Adam Rayski

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. 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 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.

From the fall of 1942 onward, he wrote pamphlets in French, Yiddish and Polish warning Jews that "resettlement in the East" did not mean moving to some Jewish utopia vaguely located somewhere in Eastern Europe as the Nazis were promising, but rather being exterminated. In his pamphlets, Rayski warned that to take part in the "resettlement in the East" would mean death, and urged Jews to go into hiding to escape the "resettlement in the East". Rayski learned from a Spanish Republican soldier who had escaped from the Gurs camp and been handed over by the French authorities to work as a slave for the Todt organisation in Poland, who had subsequently managed to escape back to France, that there was a camp in Silesia called Auschwitz where Jews were being exterminated via gassing. Rayski found the man credible, but suffered much doubt about whether he should publish allegations based upon a single source that he could not confirm, and he deeply hoped that his story was not true. Despite his doubts, in an article in J'accuse published on 10 October 1942, Rayski stated that about 11, 000 Jews from France since March 1942 had been exterminated via gassing at Auschwitz.

Rayski observed that a disproportionate number of the members of the FTP-MOI were veterans of the International Brigades who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, providing a great advantage as these were men who had experienced combat and were well accustomed to handling guns and bombs. Rayski also noted that a disproportionate number of the FTP-MOI were like himself Jewish, which provided a certain desperation to their efforts since for them, the victory of the Third Reich would mean their extermination. Rayski argued that for ordinary French people, that if Nazi Germany won the war, France would remain occupied, but the French people would continue to exist while for himself and all the other Jews in the world, they would all cease to exist in the event of a German victory, making their underground struggle a matter of existential importance. Rayski recalled: "We brought together many young Jews without parents or homes in action groups of three people. During the winter of 1942–43, we had about 300 people, mostly young people, in the Jewish groups of the Francs-Tireurs et Partisans". Rayski remembered the main problem was the lack of weapons, recalling: "Antiquated pistols didn't always come with the corresponding bullets, so we had to consider switching over to bombs". Rayski was greatly helped by Cristina Luca Boico, a Romanian student at the Sorbonne and the FTP-MOI intelligence chief who supplied him with materials for making bombs from the chemistry department at the Sorbonne.

Some latter day controversy has been caused by the fact that most of the attacks staged by the FTP-MOI were made by men as the FTP-MOI generally did not employ women as assassins. This was especially controversial as during the same period, women were active in fighting in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Greece. About a quarter of the andartes (guerrillas) of the National Liberation Front in Greece were women. Rayski defended the choice of men as assassins for the FTP-MOI, stating it was suicidal for the FTP-MOI to engage in sustained shootouts owing to the disparity in firepower and numbers, and as such its members had to attack swiftly by throwing a bomb and/or firing a few shots before making an equally swift retreat. Rayski argued that men were better suited for making the "lightning fast" retreats by running down the streets of Paris as swiftly as possible than were women as he maintained that the conditions that allowed for more sustained fighting in the forests of Russia and the mountains of the Balkans did not exist in Paris.

He later stated that the greatest mistake that the FTP-MOI ever made was to accept Lucienne Goldfarb, better known as Katia la Rouquine (Katy the Redhead), into its ranks. Goldfarb, whose parents and siblings had been deported in the grande rafle of 16–17 July 1942, joined the FTP-MOI in late 1942, saying she wanted to avenge her family. Unknown to Rayski, Goldfarb was a prostitute and a long time police informer who used her police connections to secure herself immunity from being deported. In exchange for immunity and regular cash payments, Goldfarb infiltrated the FTP-MOI for the French police and thanks to information supplied by her, the French police made their first mass arrests of FTP-MOI members in March 1943. Over the course of one night, the French police arrested 80 FTP-MOI members. Despite the fact that her entire family had been exterminated at Auschwitz, Goldfarb felt no regret for her actions, and seemed to be motivated only by greed as she worked for the same police force that had deported her family. The French police used their favorite filature (spinning) methods of watching the movements of one FTP-MOI member, if necessary for months, in order to learn about his or her contacts, and then to follow the others, thus building up a comprehensive picture of the structure and membership of the FTP-MOI. The debate about Zionism proved to be the most difficult subject at the conference as Fischer and the other Zionist delegates insisted that the group issue a statement in favor of a Jewish state in Palestine, to which Rayski was opposed to. Courtois denied that Rayksi had really defected, claiming he was still loyal to the Communist regime, and was operating in France as a spy. On 6 October 1959, he was arrested by the French police, who accused him of passing information to Hermann Bertele, a Polish spy operating in Paris. In July 1961, he was convicted of espionage for Poland and sentenced to 7 years in prison. Following lobbying by several resistance fighters, in March 1963 President Charles de Gaulle pardoned Rayski. In an undated document, Rayski writing in the third person declared: "A. Rayski, who is no longer in agreement with certain ideas of the Communist Party, has preferred to reclaim his independence. Nonetheless, he maintains a faithful memory of the past, which allows him to evoke with great honesty the actions of the resistance of Communist Jews. He directed the UJRE until 1949".

Rayski worked as a historian, writing several books about the subject of Jewish resistance in France. In 1985, he published his memoir Nos illusions perdues ("Our Lost Illusions") about his life in Poland from 1949 to 1957. In Nos illusions perdues, he was deeply critical of the Communist regime in Poland, which he called a "dictatorship" and a "totalitarian regime". Rayski appeared in the 1985 documentary Des terroristes à la retraite (Terrorists in Retirement) by Mosco Boucault to discuss the allegation that he and the other FTP-MOI members were Communist terrorists. During L'Affaire Manouchian of the 1980s, he was a prominent defender of Boris Holban against the allegation that he was a police informer who had betrayed Missak Manouchian. Rayski argued that the man who betrayed Manouchian was Joseph Davidowicz, the political commissar of groupe Manouchian, whom Holban had killed on 28 December 1943.

Rayski proudly noted that during the trial of SS Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie in 1987 that the prosecutor Pierre Truche introduced his wartime writings as evidence that the true nature of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was known in wartime France against the claims of Barbie's defense lawyer Jacques Verges. Verges had claimed during the trial that Barbie had no idea about what was happening to the Jews sent for "resettlement in the East", claiming that for he all knew that the homeland for Jews said to be vaguely located in Eastern Europe to which the Jews were being "resettled" was a real place. In response, Truche brought in Rayski's wartime warnings as evidence, leading him to conclude that if Rayski, a man with no special information about the Third Reich knew that the "Final Solution" was really genocide, then it was not possible that a SS Hauptsturmführer such as Barbie could claim ignorance about the true nature of the "Final Solution". In 1989 together with Stéphane Courtois and Denis Peschanski he published Le sang de l'etranger : les immigres de la MOI dans la Resistance, a well regarded history of the FTP-MOI. In Le sang de l'etranger, Rayski, Courtois and Peschanski established the majority of the attacks on German forces in the Paris area between 1942 and 1944 were the work of the FTP-MOI.

On 8 May 1990, he spoke at a rally in West Berlin at the site of the Wannsee Institute, where he talked about the prospect of impeding German reunification. At the time, he stated: "One question remains for today and tomorrow. Is there something in the German nature that predisposes them not to genocide, but to hate of the other? I have no answer. Perhaps the democracy in West Germany tells us there is no truth to that fear. But that is for the Germans to show us, now and in the future."

As a historian, he was greatly opposed to the thesis of alleged Jewish passivity in the face of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". In 1998, he wrote: "Has the time not arrived to restore to the millions of victims, by the means of scientifically rigorous and documented research, their status as combatants who were vanished during an entirely unequal combat?" In 1992, Rayski's best known book, Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy – Entre soumission et résistance, an account of Jewish life and resistance in France during the occupation was published. In a review of The Choice, the historian Richard Cohen felt that Rayski had erred in his picture of the French people as being basically opposed to Vichy antisemitism and of being essentially supportive of the Jewish communities. In another review of The Choice, the historian Lars Rensmann called it "...arguably the most detailed and comprehensive account of the Jews and Jewish resistance under Vichy France". Rayski's thesis of French Jews as being very far from the passive subjects of history has been widely accepted as he noted that most French Jews who escaped deportation took action themselves to avoid that fate. His tombstone in Paris bears the inscription "Adam Rayski 1913–2008 He was a Communist and a terrorist when he had to be". The use of the word "terrorist" on his tombstone appears to be meant ironically. His son Benoît Rayski is a prominent intellectual in France.

Work Le soulèvement du ghetto de Varsovie et son impact en Pologne et en France, co-written with Georges Wellers, André Kaspi, and Bronia Klibanski, Paris: Center de documentation juive contemporaine, 1984. Nos illusions perdues, Paris: éditions Balland, 1985. Qui savait quoi?: L'extermination des juifs, 1941–1945, co-written with Stéphane Courtois, Paris: éditions La Découverte, 1987. Le sang de l'étranger – les immigrés de la MOI dans la Résistance, co-written with Stéphane Courtois and Denis Peschanski, Paris: éditions Fayard, 1989. Le choix des Juifs sous Vichy – Entre soumission et résistance, Paris: éditions La Découverte, 1992, translated into English as The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between Submission and Resistance. L'Affiche Rouge: Il y A 50 Ans Paris : Délégation à la Mémoire et à l'Information Historique, 1994. De Gaulle et les Juifs (1940–1944), Paris: publié par l'Union des résistants et déportés juifs de France, 1994 "The Jewish Underground Press in France and the Struggle to Expose the Nazi Secret of the Final Solution" pages 616–628 from The Holocaust and History The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, edited by Abraham Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Books and articles