Coming to the aid of the party

In 1967 I met a Polish diplomat in Cambodia whose communist family had immigrated to Palestine when he was a child. Like many Jewish (and other) communists the family was plunged into an emotional ideological quandary by the Soviet pact with the Nazis in 1939. The diplomat told me that one morning he awoke to music. When he looked out of his window he saw his parents and their communist neighbours dancing and singing. It was 22 June 1941 and the German army had just crossed the border into the Soviet Union. All the tortured explanations for Stalin’s ‘wise decision’ for the alliance now vanished.

Jonathan Frankel, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and one of the authors of the introduction to this fascinating collection of essays, writes:

The Red Army alone now stood between the Jews of Europe and annihilation. For Jewish communists and fellow travellers this was the time of their greatest acceptance within the Jewish sub-world and society in general.