Adam Rayski (14 August 1913 – 11 March 2008) was a Franco-Polish intellectual best remembered for his involvement with the French resistance.
Communist activist Rayski was born as Abraham Rajgrodski to a family of Ashkenazim (Yiddish-speaking Jews) in Białystok, which at the time was part of the vast Russian Empire. His left-wing parents were involved in the Revolution of 1905. After the First World War, Białystok became part of Poland. Active in the Communist Party of Poland, he was expelled from his high school as a trouble-maker. In common with many other Eastern European Jews, Rajgrodski was attracted to Communism because it promised to dissolve all nationalities, religions and ethnicities, thereby rendering the "Jewish Question" moot. Accounts differ about his views towards Poland. The French historian Stéphane Courtois claimed that Rayski "hated" Poland. By contrast, Rayksi's son, Benoît Rayski, has denied Courtois's allegations. Benoît Rayski claimed that his father was deeply attached to Polish culture and literature, and wanted to "integrate" very badly into Polish society.
Under the Sanation military dictatorship that ruled Poland from 1926 to 1939, the Communist Party was illegal and the police were often looking for him. He adopted as his alias the name Adam Rayski, taking the name Adam because in the Bible Adam was the name of the first man created by God, which reflected his belief that Communism would create a new civilization. He also chose the name Adam after Adam Mickiewicz, who was his hero. He took as his surname Rayski because it is a very common Polish surname, allowing him to not attract attention.
In 1932, he immigrated to France, where he studied journalism at the Sorbonne. In 1933, he joined the Jewish section of the French Communist Party. In January 1934, he joined the Main-d'oeuvre immigrée (MOI) section of the PCF (Parti communiste français-French Communist Party). That same month, the MOI launched a Yiddish language newspaper Naye Prese (New Press), which Rayski contributed to as a journalist. As his French improved, he also started writing articles for L'Humanité, the main newspaper of the PCF.
Rayski wrote extensively about the Spanish Civil War in Naye Prese. In his first article, written right after the botched coup d'état of 17 July 1936 led to the civil war in Spain, Rayski- reflecting the Popular Front policy dictated by the Comintern-called for a union of all leftists and liberals against fascism. The news of the German intervention in Spain, which began on 24 July 1936 led him to warn in article on 1 August 1936 that fascism was on the march, which caused him to urge that France strengthen the alliance with the Soviet Union, and for French leftists to campaign against French supporters of the Spanish Nationalists. Rayski labelled General Francisco Franco and General Emilio Mola, the two leaders of the military junta trying to overthrow the Spanish republic, as the heirs to the Inquisitors who persecuted Jews in the Middle Ages. Throughout the civil war, he urged that Jews join the International Brigades fighting for the Spanish republic, as he used highly emotional language to link the Spanish Nationalists with the persecution and expulsions of Spanish Jews in centuries past. Inverting the language of the Nationalists who professed to be engaged in a Catholic "crusade against Communism" that sought to evoke the militant crusading spirit of the medieval Reconquista against Islam, Rayski accused the Nationalists of quite literally wanting to take Spain back to the Middle Ages. The Spanish Civil War was to become something of an obsession for him as most of the articles Rayski wrote in Naye Prese between 1936 and 1938 were about Spain.
The Franco-Israeli historian Renée Poznanski called Rayski a man who was integrated into French society by the means of his "militant Communism" as the PCF came to be a surrogate family for him. Rayski came to be deeply attached to French culture and in particular attended the theaters of Paris. The American journalist Anne Nelson described Rayski as wearing "natty suits" and a black fedora hat, which he always wore regardless of the weather. Rayksi was well known for his fiery, passionate temperament, which was reflected in his writing style. In 1938 he married Idesza "Jeanne" Zaromb, a fellow Polish Jewish immigrant to France who would be his liaison agent during the World War Two. Their son Benoît was born later that year. In 1938, Leo Katz, the editor of Naye Prese was expelled from France, and Rayski together with Louis Gronowski became the new co-editors of Naye Prese, continuing in that role until the French government shut down Naye Prese in the fall of 1939. During the 1938 crisis over the Sudetenland, Rayski followed the Comintern line that a front of the Soviet Union, Britain, and France should support Czechoslovakia against the demands of Germany. Rayski would later rationalize the 1939 German-Soviet non-aggression pact as a Soviet response to the Munich Agreement. Naye Prese was one of the three main Yiddish newspapers in Paris; the other two being the Zionist Parizer Haynt and the Bundist Unzer Shtime. Naye Prese had a daily circulation of about 10, 000 in 1936.
The German-Soviet non-aggression of 23 August 1939 caused him much anguish. In an editorial of 27 August 1939 in Naye Prese, Rayski blamed the "shifty policy of France and England" for the non-aggression pact, arguing that the Soviet Union had been in negotiations to join the Anglo-French "peace front" intended to protect Poland, and insisted it was Anglo-French policies that had driven the Soviets to sign the non-aggression pact. In the same editorial, Rayski also blamed the Danzig crisis on Adolf Hitler, arguing that it was German threats to Poland that had pushed Europe to the brink of war. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland and on 3 September 1939 France declared war. In an editorial on 4 September 1939, Rayski broke with the Soviet line, writing: "Hitlerism, which from the start has built its existence on the massacre of Jews, has now taken the road to worldwide massacre...We enter the war on the side of the French people...For France and for our people!" Rayski expressed his hope that France would soon win, writing: "Let the name of Adolf Hitler disappear forever! Cursed for always, the idea of National Socialism! No one wanted this war except Hitler and his clique...He will drown in the sea of blood that he has unleashed."
World War Two In early 1940, he joined a regiment of the Free Polish Army stationed in France, and fought in the campaign of May–June 1940 during the German invasion. In June 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht, but escaped from the POW camp where he was being held outside of Nantes. Under the terms of the armistice signed on 21 June 1940, France was divided into two zones with Germany occupying all of northern France plus the entire Atlantic coastline while most of the south of France remained unoccupied (Italy was also to claim an occupation zone in the Nice area following the armistice of 24 June 1940). The French government, which had relocated to Vichy, retained control of the police forces in all of the zones of France.
On Bastille Day 1940, Rayski returned to Paris. He began to republish Naye Prese under the new title Unzer Wort (One Word). In July 1940, he was a founder of the Jewish resistance group Solidarité. Rayski defined the purpose of Solidarité as: "Some kind of propaganda and above all information was a sine qua non of the organization of resistance". In April 1941, he went to the unoccupied zone in the south of France to assist with helping the Spanish Republican refugees escape from the internment camps at Gurs and Vernet. In May 1941, he went to Marseille where he established an edition of Unzer Wort for the south of France. Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union that started on 22 June 1941, was greeted with Rayski with almost palpable relief in an editorial in Unzer Wort, leading him to write: "And so for us to become ourselves again-that is Jews, Frenchmen, antifascists, we needed Hitler's aggression, termed "criminal" against the "homeland of socialism"". On 24 August 1941, Rayski learned from listening to Radio Moscow's Yiddish language broadcasts that the Germans were systemically massacring Jews in the occupied areas of the Soviet Union.
In September 1941, he became the national manager of the MOI, leading him to return to Paris. In November 1941, in an article in Unzer Wort, he first revealed the existence of the Drancy camp outside of Paris, which he called the "French Dachau". The first deportations of Jews from France started in March 1942. At the time, it was announced that this was part of a process known as "resettlement in the East" under which the Third Reich had created an utopian homeland for Jews somewhere in Eastern Europe, where all of the Jews of Europe would be "resettled". Initially, the claim of the mysterious Jewish homeland in Eastern Europe that no one had actually seen was widely believed in France, even by most Jews, and though most French people did not believe the alleged homeland was the paradise that the Nazis had promised, few could imagine the truth. Rayski was aware that Operation Barbarossa was a "war of extermination" as Hitler had labelled it, but he initially believed that the Jews from France being deported were being used as slave labour.
In April 1942, he helped found the Francs-tireurs et partisans – Main-d'oeuvre immigrée (FTP-MOI), the immigrant section of the French Communist resistance. Rayski appointed Boris Holban as the military commander of the FTP-MOI for the Paris area. At the same time, Rayski was active as a journalist in underground newspapers, namely J'accuse and Fraternité. Both during the war and afterward, Rayski was very critical of the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF), which was created in November 1941 to administer the Jewish community in France. On 7 June 1942, all Jews in the German occupied zone of France were ordered to wear at all times a yellow star of David badge with the word Juif written on it. In a statement, the UGIF urged Jews to wear the yellow badge with "dignity", which led Rayski to condemn the UGIF as abject collaborators who willingly went along with Nazi measures out of the hope that it might improve conditions for French Jews.
On 15 July 1942, Rayski was returning to the room he rented in Paris under a pseudonym with false papers that declared him to be an Aryan, unaware that his wife was trying to flee Paris that day with their son. As a résistant, Rayski felt it better to live apart from his wife. On that day, he recalled that his major concern was the unpleasant smell caused by the sauerkraut that German soldiers were always eating in the outdoor restaurants of Paris. At about 4:30 am on 16 July about 4,500 French policemen began an operation known as the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup to arrest every single Jew living in Paris. On the morning of that day, Rayski described the scene he saw as he was entering the Paris Metro: Rayski spent all of that day, known in French history as Black Thursday, trying to contact his wife to see if she and their son had escaped. Rayski was greatly relieved to find that both his wife and his son had escaped the grande rafle (great round-up) of 16–17 July 1942. After hiding their son away with a teacher friend of his wife, Rayski spent the night with her at his room, where he noted that she was so shaken by the grande rafle that she had difficulty sleeping and she held him tight, saying she had been so afraid that she had lost him that day.