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"Against the Current": Hashomer Hatzair in the Warsaw Ghetto
"Prepare to defend yourselves incase the enemy attempts to completely destroy your community!"(1) This was the new slogan of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement in Warsaw in April 1942 when word spread of the destructive tidal wave engulfing Jews. By March of the same year, implementation of the "Final Solution" had reached Lublin and other ghettos within German-occupied Poland. While anxiously anticipating the Red Army s spring offensive after the Russian snows began to melt, the Hashomer Hatzair engaged itself in an antifascist struggle. These two commitments -- a Jewish one and a pro-Soviet one -- were two facets of the same dramatic landmark in the ideological odyssey that Hashomer Hatzair in Warsaw traversed between the outbreak of World War II and April 1943 when, alongside other groups, it led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, both of these concepts were foreign to the pre-war ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair.
Before World War II, Hashomer Hatzair, a radical leftist Zionist youth movement, had been known for its total detachment from Jewish life in Poland. Like other socialist-Zionist youth movements, it perceived the Diaspora to be a repressive reality that should best be left behind. Palestine was not only regarded as a long-term national solution but also as an immediate potential haven. Unlike other groups, the Hashomer Hatzair regarded itself as the avant-garde of the Labor-Zionist movement. Following Marxist Zionism of the Borochov school, it believed that the social and national redemption of the Jewish people could be attained only in a socialist Palestine. This goal was to be achieved in two stages: first, Palestine was to become a national homeland; and then, a successful class struggle would transform it into a socialist society. Hence the axiom that there was no basic contradiction between Zionism and communism could remain intact despite the ideological nationalist priority.
As the left-wing of the Zionist movements in Poland, Hashomer Hatzair found itself in competition with the Bund and the Polish Communist Party, which, since the 1930s, had been gaining prestige among Jewish youth. Hashomer Hatzair was thus very uncompromising in its Zionism; it educated its members to see themselves as tied to Palestine and to avoid any local political or social...