woodworkers, makers of cane chairs, and carpenters, as well as the headstone makers centered on the Père Lachaise cemetery. These craftsmen worked, for the most part, in tiny, bare, dark workshops in the northern, southern, and eastern quarters. The pcf was a powerful presence in these areas, creating what was called at the time Paris’s “Red Belt.”3 The complex structure of the pcf and its satellite organizations was reflected in the plethora of publications they produced. The Naye Prese, which commenced publication on January 1, 1934, was the most important. We do not know what newspaper Eliezer first associated himself with and when he began to write for it, but he was well aware that journalism was an important way of gaining influence in his new milieu. Two pictures emerge from what he wrote and told his family. In one version, he joined the staff of a Polish-­ language newspaper that, according to its editors, had a circulation of about nine thousand. This newspaper ran on a deficit, which its workers had to make up from their own pockets. Eliezer used some of the money that his mother sent him, initially from...

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